As nonbeliever ranks grow, will political clout?

WITH less than two months until the midterm election, one group is busy trying to motivate people based on their religious preference.

This is standard stuff in American politics: White evangelical churches have used various means to get out the vote over the years — usually in favor of conservative Republican candidates. Black churches pushed voter activity as well — usually in favor of liberal Democrats.

The new kid on this block doesn’t have a church on the street. It’s a coalition of secular organizations trying to rally support from those who don’t believe in God and/or don’t affiliate with organized religion. If the coalition succeeds, Democrats will likely do better than they’re already expected to do in this time of anti-Donald Trump fervor.

The Wall Street Journal this week reported on statistics gathered by the Public Religion Research Institute. The stats show that the share of American adults with no religious identity (or “nones”) rose to 24 percent in 2016, the year Trump was elected and the latest for which figures are available.

That nearly a quarter of U.S. adults have no affiliation is startling given that the figure was 14 percent in 2000, the year George W. Bush was elected.

Trump and Bush benefited from support from evangelicals — even if some of them were a tad uneasy with Trump’s reputation in the moral arena. The secular coalition hopes the political positions it favors will benefit from motivating voters with no religious affiliation.

PRRI notes a big difference between the percentage of the population considered nonreligious and the percentage of actual voters in 2016 who self-identified as being nonreligious. Rather than 24 percent, the portion of actual voters in the nonreligious category was 15 percent two years ago.

As the Journal asked, how does a political interest group motivate people “whose common denominator is what they don’t believe?” Perhaps through persuasion that the issues of most importance to the secular coalition are also important to nonbelieving voters. The coalition’s key issues are separation of church and state and reproductive rights. Are nonreligious voters just as passionate about those issues?

We’re not sure, but one indication that they are (according to Pew Research) is that the nonreligious voters are predominantly Democrats (54 percent). Democrats generally push church-state separation and access to abortion. Despite what Democrats say about church-state separation, African-American churches have long been hubs of political activism that helped the party.

Of note is that 22 percent of the nonreligious voters say they don’t lean toward either major political party — part of a larger societal trend in which more voters are independent. And it’s not just citizens who are openly nonreligious: An increasing number of candidates are, too, unashamedly running from religion as ardently as candidates traditionally have run toward it.

For Republicans to counter the trend of more voters being nonreligious, they must appeal to independents with a pro-libertarian message. Secularists who insist that religion has no place in government have no problem with government being involved with everything else — including an insistence that religious organization health plans cover items the organization believes are unacceptable.