Do voters think the Republican or Democratic Party is more welcoming to people of faith?

Every four years, prayer and people of faith play a big role in both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.
But that doesn’t mean Americans see the country’s two major political parties as equally welcoming to religious people.
New research from the Deseret News and HarrisX shows that nearly half of registered voters in the United States (45%) — including 65% of Republicans and 28% of Democrats — believe the Republican Party is more welcoming to people of faith than the Democratic Party.
Just one-quarter of voters say the Democratic Party is more welcoming, while the remaining 30% say the two parties are equally open to religious people.
Experts on religion and politics told the Deseret News they aren’t surprised by these results, since the Republican Party has a strong and very visible relationship with a variety of Christian organizations.
But they noted that the straightforward survey question is a gateway to a more complex debate about how to define “welcoming,” who comes to mind when you hear “religious people” and what today’s voters would like to see from political parties when it comes to religious outreach.
Find the full dataset for the Deseret News/HarrisX survey on political parties and religion here.
In the past, candidates and parties needed to be seen as friendly to faith groups in order to succeed.
Today, it’s still good to have that reputation, but the payoff for pursuing it is smaller than it once was.
“In the last few years, the political benefit of being viewed as religious or Christian has really declined,” said Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life and a senior fellow in polling and public opinion with AEI.
That shift has occurred against the backdrop of declining religious engagement and the rise of the “nones,” people who don’t affiliate with a particular faith group. It’s become more common to distrust institutions of all kinds and to care more about a politician’s stance on religion-related policies than whether they go to church.
In general, the relationship between religion and politics is growing more complicated as the country becomes more religiously diverse and as debates over faith-related issues like abortion and the war in Gaza take center stage.
Some voters, primarily in the Democratic Party, have started to see religious outreach as problematic, since they associate religion with intolerance, Cox said.
“There’s a growing number of secular Democrats who believe that religion is a malevolent force in American society,” he said.
John C. Green, a distinguished professor emeritus of political science at the University of Akron, shares Cox’s sense that religious outreach is becoming more complicated — and coming with less of a reward at the polls.
But he emphasized that it’s always been difficult for a party to win broad support for its approach to religion, since no two voters are looking for exactly the same thing.
“If you reach out to one (faith) group, you might, in fact, alienate another group. Sometimes party leaders have to make a choice,” he said.
Additionally, parties have always been judged on more than their own actions. They contend with voters’ preexisting assumptions and personal biases, among other factors, Green said.
Republican voters are more charitable to the Republican Party than the Democratic Party — and vice versa. Christians focus on different issues than Muslims or Jews.
In the Deseret News/Harris X poll, as Green predicted, responses vary between Republicans and Democrats and between members of different faith groups.
For example, just 9% of Republican voters say the Democratic Party is more welcoming to religious people than the Republican Party, but 47% of Democrats do.
That pattern repeats itself if you sort respondents by who they plan to vote for in the 2024 presidential election. Eleven percent of supporters of former President Donald Trump say the Democratic Party is more welcoming to religious people, compared to 43% of Vice President Kamala Harris’ supporters.
The new Deseret News/HarrisX national poll was fielded from Aug. 2-3, 2024, among 1,011 registered voters. The margin of error for the total sample is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
Although the Republican Party wins out if you ask voters which party is more welcoming to religious people in general, the survey results were more mixed on questions about individual faith groups.
As these results make clear, the Democratic Party is seen as more religiously diverse than the Republican Party. To maintain that image — and to continue getting large shares of the non-Christian vote on Election Day — Democratic leaders have to walk a very careful line when they speak about faith, Cox noted.
“It’s more complicated on the left than the right because you have a much more diverse religious coalition that you have to appeal to. … The way you have to talk about your religious background has to be more nuanced and more inclusive,” he said.
The Republican Party faces its own unique challenges as it works to retain the support of more conservative Christian voters. It can’t reach out to non-Christians without facing a certain amount of blowback, said Brian Kaylor, co-author of “Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism.”
“Some believe that if a party or a politician isn’t actively promoting Christianity, then they’re anti-Christian and unwelcoming,” he said, highlighting the controversy that arose around the Sikh prayer at July’s Republican National Convention.
In light of ongoing changes in the U.S. religious landscape, experts on religion and politics believe political parties’ relationship with religion will only grow more complicated in years to come.
What they don’t expect is for either party to give up on trying to appear welcoming to people of faith.
“Even though, on an average weekend, most (Americans) aren’t attending worship somewhere, they’re still identifying as religious,” Kaylor said. “There’s still a danger that comes with being seen as opposed to or antagonistic toward people of faith or religion.”
Still, Kaylor can envision the Democratic Party, in particular, intentionally decreasing explicit references to religion in favor of more generic nods to morality and faith.
Already, at this month’s Democratic National Convention, some speakers chose to allude to Bible verses without specifically naming them, he noted.
“They’re borrowing biblical or religious language without taking a Bible-thumping approach,” Kaylor said.