Survey: FFRF members more liberal than Nones

This article was written prior to the Nov. 5 election.

By Ryan P. Burge

I learned a term in graduate school that I probably use too much now in my everyday life: “a self-selection effect.” It’s something that the average person does all the time and doesn’t realize — they choose to be part of something. It could be a sports team, a political party or a religious organization. They aren’t randomly chosen to participate; they make an intentional effort to join a social group.

Of course, in the world of religion, almost everything is self-selection when you become an adult. It’s a voluntary choice whether to attend church, what church to attend, and how often to attend.

Other significant demographic factors like age and race are immutable facts of a respondent. Whether they identify as Protestant, Hindu or atheist is completely up to the person answering the survey question.

That’s why I like studying an organization like the Freedom From Religion Foundation. It’s a self-selected collection of individuals who become members and pay dues because they feel it’s a good use of their time and resources. But how much do members of a group like FFRF represent the larger nonreligious group they come from?

Paul Djupe and I are lucky enough to be able to answer that question because we partnered with FFRF to do two surveys. One, which was administered by Qualtrics, was a random sample of nonreligious Americans. The other was a survey of FFRF membership. This article will focus specifically on the political views of FFRF and how it compares to different types of nonreligious Americans, as well as other groups like Catholics and Latter-day Saints.

First, let’s just get to the most basic question: How do folks plan to vote in November? We fielded this survey before Joe Biden decided in July not to seek reelection. So, just keep that in mind.

Here’s the headline statistic: 94 percent of FFRF members said they planned to vote for the Democrat on Election Day. In the total sample of 11,422 members of FFRF, just 56 said they planned to vote for Donald Trump. That’s 0.5 percent. Among the rest of the FFRF sample, just 1.6 percent said they would vote for a candidate not listed, 1.3 percent wanted to vote for Jill Stein, and 0.8 percent liked Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

There’s undoubtedly a leftward tilt among the random sample of nonreligious Americans, but it’s not that strong. Among all Nones (those who are religiously unaffiliated), about 60 percent said that they wanted to vote for Biden, while 16 percent intended to support Trump. That other big story is that 9 percent of nonreligious folks said they would vote for RFK Jr. Of course, that will not happen now as he has dropped out of the race. However, according to this poll, he received reasonably strong support for a third-party candidate.

Let’s pivot to other metrics now, like political partisanship. This question had seven response options ranging from Strong Democrat to Strong Republican.

FFRF members are comfortable identifying as Democrats. About 43 percent said that they were strong Democrats. In total, 91 percent of FFRF members said they more closely aligned with the Democrats. Just 6 percent said that they were independents, and almost none were Republicans. Remember that discussion of a self-selection effect? FFRF is drawing not just from nonreligious Americans, but specifically Democratic Nones.

How does that compare to the random sample survey of Nones? Well, FFRF members align more with the Democrats than other groups. Among all Nones, 64 percent were Democrats, and 21 percent were independents. Approximately two in three atheists in our random sample said that they were Democrats, and 19 percent were independents. Agnostics looked more like the entire sample of Nones, while the “nothing in particular group” had the lowest share of Democrat identifiers at 57 percent. The “nothing in particulars” were the most likely to be Republicans, but let’s be clear on that — just 16 percent of them chose to associate with the GOP. No group in this survey leans right of center on partisanship.

What about political ideology? This was also measured on a seven-point scale, running from very liberal to very conservative.

The survey showed that 88 percent of Freedom From Religion Foundation members said they were liberal, while 31 percent identified as very liberal. How does that compare to the rest of the country? In a sample of all Americans collected in 2023, 11 percent said that they were very liberal, and a total of 34 percent were liberal. Clearly, FFRF members are far to the left of the average person in the United States.

What about other types of Nones in our sample? It does look like atheists are the most likely to be left-leaning. Among this group, 67 percent were liberal, but that’s still 20 points left of the FFRF membership. Again, FFRF is a specific subsection of nonreligious folks. Among agnostics, 62 percent were liberal, and it was 53 percent of “nothing in particulars.”

Let me throw the last two metrics into one visualization and a bunch of other religious groups so you can easily understand how FFRF stands out from the crowd.

Obviously, partisanship and ideology are deeply related to one another, but some groups are far off the trend line. A good comparison is between Black Protestants and FFRF members. In terms of political partisanship, they don’t differ that much. Black Protestants are a 2.2 out of 7. FFRF members are 2.04. They both are strongly aligned with the Democrats. However, there’s a chasm in political ideology. The average for the FFRF sample was 2.16 on a scale from 1 to 7. Meanwhile, Black Protestants are 4.34. That puts them right of center on ideology.

You can also see how the FFRF point estimate is even further left than the average atheist in the sample on both ideology and partisanship. It’s staggering to consider how far apart FFRF members are compared to white evangelicals — two completely different parts of the political world.

In our survey of FFRF members and nonreligious folks, we also asked them to place a bunch of groups on the ideology scale. It’s a really telling look at how FFRF members see the world compared to other Nones.

FFRF members see themselves to the left of the ideological spectrum. They place themselves to the left of atheists, as well as the Democratic Party and President Biden. Then there’s a huge gap, and then you can see how they put Trump at about 6.3 on a 7-point scale, the Republican party at 6.5, and evangelicals at 6.7. In other words, members of FFRF see evangelicals as about as conservative as it gets.

How does that compare to other nonreligious folks? One big difference is that in the random sample of Nones, the average person sees themselves slightly to the right of the Democratic Party. But, in this sample, they cluster Biden, the Democrats, atheists and themselves all in pretty close proximity. Another notable finding is that Nones see evangelicals as a lot more moderate than FFRF members. In fact, the random sample sees all right-leaning groups as more moderate than members of FFRF.

What about FFRF members’ positions on issues?

This data makes it even more apparent how politically unified the members of FFRF are on most issues. They are nearly unanimous on things like supporting women’s rights, support access to abortion services, climate change, equal rights for the LGBTQ community and limits on religious freedom. They are also unified on topics like their view of racial discrimination and private school vouchers.

What struck me were the issue areas in which FFRF members were less homogeneous. For instance, they were basically split on the idea of reparations for the descendants of enslaved people. They were also less aligned on a guaranteed minimum income or increasing the number of seats on the Supreme Court.

But, I think it’s very fair to say that based on these results, FFRF folks are largely of one mind when it comes to the major public policy debates of the day.

We also asked FFRF members to review a list of possible concerns facing the United States and asked them to select the three that they thought were the most important.

The number one choice was reproductive rights. Half of FFRF members believed it was one of their top three concerns. It was followed by civil rights/racial equality. Then, there was a huge gap. Only a third of respondents believed women’s rights were among their top concerns, and just 28 percent felt that environmental quality was among the top three.

I was also struck by what didn’t rank that high. For instance, just 10 percent of people in FFRF believed that being anti-war was one of their most pressing concerns and even fewer were deeply concerned with animal rights (6 percent) and charity to help the needy (3 percent).

One final battery of questions focused on a critical topic to groups like FFRF — political activity. We asked if they had engaged in a number of activities in the prior 12 months (which ran from June of 2023 through June of 2024). I compared the responses of the FFRF sample to the random sample of nonreligious Americans.

There are areas in which FFRF folks are incredibly politically engaged. Nearly 60 percent of FFRF members said they had contacted a public official in the prior year. That’s double the rate of the Nones in the other sample. Also, two-thirds of FFRF members had made a political donation. That was 40 points higher than the other nonreligious folks in the random sample. FFRF members are also much more likely to display a political button or yard sign.

However, there were other activities with only a small gap between the samples. Both groups were nearly as likely to attend a protest or rally, there were no differences in the rate of talking about politics with a stranger, and it was surprising to see that members of FFRF were slightly less likely to post about politics on social media compared to the random sample of Nones.

In 1831, the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville came to the rapidly growing United States to observe how our culture differed from his native France. He wrote, “Americans group together to hold fêtes, found seminaries, build inns, construct churches, distribute books, dispatch missionaries to the antipodes. They establish hospitals, prisons, schools by the same method. Finally, if they wish to highlight a truth or develop an opinion by the encouragement of a great example, they form an association.” (Tocqueville 1840, 596)

When we think about these voluntary associations, our minds tend to drift to groups like the Boy Scouts, the Elks Club or the local Methodist church. However, in the future, there will be a proliferation of groups like the Freedom From Religion Foundation. They are an organization that understands a growing number of Americans share their concerns about issues facing the country. Joining together to advocate, organize and strategize is vital in a healthy, pluralistic democracy. What made America great 200 years ago continues to endure in the United States today.

Ryan P. Burge is an associate professor at Eastern Illinois University, political scientist, statistician and former Baptist minister.