Pew Researches Faith on the Hill; The Religous Composition of the 112th Congress

President Barack Obama embracing Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords before delivering his speech at the 2012 State of the Union. Pete Souza, Wikipedia Commons

Many analysts described the November 2010 midterm elections as a sea change, with Republicans taking control of the US House of Representatives and narrowing the Democratic majority in the Senate. But this political overhaul appears to have had little effect on the religious composition of Congress, which is similar to the religious makeup of the previous Congress and of the nation, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life.

The 112th Congress, like the US public, is majority Protestant and about a quarter Catholic. Baptists and Methodists are the largest Protestant denominations in the new Congress, just as they are in the country as a whole.

A few of the country's smaller religious groups, including Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Jews, have greater numerical representation in Congress than in the general population. Some others, including Buddhists and Muslims, are represented in Congress in roughly equal proportion to their numbers in the adult US population. And some small religious groups, such as Hindus and Jehovah's Witnesses, are not represented at all in Congress.

Perhaps the greatest disparity between the religious makeup of Congress and the people it represents, however, is in the percentage of the unaffiliated — those who describe their religion as atheist, agnostic or "nothing in particular." According to information gathered by CQ Roll Call and the Pew Forum, no members of Congress say they are unaffiliated. By contrast, about one-sixth of US adults (16%) are not affiliated with any particular faith. Only six members of the 112th Congress (about 1%) do not specify a religious affiliation, which is similar to the percentage of the public that says they don't know or refuses to specify their faith.¹

These findings are based on a comparison of the religious affiliations of members of the new Congress with data on the U.S. public from the US Religious Landscape Survey, conducted by the Pew Forum in 2007 among more than 35,000 US adults. CQ Roll Call gathered information on the religious affiliations of members of Congress through questionnaires and follow-up phone calls to members' offices. The Pew Forum supplemented that information with an extensive review of media reports on candidates in 2010 House and Senate races. It should be noted, however, that there is an important difference between a confidential telephone survey of a sample of US adults and media inquiries about the religious identification of an elected official or candidate. Media inquiries may find fewer "unaffiliated" people because those inquiries are more public.

The New, 112th Congress

Of the 535 members of the new Congress, 304 — or 57% — are Protestants, which is slightly higher than the share of Protestants in the US adult population (51%). Compared with the previous Congress, the 112th Congress has added 12 Protestants, an increase of roughly two percentage points.

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Pew Researches Faith on the Hill; The Religous Composition of the 112th Congress

The New, 112th Congress

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