The Evangelical Diploma Divide

The United States is now in the throes of the politics of class division, and American evangelicalism is no exception.

College-educated evangelical Christians may be the least prepared for this new class-based polarization, because it doesn’t break along old class fault lines. As recently as two decades ago, social class in the US was primarily determined by income or wealth, “haves” pitted against “have-nots.”

But today’s most intractable class divide is about education, and educated evangelicals are having a hard time navigating this split. After all, the college-educated are a minority among white evangelicals, only 29 percent of whom have four-year college degrees.

I say this—as an evangelical with not only a four-year degree but a PhD—not to seek pity for the new educational elite. We don’t need commiseration. But we do need unity in the body of Christ. So what should we do when our education divides us from our Christian brothers and sisters? What do we do when the values we’ve acquired from our schooling lead us down a political path that many non-college-educated evangelicals view as dangerously wrong?

It’s only in recent years that education has become such an important political predictor. “Among white voters, in particular, individuals with at least a college degree are now a much more Democratic constituency than people with less schooling,” The New York Times reports. Meanwhile, whites without a college degree are moving rapidly into the Republican Party.

This is a reversal of traditional patterns, because, for many decades, the GOP was the party of the affluent and upper middle class, while Democrats relied heavily on the support of working-class voters. That began to shift as divisions over the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and debates over affirmative action in the 1980s put the Republican Party in conflict with many liberal Protestant clergy and college professors.

For a long time, this dissent among PhDs seemed to have little effect on the rest of the college-educated population, evangelicals included. Ronald Reagan received strong support from white college graduates during his reelection campaign of 1984, and a majority of white college grads continued to support the Republican Party until the 21st century.

This meant that most college-educated evangelicals who voted for Reagan in the 1980s or supported the Christian Right in the 1990s didn’t have to worry about alienating their secular friends. Those friends might not have shared evangelicals’ views on abortion or sexuality, but they probably didn’t view voting Republican as immoral.

That began to change in this century, starting with the defection of many college-educated Americans from the Republican coalition during George W. Bush’s presidency. Some left because of opposition to the Iraq War. Others were fed up with Bush’s stance on cultural issues including embryonic stem cell research and same-sex marriage. One way or another, by the end of Bush’s presidency, the Republican Party was moribund in educated areas of the Northeast and West Coast, places where it had been reasonably strong a decade prior.

But that didn’t hurt the GOP very much, because it offset those losses with a rising appeal to non-college-educated Americans. As the Republican Party became more rural, Southern, and working-class, the party’s policy positions began to shift to reflect the interests of this new constituency. Its positions on immigration and gun control became more hard-line, and its commitment to free trade and entitlement reform started to soften.

At first, those differences received little attention, but the nation’s polarization over former president Donald Trump exacerbated this divide and brought it into the open, including in the evangelical church. Today, the core of Trump’s constituency is united by a strong opposition to the establishment, whether in government, the media, or education—or maybe even their own denominations. As Trump Republicans have taken over their party, this anti-establishment ethos has become part of the whole GOP’s identity.

The Democratic Party, meanwhile, is increasingly a pro-establishment party supported by college-educated Americans. Its agenda includes things that “establishment” evangelicals (such as the National Associations of Evangelicals) have also historically cared about, like efforts to fight climate change or honor the human dignity of undocumented immigrants. Both of those causes, which the NAE has endorsed in the past, incur strong opposition from anti-establishment Republicans, evangelicals included.

But the modern Democratic agenda also includes things that “establishment” evangelicals have historically opposed, especially abortion and an ever more progressive ethic on sex and gender.

Here’s where the position of college-educated evangelicals gets complicated. Most voters who share our educational class are uninterested in or actively hostile to biblical values on life and sexuality. It’s easy for them to wholly embrace the contemporary Democratic Party’s pro-establishment agenda, abortion and LGBTQ activism as much as immigration reform and environmental care.

On the other hand, most voters who share our faith are non-college-educated, anti-establishment Republicans. They find it similarly easy to reject that whole Democratic agenda, and perhaps also to dismiss anyone with any sympathy for any part of it as “woke,” “weak,” or “leftist.”

So what do we do? College-educated evangelicals could stay in the awkward middle forever, remaining aligned with fellow evangelicals on abortion and sexual ethics while continuing to partner with fellow college grads on immigration and climate policy. But recent polling data I’ve reviewed suggests that isn’t what’s happening. Instead, many college-educated evangelicals are reacting to this dissonance by turning their backs on the GOP and, in some cases, on non-college-educated evangelicals.

We’ve seen this at the individual level, of course. More than a few who made this choice have ended up leaving evangelicalism altogether and/or spending a significant amount of time battling evangelical Republicans online. But we can see it at the national scale too.

As late as 2016, there was no statistical difference between the voting choices of college-educated and non-college-educated evangelicals. That year, 81 percent of college-educated white evangelical voters cast their ballots for Trump, as did 80 percent of white evangelical voters without a college degree.

This changed by 2020. Then, 84 percent of non-college-educated white evangelical voters voted for Trump. But among college-educated white evangelicals, support for Trump markedly decreased to just 63 percent. That means a remarkable 21-point educational gap developed among white evangelicals over the course of a single presidential election cycle.

This class-based division in evangelical opinion continued after the 2020 election. An American Enterprise Institute study from March 2022 showed that only 51 percent of white evangelicals with a bachelor’s degree had a favorable view of Trump, compared to 77 percent of white evangelicals who had not attended college. The evangelical groups that historically have been the most suspicious of ecclesiastical and political establishments and the least likely to be college-educated—such as Pentecostals, for instance—have also been Trump’s strongest supporters.

And there’s every indication that divide will widen this year. A poll in early June 2024 showed that President Joe Biden’s support among voters (of all faiths) without a college degree had dropped by 10 percentage points since 2020, while his support during that same period had slipped by only 1 percentage point among college-educated voters. I expect we’ll see similar—perhaps even accelerated—dynamics with Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic presidential nominee.

Consequently, this November, college-educated evangelicals will face a choice. Like many of our educational peers, we could vote for the establishment, a choice that may well alienate us from fellow church members and the broader evangelical movement. Or we could vote for the anti-establishment party, burning bridges with our college-educated friends and colleagues.

Neither one of those choices strikes me as a particularly good one, and I want to suggest an alternative.

To begin, college-educated evangelicals must recognize that we’re a minority in our faith tradition. Most fellow evangelicals will make political choices that don’t line up with ours. This reality can be easy to miss if all our friends are college-educated and the only Christian books we’re reading are those written for us.

By the time of pastor Timothy Keller’s death last year, for example, all of his books combined had sold just over 2 million copies. That’s a lot, but Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series sold 80 million copies. Far more American Christians have encountered the apocalyptic good-versus-evil scenarios presented in those books than have ever read Keller’s apologetics.

Similarly, if we’re part of a congregation or denomination that disproportionately attracts college-educated members, we may greatly exaggerate the importance of trends among people in our own circles—like a move toward more liturgical worship or a rediscovery of the Reformed heritage or the early church fathers. Denominations well-represented among the evangelical elite, like the Presbyterian Church in America (where Keller pastored), the Christian Reformed Church (home of James K. A. Smith and Nicholas Wolterstorff), and the Anglican Church in North America (which includes Esau McCaulley, Tish Harrison Warren, and now Beth Moore) are smaller than many realize.

Those churches have national memberships of just 400,000, 200,000, and 125,000, respectively. Even put together, they’re far outnumbered by the Assemblies of God’s 3 million members, the Southern Baptist Convention’s 13 million members, or the 16 million who attend nondenominational churches. The educated evangelical bubble is very small.

If we exist in that bubble, we may come to find it incomprehensible that other evangelicals do things like flying Trump 2024 flags on their trucks. We need to learn to comprehend it. We need to acknowledge that our circles are politically unusual, and that’s okay. And when we see reports this November (as we surely will) that most evangelicals voted for Trump, we shouldn’t be shocked. In our current political climate, that’s exactly what we’d expect from such anti-establishment voters.

As for how we vote, this election—and each one after it—may be a moment of reckoning for college-educated evangelicals like me. We’ll feel forced to choose one major party or the other. But what if we’re convinced neither side sufficiently represents the values of Christ’s kingdom?

That should mean we won’t fully align ourselves with either, which will also mean continuing dissonance among our educated friends and fellow evangelicals alike. That might never feel comfortable, but discomfort doesn’t excuse us from maintaining a charitable disposition toward Christians who disagree with us, knowing that we’re all fallible. This new class difference may prove durable, but it needn’t divide the body of Christ.

If our education becomes a path to understanding rather than a component of our tribal identity, it can be a valuable gift in the kingdom of God instead of a marker of political division.

Daniel K. Williams teaches American history at Ashland University and is the author of The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship.