Religion and Policy Preferences in Context: Born-Again Christian Identity, Support for Inclusive COVID-19 Aid, and the Broader Political Environment

How COVID-19 economic aid should be distributed continues to be an important societal question, with relevance to current and future public health policy. We argue that religious identities condition the influence of broader political context on COVID-19 policy preferences, serving as social conduits through which political attitudes are transmitted. We analyze original U.S. survey data (N = 989), to examine support for inclusive (i.e., including undocumented immigrants) COVID-19 economic aid. We find that individuals’ religious identities interact with county-level political context to influence COVID-19 policy preferences. Born-Again Christian individuals are more strongly affected by conservative political climates compared to their religious and nonreligious peers, after controlling for individual political characteristics and a host of sociodemographic factors. Findings support the conceptualization of conservative religious identities as social conduits for political messaging and show the importance of religion to how policy opinions are shaped by the broader environment.