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A new study indicates that Americans with lower scores on a vocabulary test commonly used to measure cognitive ability are more likely to endorse Christian nationalist beliefs, even when accounting for their overall level of education. The findings suggest that the appeal of this political and religious ideology relates to underlying cognitive resources rather than just differences in schooling. The research was published in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.
The research, conducted by Samuel L. Perry, the Sam K. Viersen Presidential Professor of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma and currently a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, explores the individual characteristics associated with Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism is a set of beliefs asserting that the United States has conservative Christian foundations. The ideology promotes the idea that the government should institutionalize Christian dominance in American society, often merging religious identity with civic belonging.
“One of the most consistent predictors that Americans adhere to Christian nationalism is that they have lower education,” Perry told PsyPost. “But there have also been a number of studies that find that persons who subscribe to Christian nationalist views (even after accounting for level of education) exhibit significant knowledge gaps across a variety of different domains.”
For example, people who strongly endorse the ideology tend to score poorly on tests about “American history or scientific knowledge,” Perry noted. “They are also more likely to hold factually incorrect beliefs about vaccines,” he said, referencing a 2021 study he co-authored, which was covered by PsyPost. “And related to that last point, they are also more likely to affirm ridiculous conspiracy theories related to COVID-19, January 6th, or QAnon.”
“The dominant explanations for these substantial knowledge deficits and the apparent credulity of Christian nationalist adults have been motivated reasoning and siloed information sources,” Perry explained. “Both of those theories are no doubt true. But we have yet to consider whether there may be evidence of a gap in cognitive resources, one that can’t be explained solely by educational background or other relevant factors.”
Perry sought to see if general cognitive ability also plays a role in explaining these patterns. Cognitive ability refers to a person’s capacity to learn, apply new information, and engage in the complex reasoning required for critical thinking. A study covered by PsyPost in 2017 provides evidence that an intuitive thinking style tends to predict higher religious belief, while lower cognitive ability predicts higher social conservatism.
“A large number of studies have already documented an association between lower cognitive ability and greater religious fundamentalism, political authoritarianism, or otherwise right-wing views,” Perry said. Based on this prior research, he anticipated that cognitive ability might similarly predict support for Christian nationalism, viewing the study as a “necessary next step to empirically connect all the dots.”
To test this, Perry analyzed data from the General Social Survey, a long-running and nationally representative survey of American adults. The researcher measured cognitive ability using a vocabulary exercise where respondents identify the closest synonym for ten different words. This test is a common proxy for crystallized intelligence, which reflects the knowledge and reasoning skills a person has accumulated over time.
The study examined two specific measures of Christian nationalist ideology. The first asked respondents how important it is to be a Christian to be “truly American,” using data from survey waves in 1996, 2014, and 2024 with a sample of 1,659 adults. The second measure asked if respondents disapproved of the Supreme Court’s decision to ban mandatory Christian prayers and Bible reading in public schools. This second question included data from 17 survey waves between 1989 and 2024, creating a sample of 18,700 adults.
The researcher accounted for a wide range of variables to ensure the vocabulary scores were not just standing in for other demographic factors. These included educational attainment, such as whether a person completed high school or earned a college degree. The models also adjusted for religious affiliation, fundamentalist beliefs (such as viewing the Bible as the literal word of God), worship attendance, and political ideology. Additional demographic controls included age, race, sex, household income, and geographic region. The results remained consistent even when further controlling for parents’ education and family income at age 16.
For both outcomes, higher vocabulary scores were consistently and negatively associated with Christian nationalist views. As vocabulary scores increased, people were less likely to say being Christian was highly important for being truly American. They were also less likely to disapprove of the Supreme Court ban on school prayer. These negative associations persisted even when comparing people with the same level of education and similar religious habits.
The negative association between cognitive ability and Christian nationalism held steady across different demographic subgroups and was consistent across all survey years for the “truly American” question. For the school-prayer question, the link was always negative but reached statistical significance in only 11 of 17 survey years (and 7 of the 8 years since 2008).
The only exception was among the least educated Americans, specifically those who did not finish high school. For this specific group, vocabulary scores did not change their likelihood of supporting Christian nationalism. Notably, the effect was just as strong for high school graduates as for those with college degrees, indicating the pattern is not simply a result of college education. Perry suggests there may be a basic level of schooling, reached sometime during middle or high school, below which cognitive ability does not incline people to reject Christian nationalist views.
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2022, also authored by Perry, which found that higher support for Christian nationalism was linked to lower factual knowledge about the role of religion in American political history. Both studies link the ideology to lower test performance, though factual knowledge and general cognitive ability are different things.
“To the extent that belief systems like Christian nationalism appeal to those Americans who for whatever reason tend to be less adept at thinking carefully and effectively, it suggests Christian nationalism (like religious fundamentalism or right-wing authoritarianism) is not the result of more sophisticated and complex ruminations on politics, religious ethics, and pluralism,” Perry said. Instead, he argued, it “appeals to more basic impulses for control and binary distinctions.”
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind regarding these findings. “Readers shouldn’t read further into this finding than what the evidence warrants,” Perry cautioned. “I cannot make any claims about where cognitive ability comes from here.”
The data is cross-sectional, meaning all the information was collected at a single point in time for each respondent. “I actually show in one of my appendix tables that Christian nationalist views also predict wordsum scores,” Perry said. “So the correlation could theoretically go either way.”
“While I think the causal arrow almost certainly goes in the direction of cognitive ability shaping adherence to Christian nationalism, the cross-sectional nature of the data prevents me from making that definitive claim.”
It is possible that adopting a fundamentalist religious and political worldview alters the way people engage with educational material and language. In addition, despite robust statistical controls, “I cannot demonstrate definitively that lower scores on the wordsum vocabulary exercise are not the result of some childhood exposure or socialization that might also help explain the Christian nationalism connection,” he noted.
Another detail to note is the measurement of cognitive ability. The vocabulary test is a brief exercise, not a comprehensive intelligence test. However, Perry found that two other measures available in the General Social Survey, an abstract reasoning test and a numeracy item, also correlated with Christian nationalism in the same direction. Future studies could use more robust, multi-part intelligence tests that assess mathematical ability and problem-solving. Tracking individuals over time would also help clarify whether cognitive ability shapes political ideologies, or if the ideologies influence intellectual development.
In this study, the link between cognitive ability and Christian nationalism did not depend on people’s political ideology or party. But Perry has several other studies under peer review suggesting that ideology does shape how cognitive ability relates to other social attitudes. “There is a sense in which cognitive ability inclines us toward particular social or political views,” he said. “But there is also evidence that cognitive ability simply helps us discern and defend the ideological commitments of our in-groups.”
“This would be consistent with the theory that our higher reasoning abilities help us solve social problems of status rather than guide us toward certain ‘enlightened’ moral views,” Perry concluded. “And sure enough, I find in several of these studies that more cognitively sophisticated liberals hold liberal views more strongly, while cognitively sophisticated conservatives hold conservative views more strongly.”
The study, “Cognitive Ability and Christian Nationalism,” was authored by Samuel L. Perry, author or co-author of Taking America Back for God, The Flag and the Cross, and Religion for Realists.