• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, September 4, 2024

I'm not the most religious man, but I promise you this, I will be praying as I cast my vote in November. Apparently, so will most of the rest of you, according to some new research I just received from the Religion News Service (RNS).

"Among the most significant findings," RNS says in its analysis of a survey of 1,087 U.S. adults conducted last month is that 52% of all respondents and 57% of Millennial respondents plan to pray when they vote.

Given what's at stake -- as well as the role religion seems to be playing -- in this year's election, I was actually a little surprised that the percentages weren't higher than that. So I asked for more data on the composition of the respondents to see how representative they were of actual U.S. voters.

Turns out, it's pretty representative, because nearly a third of the respondents are not aligned to any religion (see below).

That coincides with a national survey conducted by Gallup last year, which found only 47% of Americans identify as being religious, although 33% identify as being "spiritual but not religious," and the rest not so much.

I'm not going to venture what the respondent bias is in surveys about religion, spirituality or otherwise, but I was still struck by the fact that only half of Americans plan to pray on Election Day.

So I asked RNS to provide some cross-tabs based on how respondents identify religiously.

Remarkably, even 55% of those who identify as "something else," and 29% of those who said "nothing in particular" plan to pray before they vote.

I mean, even 2% of atheists and 8% of agnostics plan to do so.

I'd love to see data on the role prayer played in previous elections, including how those prayers resulted in electoral outcomes, but at least you know what I'll be doing while I'm inside the voting booth.