Americans Cite Faith as Their Biggest Influence in Election 2016

Faith exerts the greatest influence on how Americans plan to vote this year. Thirty-two percent of Americans said faith has “a lot” or “some” influence on their decision in election 2016, while another 13 percent said it had only “a little” bit of influence, according to a survey released October 27 by the Barna Group. Thus, nearly half of American voters agreed that faith impacted who they intended to vote for.

“Fewer Americans are going to church these days, but a new national survey reveals that the most likely influence on who people vote for in this year’s presidential contest is their religious beliefs,” the Barna Group proclaimed.

While the survey found that pastors had the least influence on American voters among the top ten factors listed, the Barna Group’s founder and Special Analyst George Barna said there was still “great potential for churches and pastors to impact voting decisions.” He explained that the problem was not that Americans felt distrust toward pastors, but rather that pastors had elected “to not speak to their congregants about the issues or the candidates” relevant to election 2016.

“In fact, one out of every four Americans say they trust their church or pastor to exert a lot of influence on their political choices,” Barna said. “What a tremendous opportunity for churches to position themselves as relevant to people’s life choices while taking advantage of an available opportunity to influence people’s lives.”

Barna added that if more pastors spoke up about “political issues, matters of governance, and candidate selection, the election campaign might have been dramatically altered.”

Not surprisingly, what factors influenced Americans the most varied by religious affiliation. Evangelicals were the most likely to say that their faith exerted “a lot” of influence over the way they planned to vote, compared to other religious groups and religious skeptics. The vast majority of Evangelicals (75 percent) said their faith served as an important influence on their decision. The next most influential voices for Evangelicals were their pastors (22 percent) and families (21 percent).

While Evangelicals were the most influenced by pastors and families, they were the least influenced by the news media. Evangelicals were also the least influenced by political commentators on television, online, and in print publications, but they were one percent more likely to consider radio commentators influential than the average American.

Interestingly, only four percent of non-Evangelical born-again Christians considered pastors to have “a lot” of influence on how they voted, which was one percent lower than the national average. The only group with a lower average was religious skeptics.

The Barna Group also found that Americans also cited different influences as more important based on where they fell on the political spectrum:

For instance, religious beliefs are said to have “a lot of influence” on their political choices by more than one-third of conservatives (38%) but by less than one out of ten moderates (9%) and by barely one out of every twenty liberals (6%). The influence of pastors is more significant among conservatives (14%) than either moderates (3%) or liberals (4%).