During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump spoke at a gathering of conservative Protestants, imploring them to vote for him “just this time.”

In “four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians,” he said.

As a scholar of religion and public life for the past 30 years, I had an immediate gut reaction: Such a blanket term is out of place. The diversity of Christian traditions, beliefs, communities and denominations is far too vast to lump together as “my beautiful Christians.”

But, in fact, Trump’s choice of words hints at something true. Despite that expansive diversity, American Christians are growing more similar in some of their social and political views.

Social scientists often parse Christians out into the various Christian traditions: evangelical, fundamentalist, conservative Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Latter-day Saints, mainline Protestant, liberal Protestant – the list goes on. In my own work and the work of some peers, however, one simple category has become more useful. That category is what I call “practicing Christians”: people who say that they are Christian, that their faith is very important to them, and that they attend church at least monthly.

When it comes to views on immigration and racial inequality, for example – a focus of my research – “practicing Christians” across different traditions are becoming more similar. Voting behavior shows a similar trend. This is true especially among white Christians, but among most other racial groups as well.

Social views

In 2000, sociologist Christian Smith and I co-authored a book about the uniqueness of American white evangelical Christians and their racial beliefs.

Compared with other white Christians, white evangelicals were far more likely to view racial issues through an individual lens, rather than a societal one. That is, they tended to blame race problems on bad people and bad relationships, rather than factors such as discrimination or unjust laws.

For example, using data from the 1996 General Social Survey, we found that white conservative Protestants were 26 percentage points less likely than white mainline Protestants to attribute racial inequality to a lack of access to quality education. These conservative Protestants – the term the survey uses for evangelicals – were 22 percentage points more likely than mainline Protestants to say that lack of motivation is a reason for racial inequality.

But just a few years later, scholars started to find these distinctions shrinking. In fact, when I compare the 2021-2022 General Social Survey to our 1996 findings, those gaps between mainline Protestant and conservative Protestant explanations for racial inequality have shrunk by about half.

When doing analysis for our 2024 book “The Religion of Whiteness,” sociologist Glenn Bracey and I found that gaps between different traditions of American Christians’ views on several social issues had shrunk to the point that it was no longer advantageous to parse out the different groups. We could more efficiently explain some patterns by using the category “practicing Christian,” compared against less-practicing Christians and non-Christians.

Bracey, minister Chad Brennan and I co-led a national survey on race, religion and social justice in 2019, polling around 3,000 Americans. One question illustrating this trend asked respondents whether “it is acceptable for whites, on average, to have more wealth than other racial groups.” Nineteen percent of white practicing Catholics, 18% of white practicing mainline Protestants and 18% of white practicing conservative Protestants agreed. In comparison, only 10% of all other white Americans agreed, as we reported in “Religion of Whiteness.”

Political action

A similar pattern is at play in presidential voting. Exit polls do not identify whether people meet the definition of “practicing,” but people who call themselves Christians are, in general, increasingly leaning toward the Republican Party.

Among white voters, shifts toward the GOP are occurring across the largest Christian traditions. In 2004, for example, 67% of white Protestants voted for the Republican candidate for president. That same year, 56% of white Catholics also voted for the Republican candidate. By 2024, 72% of white Protestants and 63% of white Catholics supported the Republican candidate.

Most practicing Asian Christians have voted majority Republican at least since 2016. According to data from my race, religion and social justice survey, only 26% of non-Christian Asians voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but 56% of Asian practicing Christians did so.

I do not have data to sort Hispanic Catholics into “practicing” or “nonpracticing” categories, but overall, they have always voted majority Democrat. The gap is narrowing, however. In 2016, Clinton won 78% of Hispanic Catholics’ votes. Four years later, Biden won 66%, and in 2024, Harris won only 55%.

African Americans are the exception to the overall voting trend for Christians. The majority have voted Democrat in every presidential election since the 1960s, regardless of their faith identity or lack thereof, and whether they would be described as “practicing.”

Importantly, in the past three presidential election cycles, practicing Christians who are not African American are the only religious group that voted majority Republican.

Concentrated culture

Different from the past, then, I argue the “practicing Christian” category is now a powerful way to understand many social and political trends.

Why this change? Two main reasons have coalesced.

First, since 2000, there has been a significant decline in church attendance, along with growth in the “nones” – those who claim no religious allegiance. In 2000, 42% of Americans attended worship nearly every week or more, whereas by 2023 that percentage had declined to 30%. Likewise, the number of Americans who reported no religious affiliation grew from 9% to 21%.

This attendance decline has been concentrated within mainline Protestants and Catholics – the Christian groups that, in the past, were most likely to vote Democrat and have more liberal social views.

There is no single American Christian culture. Yet, the vast diversity is shrinking. And it is shrinking in a decided direction: toward conservative Protestantism.

“My beautiful Christians” is still a simplistic phrase, flattening hundreds of faith traditions into one. But “practicing Christians” are indeed growing more similar – a powerful influence in current American life.

Michael Emerson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.