James Ron - Religious Salience & Support for Deportation in the US
- James Ron
- Aug 13
- 5 min read
Updated: Sep 25
How does religious salience shape the US public’s attitudes towards deporting undocumented immigrants? In the US, spiritual people who do not identify with any particular faith tradition tend to be more supportive of deportation as religious salience grows.
Our survey suggests that this group may represent roughly 20% of the US population. Importantly, these people are distinct from self-reported "atheists" and "agnostics." To my surprise, this pattern does not obtain for other major faith traditions in the US, such as Protestants and Catholics. There is some evidence that it might be true for the less numerous religious identities, but the number of survey respondents affiliated with these traditions is insufficient to report on with great confidence.
This piece is part of a broader series I am developing with the noted sociologist of religion, Richard Wood, on religion and public opinion.
The Data
The data for this analysis comes from a nationally representative survey of 2,000 American adults, fielded in 2018 by YouGov, under the direction of several colleagues and me. We published pieces from this data in the Washington Post, New York Times, Open Global Rights, and Foreign Policy.
The poll was weighted to reflect US census parameters for age, gender, race/ethnicity, region, and education. YouGov asked respondents political and religious questions, including their views on human and civil rights, immigration, and religiosity.
The data are seven years old, so the univariate findings have likely changed somewhat. If you ran the same poll today, for example, the percentage of respondents supporting deportation would likely be a bit different. The underlying multivariate statistical patterns, however, have likely not changed all that much.
Support for Deportation: Univariate Findings In our survey, 45% of respondents favored deporting undocumented immigrants, while 56% opposed, as detailed in Figure 1 (totals do not equal 100% due to rounding).
What role do religious identity and salience play in shaping these attitudes?
Religious Identity and Salience
Many respondents identified with one of the country’s major religious traditions: 36% as Protestants, 19% as Roman Catholics, and 10% as Eastern Orthodox, Hindus, Jews, Mormons, Muslims, and others. Only 13% considered themselves “atheists” or “agnostics,” while 22% selected “nothing in particular,” a distinct group of faith-oriented individuals who do not identify with a specific religious tradition. Figure 2 details these affiliations:
Americans tend to be rather religious, so not surprisingly, 56% of respondents said religion was either “very” or “somewhat important” to them, as detailed in Figure 3:
Support for deportation varied among the major faith traditions. On a scale of 1 through 6, in which 1 equals “strongly oppose” and 6 represents “strongly support,” the average level of support for deportation was highest among Protestants and Catholics (an average of 3.6), followed by those who self-identified as “nothing in particular” (3.3), agnostics, and atheists (2.1). Figure 4 details these differences:
Religious Salience and Support for Deportation: Bivariate Findings Rudimentary statistical analysis suggests a link between religious importance and support for deportation. Respondents who considered religion “very important” supported deportation, on average, at 3.7 on the 1-6 scale, compared to 3.4 for those reporting that religion was “somewhat important” to them, 3 for “not very important,” and 2.5 for those who said it was “not at all” important.
In other words, the bivariate findings suggest that the more salient religion is for respondents, the more likely they are to support deportation, as detailed in Figure 5:
Religious Salience and Support for Deportation: Multivariate Findings
Using more sophisticated analytical methods, however, suggests that the true picture is more complicated and interesting.
I built a simple statistical model predicting support for deportation, with religious denomination and religious importance as the independent variables of interest. To improve comparability, I centered each respondent’s religious importance score relative to their group's mean.
The model controlled for a wide range of variables, including additional religious practices (prayer and church attendance), political orientation (party ID, voter registration), ideological attitudes (support for populism, ethnocentrism, and nativism), and sociodemographic factors (gender, income, education, employment, marital status, and region of residence). I used a statistical technique called Ordinary Least Squares regression, both with and without robust standard errors, the latter offering more conservative estimates when dealing with public opinion data.
Once I controlled for these other factors, religious salience and faith tradition were NOT significantly associated with support for deportation. Ideology, political partisanship, and sociodemographic factors soaked up much of the pattern observed in the bivariate tables above.
The interaction between religious salience and faith tradition was significant, however. Among respondents who said their religious affiliation was “nothing in particular,” greater religious importance was associated with more support for deportation. This relationship was statistically significant under classical assumptions (p = .025), and remained positive, but fell just short of significance, when using the robust standard errors technique (p = .110). I observed no such association for Protestants and Catholics. You can see what I'm talking about in the figure below:
In this graph, the X-axis shows increasing levels of religious importance, while the Y-axis displays predicted support for deportation. Only among respondents with no formal religious affiliation (“nothing in particular,” shown in black) does support rise with religious importance. For Protestants and Catholics, the slope is flat. (The shaded areas represent 95% confidence intervals).
What does this all mean?
For most Americans, religious identity and the importance they place on religion, on their own, are not strong predictors of support for deporting undocumented immigrants, unless they do not identify with a particular religious tradition.
For Americans who say their religion is “nothing in particular,” the more salient religion is to their lives, the more likely they are to support deportation. This suggests that when religious belief is not anchored in a specific faith tradition, it can align more easily with exclusionary political views.
This finding hints at a broader dynamic: religious energy, when detached from organized theology or institutional guidance, can fuse more easily with populist or nationalist sentiment. The “spiritual but not religious” crowd may not be as uniformly liberal or open as often assumed, especially when religious feeling intensifies without the guardrails of tradition.
This finding challenges stereotypes about secularism and religiosity in the US. It’s not just how religious people are that matters, but how their religiosity is shaped by tradition, teachings, community, and institutional frameworks.
For a more developed version of this analysis, using a more sophisticated breakdown of religious denominations in the US, see my paper with Richard Wood on the website of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California, "How Faith Identity Shapes Support for Deportation in the US."
About James Ron
James Ron is an author and social scientist whose career has spanned military service, human rights investigations, journalism, and university teaching. He is working on a memoir, Azimuth, which reflects on a life lived at the intersection of political violence, moral responsibility, exile, and personal transformation.
Learn more at www.jamesron.com | www.jamesron.org | www.jamesron.net
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