Bernie Sanders’s electoral strengths and weaknesses could be described in a few ways.
Bernie does much better among younger voters than older voters. Black voters, especially those over the age of 40, are not terribly keen on him. He is getting destroyed in the South, but he does well in New England. Compared to other Democrats, Sanders does not poll well among Jewish voters. Broadly unaffiliated, unconnected voters are flocking to him.
Through all of these demographic and geographic variations runs a single thread, often missed by analysts and commentators: religiosity and church attendance.
Sanders, in short, could be considered the candidate of the secular.
His best state to date was New Hampshire, by some measures, the least religious state in the country, where most Democrats never attend religious gatherings. Bernie’s worst loss, which knocked him off his pedestal as the clear front-runner, was South Carolina, the most Christian state in the country. Down there, half of all Democrats go to church every Sunday — and then again most Wednesday evenings, to boot.
The socialist from Vermont, who promises a revolution right here on Earth, is the candidate of atheists, agnostics, and the unaffiliated.
At Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Sumter, South Carolina, the day before that state’s primary, Joe Biden held a morning rally. Pastor James Blassingame introduced Biden, but only after offering a prayer in Jesus’s name, asking for forgiveness and encouraging his flock to vote for Biden.
It was a bit different a few hours later at the Sanders rally at Finlay Park in Columbia.
Instead of Pastor James, Sanders was introduced by Killer Mike, the rapper-turned-activist who founded his own religion, the “Church of Sleep.” The reality show episode about Killer Mike’s religion was titled “New Jesus.”
As Vice magazine puts it, “Killer Mike is frustrated that black Christian communities are taught to worship a white Jesus,” and Mike’s church includes “a sermon in his favorite strip club, where women pole-dance while a gospel choir sings and his parishioners pass around joints.”
When the cameras aren’t rolling, Killer Mike worships “the Gods within me, and the Gods I see existing outside of me every day,” as he told Vice.
Most of Bernie’s supporters aren’t pagans like Killer Mike, but they also are generally not religious. Kyle and Lara Allan, two young Sanders supporters in Columbia, South Carolina, when asked if they were religious, said, “No, no.” Kyle added, “I have a few Catholic friends. But the majority are secular.”
Rob Morrell, a multiracial gay man at one Bernie rally in South Carolina, called himself “relig-ish” but added, “Religion is something for the family, but we need to leave it” out of the public. He says the older generation is religious, “but if you think about it, things have changed.”
Sanders simply didn’t make great inroads into the religious vote. He lost to Biden by 41 points among South Carolinians who go to church at least once weekly — and that was 46% of voters. He beat Biden among the 17% of South Carolina Democrats who say they never attend religious services.
But in New Hampshire, a majority of Democrats never go to church, synagogue, or mosque, according to exit polls. Sanders won that group with 31%, while Biden got only 5%.
The Super Tuesday results bore this out. (Unfortunately, the exit polls in those states didn’t ask about religion.) Sanders’s best states on Super Tuesday, where he won or finished a close second, included Vermont, Maine, California, Colorado, and Minnesota, which are in the bottom third for religiosity, according to Pew. His worst states — Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and North Carolina — are all in the 10 most religious states.
It’s not just a matter of Christians rejecting a Jewish candidate. Jewish voters ranked Sanders as their least favorite Democratic candidate in a February poll by the Jewish Electorate Institute. He had a 52% favorability rating in that survey, compared to 60% for Biden.
When Morning Consult polled primary voters in 2019, Sanders’s strongest group was atheists (30% of whom were backing Bernie), followed by agnostics, and then those who declared their religion “nothing in particular.” His 30% of the atheist vote probably grew after Kamala Harris dropped out and Elizabeth Warren faded away.
Why does Biden do so much better among religious voters? Part of it is Sanders’s expressly secular message. Another part is Biden’s old-school style of Democratic politicking, which makes him very comfortable in religious settings.
Biden is a Catholic, but hardly an orthodox one: He has been denied communion by priests citing his public and unrelenting support for abortion and abortion subsidies. Nevertheless, he still wears his religion on his sleeve — and his forehead. He arrived at his CNN town hall on Ash Wednesday with ashes still on his forehead and told the crowd that he had instructed CNN’s makeup crew not to wipe it off.
When speaking to protestant churches and other religious organizations, even those who disagree with him like his willingness to talk about his upbringing in the church.
“I’d definitely like to hear [the Democratic candidates] saying some word about God somewhere in there,” Perry Moten, who attends Mt. Zion with his wife every Sunday, said before one Biden rally. “You know, some about their religious upbringing.”
Sanders doesn’t talk about God, or faith, or providence. While Jewish, Sanders says he is “not actively involved with organized religion.” When Sanders spoke about how Judaism influenced his thought, his comments had nothing to do with Jewish teachings, but instead, with the Jewish experience during the Holocaust.
While there is an interesting subset of Marxist Catholic Sanders backers (vocal on Twitter and among Jesuit clergy), socialism in its most prominent versions has been an atheistic or at least secular philosophy. It promises on Earth the sort of radical equality and liberation from need that the Abrahamic religions promise in heaven.
While the country, including the Democratic Party, grows increasingly secular, religion still may have too strong a hold on the electorate for Sanders to win.
Timothy P. Carney is the commentary editor at the Washington Examiner and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse.
