A new study suggests that Americans with weaker vocabulary scores, a common proxy for cognitive ability, are more likely to endorse Christian nationalist beliefs even after accounting for education. The findings, published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, point to cognitive resources as a factor in the appeal of this ideology beyond schooling alone.
Christian nationalism is defined in the research as a set of beliefs that the United States has conservative Christian foundations and that the government should institutionalise Christian dominance in society, often tying religious identity to civic belonging.
“One of the most consistent predictors that Americans adhere to Christian nationalism is that they have lower education,” the study’s author, Samuel L. 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.”
He added that such gaps extend to beliefs about vaccines, echoing a 2021 study he co-authored that PsyPost covered, and he noted a tendency toward conspiracy theories linked to COVID-19, the January 6th events, 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.”
The study builds on a broader research trajectory linking lower cognitive ability with religious fundamentalism and right-wing views, Perry said, calling the present work a “necessary next step to empirically connect all the dots.”
To test whether general cognitive ability plays a role, Perry drew on data from the General Social Survey, using a vocabulary exercise in which respondents identify the closest synonym for ten words as a measure of crystallised intelligence—the knowledge and reasoning built up over time.
The research examined two measures of Christian nationalist ideology. The first asked whether being a Christian is important to being “truly American,” using data from 1996, 2014 and 2024 with a sample of 1,659 adults. The second measure asked whether respondents disapproved of the Supreme Court’s ban on mandatory Christian prayers and Bible reading in public schools, drawing on 17 survey waves from 1989 to 2024 and a combined sample of 18,700 adults.
Among the controls, the models adjusted for educational attainment, religious affiliation, fundamentalist beliefs, worship attendance and political ideology, as well as age, race, sex, income and region. The analysis also accounted for parents’ education and family income at age 16, and the main findings persisted.
For both outcomes, higher vocabulary scores were consistently and negatively associated with Christian nationalist views. In other words, as vocabulary scores rose, respondents were less likely to say that being Christian was highly important to being truly American, and less likely to disapprove of the school-prayers ban. The negative associations held across demographic subgroups and across survey years for the “truly American” question. For the school-prayer measure, the link remained negative but reached statistical significance in 11 of 17 waves, and in seven of the eight waves since 2008.
The only notable exception occurred among Americans who did not finish high school. In this group, vocabulary scores did not alter the likelihood of supporting Christian nationalism. Perry notes that the effect was as strong for high school graduates as for those with college degrees, suggesting a basic schooling threshold rather than a simple function of higher education alone.
The findings align with Perry’s 2022 PsyPost-published work, which linked higher support for Christian nationalism to lower factual knowledge about the role of religion in American political history. Both lines of research connect the ideology to poorer test performance, though they measure different kinds of knowledge.
“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, it ‘appeals to more basic impulses for control and binary distinctions.’”
He cautioned readers not to over-interpret the finding. “Readers shouldn’t read further into this finding than what the evidence warrants,” he said. “I cannot make any claims about where cognitive ability comes from here.”
Further, Perry highlighted that the data are cross-sectional, 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,” he noted. “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.”
He also pointed to the possibility that adopting a fundamentalist worldview could influence how people engage with educational material and language, and noted that despite robust controls he cannot rule out childhood exposure or socialisation as a factor in the link observed between cognitive ability and Christian nationalism.
Other methodological notes include that the vocabulary test is a brief measure rather than a comprehensive intelligence test. Perry observed that two additional measures from the General Social Survey—an abstract reasoning test and a numeracy item—also correlated with Christian nationalism in the same direction. He called for future work that uses more robust, multi-part intelligence assessments and longitudinal tracking to better determine the direction of causality.
In this study, the cognitive ability link did not depend on respondents’ political ideology or party. Perry has other ongoing peer‑reviewed work suggesting ideology can shape how cognitive ability relates to other social attitudes. He argued that cognitive ability may incline people toward particular social or political views, but there is also evidence that it helps individuals discern and defend their in-group’s ideological commitments.
“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,” he 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, titled Cognitive Ability and Christian Nationalism, is authored by Samuel L. Perry, who has also written Taking America Back for God, The Flag and the Cross, and Religion for Realists.
