With Election Day just around the corner, political divisions feel especially sharp. Partisan hostility in the United States has risen dramatically in recent years — with 2022 seeing double-digit increases in the percentages of both parties who say that members of the other party are dishonest, immoral, unintelligent and closed-minded, compared with 2016.
One solution to these divisions may lie in a surprising source: places of worship.
My research team and I conducted surveys with thousands of people and interviewed hundreds of people over the last 12 years as we studied faith-based community engagement in Little Rock, Arkansas.
It turns out congregations may be one of the few places left where people incidentally encounter those who hold different political views — essentially forcing them into contact with people from the other party and giving them the opportunity to really see them as people, instead of just political opponents.
If congregants know they are worshiping with people they politically disagree with, they may feel some cognitive dissonance: “How can this person share my faith and still choose to vote for them?” It takes some work to reconcile that dissonance. But they don’t have to do the work to overcome those barriers if their congregation is philosophically or politically homogeneous —or if they never speak with these people in the first place.
That’s just what seems to be happening. Thanks to an increase in geographical partisan sorting, many people may rarely even encounter someone from the opposite political party. Basically, we really don’t like people from the other party and we rarely interact with them in our daily lives, giving us few real-life opportunities to contradict and replace our views of these people as “dishonest, immoral, unintelligent and close-minded.”
Religion may be uniquely suited to help solve this pervasive division. That may seem counterintuitive since faith is often perceived to be associated with the Republican Party.
But most of what religion does is not overtly political. Instead, places of worship most often focus on the spiritual development of their members, sharing their beliefs with others and caring for those in need.
“I believe strong churches are the backbone of a community,” one religious leader told us. “Goodness knows we have a world now where it is too much talk about hate and division and we need a lot of people to stand up and say, ‘No, that ain’t the way. Love is the way.’”
Although there are certainly examples of encounters like this turning to political division and even tearing congregations apart, congregations with more ideological diversity — that is, congregations with both liberals and conservatives at worship services — tend to feel more warmly toward each other.
It is hard to view someone from the other party as “immoral and unintelligent” when you work with them to organize the church’s fish fry or you coordinate the annual food drive together.
Spurred by their religious associations, many get involved in providing service to their communities, strengthening bonds with each other and with their local community. As one longtime volunteer with her congregation’s homeless ministry described it to us, “You become like a family. He becomes like my dad, working alongside me. She becomes like my sister, passing out clothes. He becomes like my brother, bringing supplies in. So, that develops a bond that can’t be broken.”
In this way and others, the statistics from our research confirm that community-engaged congregations strengthen society and even democracy. When more members of a congregation are engaged in the community, they have higher levels of political efficacy — that is, they are more likely to believe that their voice matters and they can make a difference.
These are also the kind of people who attend community meetings, participate in neighborhood cleanups and turn out to vote.
Overall, by providing congregants with a place to meet, worship, work and engage with people who believe differently from them, churches, mosques, temples and synagogues can help their members create positive bonds, dispel misinformation and strengthen congregational ties.
By engaging in the community, people and places of faith not only provide needed service, but also strengthen connections within their organizations and people’s sense that they can contribute to something greater. The end result is good for both places of worship and democracy.
Although some may be interested in making religion partisan, faith-based community engagement is a collective good that benefits democracy as a whole.
Rebecca A. Glazier is a political science professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She is the director of the Little Rock Congregations Study, a long-term, community-based research project on religion and community engagement. She is the author of “Faith and Community: How Engagement Strengthens Members, Places of Worship, and Society” (Temple University Press, 2024).