People in the United States are increasingly using their political views to inform their religious beliefs, with 25% of adults saying they’ve considered leaving their religion because of disagreements with their political affiliation.
“I think a lot of this is driven by things like abortion, same-sex marriage, the traditional moral issues that we think of in this area,” said Andre Audette, a political science professor at Monmouth."It seems like our politics is impacting our religion.”
"The winners are evangelical Protestants, a conservative group that is the largest coalition in the Republican Party, and secularism," Audette said. "People associate religion with conservative politics,” Audette said."This is complicated for liberals and moderates, because if you go to a church that you experience as being conservative, it can hurt your brain a little bit, because you start to think, 'I'm very liberal, but here I am at this conservative church. What do I do? How do I fix this?' This is known as cognitive dissonance in psychology.