How Faith Identity Shapes Support for Deportation in the U.S.

Debates over immigration and deportation cut to the core of U.S. democracy, raising questions of national identity, belonging, and exclusion. Religion plays a pivotal role in these debates, sometimes inspiring inclusion and solidarity, and at other times fueling restrictionist sentiment. Drawing on a nationally representative 2018 YouGov survey of 2,000 U.S. adults, this article examines how religious identity and religious salience shape attitudes toward deportation. Our findings reveal that denominational affiliation alone (Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, etc.) does not significantly predict support for deportation once other factors are controlled. Instead, the key lies in the interaction between faith identity and religious salience: • Born-again Christians become markedly more supportive of deportation as religion grows more important in their lives. • Religiously unaffiliated respondents (“nothing in particular”)—a surprising 19% of the population—show the same pattern. When religion is personally meaningful for them, their attitudes also turn more exclusionary. By contrast, Catholics and non-born-again Protestants do not display this effect. Importantly, our multivariate statistical model (R² = 68.5%) shows that the strongest predictors of pro-deportation attitudes overall are white ethnonationalism, nativism, partisan identity, education, and age, but the salience–identity interaction among born-agains and the unaffiliated remains significant. This study complicates simple binaries of “religious vs. secular.” It suggests that religious energy, when untethered from institutional guardrails, can fuse with nationalist sentiment to justify exclusionary immigration policies. These findings are especially relevant to ongoing debates about religion, politics, and American democracy.