Introduction

Scholars studying the evangelical vote in 2016 have asked which white evangelicals constituted the roughly 81% that voted for Donald Trump (Djupe and Claassen Reference Djupe and Claassen2018), looking at possible divides along the dimension of gender (Cassese Reference Cassese2020), religious practice (Layman Reference Layman2016), and religious beliefs (Margolis Reference Margolis2019).Footnote ¹ One of the principal divides concerning the voting behavior of evangelicals is the difference between white and non-white evangelicals, which is well documented before and after the 2016 Presidential Election (McDaniel and Ellison Reference McDaniel and Ellison2008; McKenzie and Rouse Reference McKenzie and Rouse2013; Djupe and Claassen Reference Djupe and Claassen2018). As Wong (Reference Wong2015, 643) notes, “White and Black evangelicals share much in common as far as placing an emphasis on sharing one's faith, [and] belief that the Bible is the ultimate authority…at the same time, it has long been observed that in terms of their political orientations, the two groups could not be more different.” The effect of religion on political behavior cannot be clearly understood without accounting for the role that racial identity plays within a given religious context.

Explanations for the political divide between Black and white evangelicals focus on the historical and enduring separation between Black and white religious experiences, such as the exclusion of Black Christians from white religious spaces (Steensland et al. Reference Steensland, Robinson, Bradford Wilcox, Park, Regnerus and Woodberry2000; Bracey and Moore Reference Bracey and Moore2017; Margolis Reference Margolis2018; Tisby Reference Tisby2019; Yukich and Edgell Reference Yukich and Edgell2020). However, less attention has been paid to how the degree to which evangelicals feel attached to their racial identity—or conversely, white evangelicals' out-group resentment—may influence these differences. While we know little about the role of racial attitudes among evangelicals, the centrality of racial attitudes in modern American politics is firmly established (Cramer Reference Cramer2020). Additionally, scholars are exploring new ways of measuring in-group favorability and out-group animus. This includes work that revisits the conceptualization and measurement of racial resentment (Wilson and Davis Reference Wilson and Davis2011; DeSante and Smith Reference DeSante and Smith2020), that confronts the importance of capturing attitudes toward groups beyond the black–white binary (Lajevardi Reference Lajevardi2020; Reny and Barreto Reference Reny and Barreto2022), and that further examines attachments to one's racial group (Gay et al. Reference Gay, Hochschild and White2016; Berry et al. Reference Berry, Ebner and Cornelius2021; Jardina Reference Jardina2019; Reference Jardina2020).

Because of the historical racial divide within American evangelicalism, and given that religious environments continue to be racially homogeneous (McKenzie and Rouse Reference McKenzie and Rouse2013), we might expect racial-group attachment among both Black and white evangelicals to be an especially powerful determinant of political preferences. Additionally, white evangelicals have higher levels of racial resentment than non-evangelical whites, which cannot simply be attributed to their evangelical identity (Calfano and Paolino Reference Calfano and Paolino2010). Instead, the relatively small and recent body of work in the area suggests white evangelicals are motivated by a heightened sense of perceived discrimination (Wong Reference Wong2018a) and that conservative racial attitudes may be as or more meaningful to evangelicals' politics as their issue attitudes toward traditional moral issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage (Claassen Reference Claassen, Djupe and Claassen2018). However, despite the prevalence and growth of literature on race and racial attitudes, and the demonstrated importance of examining religion through a racial lens, there remains a large body of racial attitudes research yet to be tested in the religious context.

Our research contributes to understanding the interaction of race and religion among evangelicals by evaluating how group attachment among Black and white evangelicals, and out-group resentment among white evangelicals, influences their political preferences. We assess the predictive power of Black identity, white identity, and racial resentment in determining attitudes toward traditional moral issues as well non-traditional issues, including racialized issues, among evangelicals. We then examine the association of these racial in-group and out-group attitudes with Black and white evangelicals' vote choice in 2012 and 2016. Our findings further our understanding of the differences in political behavior between Black and white evangelicals, who together comprise approximately one-third of the electorate.

First, we uncover limited effects of racial identity centrality in determining the political preferences of Black and white evangelicals. Black identity, although highly salient among Black evangelicals, does not explain their varying attitudes regarding traditional issues, non-traditional and racialized issues, or vote choice. Our findings stand in contrast to the implicit assumption that the political divide between Black and white evangelicals is driven by racial in-group attachments. Second, our findings point to a deep divide among white evangelicals along the dimension of racial resentment. This division is consistent across a multitude of political issues, and while the majority of white evangelicals hold high levels of racial resentment, our model predictions for white evangelicals with lower levels of racial resentment are quite similar to the average predicted political attitudes of Black evangelicals. Thus, the division between Black and white evangelicals' political preferences could be primarily driven by white evangelicals' racial animus.

Following our results, we discuss possible mechanisms that might facilitate these differences, such as church attendance, which may provide a conduit through which racial in-group favoritism may be operating in religious spaces. We conclude by discussing the limitations of our data and further outlining our contributions as well as future routes for related research.

The Political Divide between Black and White Evangelicals

The divide between Black and white evangelicals is prevalent throughout history. Due to white Christians' exclusion of Black slaves and free Black Americans in their religious services, Black Christians formed separate spaces to worship (Tisby Reference Tisby2019). Black churches serve as social and political hubs in many communities, fulfilling vital civic functions like registering parishioners to vote, aiding them in navigating the bureaucratic system (Brown and Brown Reference Brown and Brown2003; McDaniel Reference McDaniel2008; Brown Reference Brown2009), and hosting events for candidates in their churches (Fausset and Robertson Reference Fausset and Robertson2017). The uniqueness of the Black church is even reflected in the measurement of American religion, with Black Protestants often being separated into a category of their own (Steensland et al. Reference Steensland, Robinson, Bradford Wilcox, Park, Regnerus and Woodberry2000).

Importantly, this partition is not explicitly due to theological differences, but is due to a history of racism and discrimination from white Christians (Wald and Calhoun-Brown Reference Wald and Calhoun-Brown2014). As Margolis (Reference Margolis2018, 150) writes, “In contrast to white conservative Protestants, African Americans’ history of social, legal, and religious segregation has allowed for a theological perspective that focuses on predominately liberal ideas of equality and justice to flourish.” Because common measurement of religion is in practice a measurement of racial-religious categorization, often only in the case of Black Americans, it is difficult to estimate how many Black Americans can be classified as evangelicals based on their theological beliefs or religious identity (Shelton and Cobb Reference Shelton and Cobb2017). According to the Pew Research Center, a remarkable majority (67%) of Black Americans identify as either evangelical or as Black Protestants.Footnote ²

While Black Christians share a common history of forced segregation from white churches, less attention is paid in considering how white evangelicals shared history of dominating the social order may influence both their politics and religion. White evangelicals represent a sizeable portion of whites (29%) and a solid voting bloc within the American electorate, comprising roughly one-quarter (23%) of voters, the largest racial-religious bloc of voters in the United States (Wong Reference Wong2018a). White evangelicals firmly consolidated behind the Republican Party by the year 2000, and they now make up the backbone of the party (Layman Reference Layman2001; Margolis Reference Margolis2018). In fact, the white evangelical coalition is so strong that a candidate taking on an evangelical identity can expect to see increased Republican support (Campbell et al. Reference Campbell, Green and Layman2011). The candidacy and election of Donald Trump did not change the strength of this coalition (Djupe and Claassen Reference Djupe and Claassen2018; Cassese Reference Cassese2020); conversely, his election arguably reflected the profound strength and endurance of it.

While having an evangelical identity does have a consistently conservatizing effect on political attitudes across racial groups, this effect is uniquely strong among white evangelicals (Wong Reference Wong2018a). These differences are apparent when evaluating Black and white evangelicals' differences in partisanship (Calhoun-Brown Reference Calhoun-Brown1998; McDaniel and Ellison Reference McDaniel and Ellison2008), congregational civic engagement (Brown Reference Brown2009), and church political context (Brown et al. Reference Brown, Khari Brown, Phoenix and Jackson2016). Many of the racial divides prevalent in the country as a whole also exist within churches, and in some cases these differences are even more noticeable. While recent scholarship has increasingly parsed out these important differences, the discipline needs further clarification as to why these divisions continue.

Racial Attitudes as An Explanation for the Divide

The dominant paradigm in the literature suggests white evangelicals are drawn toward conservatism and the Republican Party for their stances on traditional moral issues such as abortion and legal recognition of marriage equality (Olson et al. Reference Olson, Cadge and Harrison2006; Lewis Reference Lewis2018; Swank Reference Swank2020). The Republican Party was able to mobilize evangelical Christians by bringing traditional moral issues to the forefront of the political arena (Wilcox Reference Wilcox1992). This mobilization permeated into the elite realm as the Republican Party built networks and special interest groups centered around marshalling evangelicals to the polls around these issues, which has led to landslide majorities for the GOP among white evangelicals in every presidential election since 1980.

However, a growing body of scholarship suggests that these moral issues might not be the source of evangelical support for the Republican Party, with some positing they might be a guise (Marsh Reference Marsh2021). Scholars have explored race and racial attitudes as an explanation for evangelical political divisions, as there tends to be similar agreement among both Black and white evangelicals on traditional moral issues (Wong Reference Wong2015; Philpot Reference Philpot2017). Wong (Reference Wong2018a, 81) finds that white evangelicals' conservatism is “driven by a sense of in-group embattlement,” in which white evangelicals feel their racial group is discriminated against more than others and that their Christian values are under attack. While whites in general have increasingly reported feeling discriminated against (Marsh and Ramírez Reference Marsh and Ramírez2019), evangelical Protestants in the South are even more likely to report racial discrimination (Mayrl and Saperstein Reference Mayrl and Saperstein2013). Furthermore, Emerson and Smith (Reference Emerson and Smith2001) argue that white evangelicals are particularly ill-equipped to comprehend and recognize structural racial inequality because of their cultural disposition that emphasizes individualism, personal relationships, and anti-structuralism. This orientation may help explain previous research that posits white evangelicals' high levels of racial resentment come from ideological disagreements rather than evangelicalism alone or anti-black affect (Calfano and Paolino Reference Calfano and Paolino2010). However, some scholars do conclude that racial attitudes motivate white evangelicals' political attitudes (Claassen Reference Claassen, Djupe and Claassen2018). Thus, racial attitudes are relevant in the evangelical context.

While a large portion of the racial attitudes literature has focused on out-group attitudes among whites and in-group attitudes among Blacks (Hutchings and Valentino Reference Hutchings and Valentino2004), much of the work on racial attitudes has not yet been taken into account when examining evangelicals. Black Americans' in-group identity has become a central factor in their political organization (Dawson Reference Dawson1994; White and Laird Reference White and Laird2020), but the impact of racial identity is still dependent on the context in which it is activated (White Reference White2007). Black identity is associated with more liberal policy preferences when the policies are seen as more helpful to the group (Craemer et al. Reference Craemer, Shaw, Edwards and Jefferson2013). These forces replicate among the religious, and religious identity and practice can even amplify racial group attachment. As Wilcox and Gomez (Reference Wilcox and Gomez1990, 271) notes, “Black religion is an important source of Black identity and a stimulus to a political involvement.” However, Black evangelicals still hold conservative positions on what are viewed as the traditional moral issues among evangelicals (Calhoun-Brown Reference Calhoun-Brown1998; Wong Reference Wong2018a).

Consequently, we expect that the higher levels of Black identity found among Black religious populations will lead to more conservative positions on traditional issues, given that, as Philpot (Reference Philpot2017) notes, African-Americans have historically been conservative on salient moral issues like same-sex marriage. However, we hypothesize that Black identity will be associated with liberal positions on non-traditional and more racialized issues. Finally, previous scholarship has highlighted group consciousness as a driver of Democratic vote choice among Black Americans (Philpot Reference Philpot2017; White and Laird Reference White and Laird2020). Thus, we hypothesize that an increase in Black identity will be negatively associated with voting for a Republican presidential candidate.

A newer development within the literature on racial in-group favoritism is a growing focus on white identity (Berry et al. Reference Berry, Ebner and Cornelius2021; Jardina Reference Jardina2019; Reference Jardina2020). Theories of white identity rest on the assertion that whites may possess in-group favorability and seek policies that specifically benefit them as whites. White identity is characterized by how important one feels being white is to their identity, as well as their sense of commonality among whites, and has been triggered by a demographically and culturally changing America. Jardina (Reference Jardina2019, 106) finds that 19% of whites high in white identity identify as Evangelical Protestants. Overall, the religious breakdown of whites with high white identity matches closely to the distribution of religion across the broader white population; the exception to this is among white non-religious respondents who tend to fall lower on the white identity measure.

Previous scholarship has found that white identity is associated with more conservative views on immigration and voting for the Republican Party; however, it is not associated with racialized policies that are not viewed as having a negative effect on whites (Jardina Reference Jardina2019). Moreover, although the Black church has been a source of increased racial identity among Black Christians, this link has not yet been made among white Christians. Thus, there is no theoretical reason for us to believe that white identity will significantly move the needle among white evangelicals on the traditional moral issues of same-sex marriage and abortion. Furthermore, we do not expect white identity to be associated with non-traditional issues that are not directly related to the in-group, such as gun control, affirmative action, and the death penalty. However, we do expect white identity will be linked with conservative attitudes on immigration because of the perception that restricting immigration will benefit white Americans. Finally, we expect that an increase in white identity will lead to a positive association in voting for the Republican presidential candidate (Jardina Reference Jardina2020).

While white identity is meaningful in certain contexts, even when modeled together, whites' racial resentment is still a consistently strong predictor of political behavior (Jardina Reference Jardina2020). We continue this line of research by comparing racial resentment and white identity within the evangelical context. Scholars have previously shown that the American political context is becoming increasingly racialized, and whites' out-group animus is now associated with issues that were previously not considered racially salient (Tesler Reference Tesler2012; Enders and Scott Reference Enders and Scott2019). In light of these findings, we hypothesize that the pervasiveness of racial resentment will be profound among white evangelicals as we speculate that the religious context found in many predominately white, evangelical churches serves as a harbor for these attitudes. In the sections that follow, we outline our measurement strategies and consider the role of in-group and out-group racial attitudes in three different contexts. First, we present our results for traditional evangelical issues, such as abortion and gay marriage. Second, we examine non-traditional evangelical issues, such as gun control, affirmative action, the death penalty, and immigration. Third, we analyze the influence of racial identity centrality and racial resentment on electoral outcomes, namely the likelihood of supporting Mitt Romney in 2012 and Donald Trump in 2016. We follow the presentation of our results with a discussion of other key findings that differentiate Black and white evangelicals.

Data and Methods

How do racial group attitudes shape the political preferences of Black and white evangelicals? To analyze this question, we rely on the 2012 and 2016 ANES Time Series Studies.Footnote ³ Our sample is Black (n = 635) and white (n = 1145) respondents who are identified as Evangelical Protestants according to their denominational affiliation (Steensland et al. Reference Steensland, Robinson, Bradford Wilcox, Park, Regnerus and Woodberry2000).Footnote ⁴

Scholars take varied approaches to measuring who is and is not an evangelical (Hackett and Lindsay Reference Hackett and Lindsay2008). As Margolis (Reference Margolis2018, Reference Margolis2019) notes, religion, and specifically the evangelical identity itself, is politicized, which influences who chooses to identify or de-identify with a particular religious group (Campbell et al. Reference Campbell, Layman, Green and Sumaktoyo2018; Djupe et al. Reference Djupe, Neiheisel and Sokhey2018; Egan Reference Egan2020). This results in religious identity being a complex concept to measure.

The most widely used measure of religious tradition, RELTRAD, is derived from Steensland et al. (Reference Steensland, Robinson, Bradford Wilcox, Park, Regnerus and Woodberry2000). RELTRAD consists of seven possible categories: Mainline Protestant, Evangelical Protestant, Black Protestant, Roman Catholic, Undifferentiated Christian, Jewish, other religion, and not religious. Others utilize the binary born-again question, which asks respondents “Would you call yourself a born-again Christian, that is, have you personally had a conversion experience related to Jesus Christ?”

While Steensland and colleagues argue that a Black Protestant category is necessary due to the historical exclusion of Black Christians from white churches, Wong (Reference Wong2015; Reference Wong2018a; Reference Wong2018b) finds that white evangelicals (as measured by the born-again question) are uniquely conservative when compared to Asian American, Black, and Latino evangelicals. Additionally, coding schemes for implementing RELTRAD vary. Burge and Lewis (Reference Burge and Lewis2018) use a combination of RELTRAD coding and the born-again question, but exclude Black respondents from answering the born-again question. As Shelton and Cobb (Reference Shelton and Cobb2017) note, the Black Protestant category often conflates a common racial identity with a common religious experience in the historically Black Church. The born-again question in the ANES is asked of Christians affiliated with non-evangelical denominations, such as Catholic respondents, and these respondents may (and sometimes do) respond affirmatively (Welch and Leege Reference Welch and Leege1991). While each of these approaches to measuring evangelicals has various strengths and shortcomings, we utilize a denominational approach.Footnote ⁵

Our key independent variables are racial identity and racial resentment. We measure Black identity and white identity through identity centrality, which is measured through an individual's response to the question, “How important is being Black/white to your identity?”(Hooper Reference Hooper1976; Jardina Reference Jardina2020). Responses vary from “Not at all important” (0) to “Extremely Important” (4). While this question has been asked to Black and other non-white respondents for many years, white respondents have only been asked since the 2012 ANES (Jardina Reference Jardina2019). To strike a balance between the need for increased observations of Black evangelicals in our analyses and question availability for whites, we use a pooled sample of the 2012 and 2016 ANES in all of our issue attitude analyses.

We also test our hypotheses by examining how whites' racial attitudes affect their policy attitudes. We investigate racial resentment among the sample of white evangelicals in which we take an individual's average response—ranging from “Disagree Strongly” (0) to “Agree Strongly” (4)—to the standard four-item index (Kinder and Sanders Reference Kinder and Sanders1996).Footnote ⁶

There exists a rich scholarly discussion on measuring racial attitudes, and particularly about whether the racial resentment measure accurately captures them (Kinder and Mendelberg Reference Kinder, Mendelberg, Sears, Sidanius and Bobo2000; Sears and Henry Reference Sears and Henry2003; Huddy and Feldman Reference Huddy and Feldman2009; Wilson and Davis Reference Wilson and Davis2011; Cramer Reference Cramer2020; DeSante and Smith Reference DeSante and Smith2020). Additionally, while limited work exists evaluating the racial resentment measure among Black Americans (but see Orey et al. Reference Orey, King, Titani-Smith and Ricks2012; Frasure-Yokley Reference Frasure-Yokley2018; Kam and Burge Reference Kam and Burge2018), we refrain from incorporating racial resentment in our Black evangelical models. Measuring racial resentment in the context of Black respondents is theoretically unclear, but could be viewed as one of negative in-group attitudes, contrary to a measure of negative out-group bias when applied to whites (Orey et al. Reference Orey, King, Titani-Smith and Ricks2012; Kam and Burge Reference Kam and Burge2018). At a minimum, it is clear racial resentment does not work for Black respondents in the same way it does for white respondents.

Jardina (Reference Jardina2020) finds whites' racial resentment to be concentrated toward the higher end of the scale and white identity to be concentrated toward the lower end of the scale. Additionally, Black respondents report higher levels of racial identity centrality than do whites. While the mean for Black identity is higher than that of white identity, we find higher average racial identity among both groups of evangelicals compared to their non-evangelical counterparts (Black evangelicals:+0.24, p < 0.05; white evangelicals:+0.20, p < 0.01). White evangelicals also harbor higher levels of racial resentment than white non-evangelicals (+0.39, p < 0.01). We find little difference when we examine 2012 and 2016 separately; Black and white identity among evangelicals does not significantly change, however white evangelicals' racial resentment decreases slightly in 2016 (−0.11, p < 0.1).Footnote ⁷

Our outcome variables include a variety of issue attitudes and presidential vote choice in 2012 and 2016. Table 1 displays the dependent variables, their possible values, and the values for which we present predicted probabilities. We model attitudes toward two traditional evangelical issues—abortion and marriage equality—and four non-traditional issues: gun control, affirmative action, the death penalty, and immigration. Finally, we present predictions for voting for the Republican presidential candidate in 2012 (Romney) and 2016 (Trump). While the voting models are separated by year, the attitudinal models feature the pooled sample.

Table 1.

Dependent variables

We control for a host of other variables in our models such as the respondent's age, education, income, sex (1 = female, 0 = otherwise), and the year (1 = 2016, 0 = 2012). Additionally, we account for church attendance, which ranges from Never (0) to Every Week (4), Biblical Literalism, which ranges from whether the Bible is written literally and by God (2) or is a creation of humanity (0), and religious guidance, which ranges from religion is not important (0) to religion providing a great deal of guidance (4).

In models predicting church attendance and Biblical Literalism, among the combined sample of Black and white evangelicals, we find no statistical association between race nor racial identity.Footnote ⁸ We do find racial resentment to be positively associated with Biblical Literalism, or an increased likelihood to take the Bible as the literal word of God. We find a negative association between racial resentment and frequency of church attendance.