A new analysis of voter data found that the “God gap” between Republicans and Democrats has never been bigger, even as religious attendance drops among GOP voters.

A majority of those who voted for President Donald Trump in 2024 attended a house of worship at least yearly, with 35% attending every week, according to Cooperative Election Study data analyzed by political scientist Ryan Burge.

Meanwhile, just 35% of those who voted for Kamala Harris attended a religious service at least once a year, with only 17% attending weekly. This means on a given week, Harris voters are less than half as likely to go to church.

A shocking two-thirds of Harris voters report rarely attending church — if ever. This is driven by a 20-percentage-point increase in the share of Democratic voters who “never” go to a religious service, rising from 24% in 2008 to 44% in 2024.

This trend may only be speeding up.

Not only are 57% of Democrats under 35 not religious — a 7-point increase from 2008 — but Democrats over 65 experienced the single largest shift of any group, as the share with no religious affiliation increased from 22% in 2008 to 36% in 2024.

This confirms that religion is likely to become even more of an “identity signal” in the nation’s polarized partisan divide, Burge told the Deseret News. ”For Democrats, secularism increasingly structures worldview and issue positions," he said.

As the Democratic Party reels from its 2024 loss, some are pointing a finger at this anti-religion reputation. In a recent speech, Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Georgia, a Baptist pastor, lamented that Democrats are not as vocal about their faith as Republicans.

“We have ceded too much of that space to them, and I don’t know why,” Warnock said in an interview with the Washington Post.

Religious makeup of the parties

The Republican Party is unequivocally “the party of Christians,” Burge concludes in his analysis.

The religious composition of the 2024 Republican coalition was 80% Christian: 42% Evangelical, 21% Catholic, 14% mainline protestant and 2% members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. An identical share, 2%, were Jewish.

Only 5% of Trump’s voters were atheist or agnostic. Another 12% did not identify with any religious affiliation — a 4% increase in “nones” from 2008, but nothing compared to the share of Democratic “nones,” who form the core Democratic constituency.

Nearly half of Democrats’ 2024 voters had no religious affiliation: 20% identified with “nothing in particular,” 14% were atheists and 11% were agnostic. The share of non-religious Democrats, 45%, is nearly triple the share among Republicans, 17%.

Whereas 80% of Republican voters are Christian, and 70% are white Christians, just 38% of Democratic voters are Christian, and 30% are white Christians. So, it is not just Christianity, “the GOP is the party of white Christianity,” Burge writes.

During highly anticipated remarks at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in December, Vice President JD Vance extolled “Christian values” and the “Christian moral order” as forming what he called the “Christian foundation of this country.”

Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, said that Christianity is also the solution to fiery debates happening within the Republican Party about “American identity and figuring out what it is that unites us.”

“The only thing that has truly served as an anchor of the United States of America is that we have been, and by the grace of God, we always will be, a Christian nation,” Vance said, then adding: “Christianity is America’s creed.”

Religious attendance

However, consistent religious affiliation among Republicans has been accompanied by a dramatic change in religious behavior. Since 2008, the share of GOP voters who never attend church has doubled from 10% to 21%.

“For Republicans, ‘Christian’ identity often operates independently of personal religiosity but still powerfully shapes partisan alignment, rhetoric, and coalition-building,” Burge told the Deseret News.

“The GOP may be less religious in terms of behavior, even as religion becomes more tightly fused with Republican identity. That tension is probably not going away anytime soon.”

For decades, religious affiliation has fallen sharply in America. Over the past 20 years, the share of Americans who identify as religiously unaffiliated has climbed from 16% of the population to over 28%.

The percentage of white Christian Americans has also continually declined from 57% of the country in 2006 to 40% in 2024, according to the Public Religion Research Institute’s Census of American Religion.

However, this trend has not impacted Utah, or Latter-day Saints in the same way.

A working paper by researchers at Brigham Young University recently highlighted how Latter-day Saints have the highest rate of church attendance, and one of the highest retention rates, of any church in the U.S.

Previous studies found that three-fourths of Utahns belong to a church, the most of any state in the country, and that Utah has the highest weekly church attendance, at 41%, of anywhere in the U.S. or Europe besides Poland.

“We do need, I believe, a religious revival,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox told the Deseret News in May. “The truth is, we’re the most religious state in the country, and that absolutely matters.”