Catholics, though they make up about 20 per cent of the US population, are part of 30 per cent of the new Congress, according to a new report from Pew Research.
Catholics are again the largest single religious denomination represented in Congress – as in the rest of the United States. Protestants comprise a majority in both the House and Senate (55 per cent of Congress and 43 per cent of the population), but they are divided into more than a dozen different denominations.
The number of Catholics in both houses decreased at the 117th Congress, from 163 to 158 representatives. But by rounding, the percentage for both the 116th and 117th Congresses is 30 per cent. Yet they represent only 27 per cent of first-year lawmakers. Methodists and Baptists suffered major losses: seven positions for Methodists and six for Baptists. Lutherans also lost four spots.
In the lower house, 77 of the House Catholics are Democrats and 57 are Republicans, representing 31 per cent of the body's members. In the 100-member Senate, 14 Catholics are Democrats and 10 are Republicans. Democrats have had a majority of Catholics in every house since the data was first collected in 1961, the year John F. Kennedy, the nation's first Catholic president, took power.
Together, Catholics and Protestants have 471 members, or 88.2 per cent, of Congress.
However, the Democratic party has a strong majority of non-Christians. In the chamber, the Democrats have 23 Jews, three Muslims and Unitarian Universalists, two Hindus, one Buddhist and one identifying himself as “other. “ In the Senate, eight Jews, a Buddhist senator, and an “unaffiliated “ senator are Democrats. Unaffiliated Americans, sometimes known as unaffiliated and often called “nones, “ now make up 26 per cent of the country, according to Pew.
By contrast, the Republican party counts two of the members of the House as Jews and a third who refused to answer, and no non-Christians in the Senate. With the removal of Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico from the upper house, the remaining nine Mormons in Congress are in the Republican party.
Pew suggested a reason behind the over-representation of Christians in Congress. “Members of Congress are also older, on average, than American adults overall, “ Pew said. In the previous Congress, the average representative was 57.6 years old and the average senator 62.9 years old. The average American is 37.9 years old.
Surveys have found that adults in that age range are more likely to be Christian than the general public: 74 per cent of Americans ages 50 to 64 are Christian, compared to 65 per cent of all Americans in 18 years or older, the report said. “Still, Congress is more Christian even than American adults ages 50 to 64, by a margin of 14 percentage points.”
One trend Pew noted is the continued increase in the number of Protestants who do not claim a specific denominational affiliation, but simply identify as “Protestant” or “Christian”. That number jumped from 80 in the 116th Congress, which was installed in 2019, to 96 in the new Congress, including 15 first-year Republican lawmakers.
The Pew report said it did not assess the religiosity of any member of Congress, but instead took their responses about religious affiliation at face value. Pew used data from the CQ Roll Call questionnaires of individual members of Congress to count the numbers.
The report was released the day before Georgia's two special elections for two Senate seats on January 5. Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler, a Catholic, lost her seat to Rev’d Raphael Warnock, a Baptist and Democrat; Republican Senator David Perdue, a Methodist, lost to Democratic opponent Jon Ossoff, who is Jewish.
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