In Tennessee, Christians tend to support state government and Trump
Among Tennesseans, selfidentified Christians are far more likely than average to plan to vote in the presidential primaries, to back Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy over Joe Biden’s in the 2024 general election and to support the expansion of school vouchers to subsidize private K-12 education, according to a religious breakdown of a new statewide poll.
The cohort is more likely than average to be dissatisfied with the United States — but its members tend to see Tennessee’s affairs in a rosier light, the study found.
Those self-identified Christians
also trend older than the norm, and all the more so if they identify as “born-again” or evangelical, the survey found.
More than half of evangelicals surveyed were 65 or older. In contrast, 1 in 5 nonevangelicals fell in that same age bracket.
The survey was the third in a series conducted by the conservative Beacon Center of Tennessee. Conducted in mid-December, released last week and repackaged for the Chattanooga Times Free Press around respondents’ religious affiliation, the poll of registered Tennessee voters, weighted to reflect the profile of the state’s general population, reflects the entanglement of religion, demographics and political identity in Tennessee life.
Often making up just a small handful of the 1,302 people surveyed, members of other religious groups appeared in such a small quantity their views could not be reliably interpreted to describe a broader dynamic. One exception to that, however, was those who identified as “born-again” or evangelical, a major force in Tennessee politics who, the Beacon Center polling data shows, pull the state to the political right.
About half of those surveyed described themselves as “somewhat” or “very” conservative. For evangelicals, that number was nearly 3 out of 4.
Of those the Beacon Center polled, fewer than 1 in 10 were Catholic, and about 4 in 10 were Protestant — and about half of those in that group described themselves as “born-again” or evangelical.
Many studies of the general population have found far higher rates of Protestants — and their evangelical subgroup — in Tennessee. In its 2014 Religious Landscape Study, the Pew Research Center found nearly three-quarters of respondents in the state to be Protestant. Public Religion Research Institute data has in recent years registered Protestants as making up between about 60% and 70% of Tennesseans.
Twenty-eight percent of those polled by the Beacon Center rejected the labels on offer and identified as “something else.” Muslims, Jews and Buddhists each clocked in around 1%. Another 21% of respondents said they were atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular.
AGING
In the U.S., the median age is 48, and the median age of a Christian is 53. The median age of both evangelicals and mainline Protestants is 55, according to data from Dan Cox, the director of the Survey on American Life at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
“We have experienced a really significant shift,” Cox said in a phone interview Friday.
Mainline Protestants were long known as the aging demographic — but in recent years, evangelicals have rapidly caught up, Cox said. In his center’s latest poll, conducted in late 2023, Cox found that 58% of white evangelicals nationwide were over the age of 50 — and about 1 in 3 were over the age of 65, distributions that skew far older than that of the general public.
There is little debate as to what is going on, Cox said. Young people have rapidly left religious institutions, and the generational makeup of those religious groups has shifted in turn. And while the Pew Research Center had found some people in recent years adopted “evangelical” as an apparently political label, the change is not fundamentally semantic, Cox said, but rather reflects a substantial shift in the religious practices and beliefs of the nation.
Most evangelicals are white and identify as conservative, and Cox sees the political views of white conservative Christians as being animated by a sense of nostalgia and loss.
“For a good long while, being white and Christian was a privileged identity in the United States, and in many cases, it still is,” Cox said. “But in a rapidly secularizing country and a rapidly diversifying country, that’s changed a lot.”
Cox said research has shown the perception of being on the defensive to be a significant factor in the opposition many evangelicals feel toward immigration and their embrace of Trump.
Indeed, among those surveyed by the Beacon Center, 75% of Tennessee evangelicals said they are most likely to participate in the Republican presidential primary, and from that group, 68% intend to back Trump.
That proportion is lower than that of other presumptive Republican primary voters in the state. (Among Republicans, Tennessee evangelicals are more likely than average to back Ron DeSantis’ presidential bid, the Beacon Center found).
Still, evangelicals, and Protestants in general, are far more likely than the average poll respondent to hold Biden in worse regard than they did in 2020 — and more likely to have signaled loyalty to Trump.
Most of the former president’s supporters in Tennessee plan to vote for him even if he is convicted of one of the many crimes for which he has been charged, the Beacon Center found, but evangelicals say they would stick with Trump at a higher rate than the rest.
SATISFIED WITH TENNESSEE
Of Tennessee’s registered voters, evangelicals are more likely than others to say they were economically worse off than they were a year prior. And judging the U.S. economy as a whole, they are also more likely to foresee choppy waters ahead, the Beacon Center found.
Like most people surveyed, evangelicals felt somewhat rosier about the state of Tennessee. Sixty-three percent of evangelicals surveyed believed the state was a good model for the nation, and 57% — far more than average — felt the Tennessee legislature has been doing good work.
Still, they saw room for improvement. Evangelicals expressed more dissatisfaction than average with public K-12 education in Tennessee, and they appear to overwhelmingly back an idea some feel will improve the situation: Gov. Bill Lee’s plan to expand school vouchers, which would use public money to subsidize private education for Tennessee families.
Most atheists and agnostics oppose the idea, Beacon Center polling shows, but Christians overwhelmingly support it. Three in 4 evangelicals expressed support for the education savings account program, as the vouchers are called in Tennessee. Catholics supported the program at an even higher rate.
HOME AND PERSONAL LIFE
Across the board, the Beacon Center Poll found Christians in general had much in common. For example, Tennessee’s self-identified Protestants and Catholics were more skeptical than the average poll respondent toward the idea of the government offering people direct financial assistance as a way to lower housing costs.
When it came to affordable housing, Christians preferred private sector solutions.
Still, they tended to feel more positive than the average person about the effect of zoning laws in their community.
In one question, for example, respondents were asked if they agree more with one of two hypothetical people. One such fictional person, “Smith,” felt zoning laws limit personal property rights and resulted in more expensive housing. The other person, “Jones,” argued zoning laws protect the character of a neighborhood and prevent out-of-control growth.
Most survey respondents agreed with Jones more than Smith, but none more so than evangelicals, with Catholics just behind.
Tennessee Catholics and Protestants — and especially evangelicals — are far more likely to be homeowners than everyone else, the survey found. And more than half of evangelicals polled are retired, compared to less than a quarter of everyone else.
Evangelicals, the poll found, also appear to be frequent news consumers. While few get information from increasingly popular domains like YouTube, they are far more likely than others to have in the previous week consumed news in formats like broadcast or cable TV or newspapers, the Beacon Center found.
Tennessee evangelicals were more likely than others polled to say they distrust national news organizations. Yet about two-thirds said they trust information from local news either “a lot” or “some” — a rate in line with the survey’s average.