Are "Real" Catholics as Conservative as Evangelicals?

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Are "Real" Catholics as Conservative as Evangelicals?<br>The Reply Guys Were Wrong (Mostly)

Ryan Burge<br>May 25, 2026

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Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.Here’s a common occurrence for me on social media. I post a graph that’s really basic: how a bunch of religious traditions feel about a controversial political issue. Could be a pathway to citizenship for folks who came here illegally, could be access to an abortion, or maybe a question about gender identity. I have all the traditions listed: white and non-white evangelicals and Catholics, mainline Protestants, Jews, Muslims, atheists, etc. What the data consistently shows — across a wide variety of dependent variables — is that white Catholics are not as socially conservative as white evangelicals.<br>This makes a lot of anonymous people on Twitter very angry, of course. I’m guessing that many of them are Catholics who believe that Catholicism, correctly measured, will exhibit results similar to their evangelical cousins. The replies are always something like, “No, show us what REAL Catholics believe on this issue.” Which I think is shorthand for: I want you to only compare weekly attending Catholics to weekly attending evangelicals. Their assumption is that if I do that, the statistical differences will disappear.

Well, let’s just put that to the test today, shall we?<br>The first thing we need to establish is that the reply guys are kind of right in one way: the average white Catholic doesn’t go to church with nearly the same regularity as the average white evangelical.

Back in the halcyon days of the early 1970s, Catholics were more devout than evangelicals — and by a fair amount. About 60% of white Catholics were going to Mass every week in 1972 compared to only 45% of white evangelicals. That’s not a small difference. But it didn’t last long. By 1980, the two lines had clearly crossed around 45%. But then the Catholic line continued to move downward while evangelical attendance rates held steady. By the late 1990s, evangelicals were more likely to be weekly attenders than their Catholic counterparts.<br>From there, the gap only widened. It was about ten percentage points by 2000 (45% vs. 35%), and the chasm has only increased in the last twenty years. By the 2010s, over half of white evangelicals went to church nearly every week compared to less than 30% of Catholics. In the data from 2024, 57% of white evangelicals were weekly attenders compared to 25% of white Catholics . So not controlling for attendance gives us a much different sample when analyzing evangelicals and Catholics. Keep that in your back pocket for now.<br>Now, there’s another variable at play here that needs to be considered: political conservatism. Are white Catholics more politically moderate than white evangelicals? The answer is: absolutely.

The graph on the left does not contain an attendance filter, so you’ve got an evangelical sample that is much more religiously active than the Catholic subgroup. There are clear differences in the political ideology of these two groups. I think it’s fair to say that evangelicals have always been more conservative than Catholics, although those gaps just weren’t that big back in the 1970s (less than ten percentage points).<br>That gap has widened over time in a very noticeable way. You can clearly pick out an inflection point, too: somewhere in the early 2000s the evangelical line began to shoot up while it rose much more slowly for Catholics. Today there’s just a huge ideological difference between the two. Almost two-thirds of white evangelicals identify as politically conservative vs. just 38% of white Catholics .<br>But remember how evangelicals are much more likely to go to church than Catholics? I controlled for that in the right panel by only including people who indicated that they attended church nearly every week or more. I don’t think this alters the general trend I just described in the “all attendance levels” graph. White evangelicals have always been more ideologically conservative than white Catholics. The gaps between the two lines on the left and the two lines on the right are almost exactly the same magnitude as well.<br>So let’s test out this idea that Catholics are just as socially conservative as evangelicals by pulling in both things that we’ve learned. I am going to show you three graphs: the entire sample of evangelicals and Catholics, only weekly attenders of those two groups, and finally only weekly attenders who also identify as politically conservative. That way we can control for those differences as much as possible.<br>Let’s start with a question about abortion. This one asks if respondents think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain an abortion if she wants it for any reason.

In the full sample, a pretty big gap emerges between evangelicals and Catholics on this issue in...