Moreso

 According to Axios, "Our lawmakers are more religious than we are."

The discrepancy — a trend also present in state legislatures — provides a window into why policies and debates on abortion, LGBTQ rights and other issues often don't reflect what Americans want.

It also shows how the nation's two-party system, with its partisan primaries, favors candidates who openly profess a faith — even as the number of people unaffiliated with a religion is growing.

This strikes me as a misreading of how politics works. There is always a part of elections that is pure popularity contest. Pew notes that "Atheists have negative feelings about Christian groups in the U.S., and the feeling tends to be mutual." And given that the American population contains far more Christians than atheists, one can see the difficulty this would create in an election cycle. Salman Rushdie noted that a person who openly professes non-religion couldn't be elected dogcatcher, and even though this was a while back, I suspect he's still correct in that assessment.

I poked around on the Pew website for a bit, but didn't find a breakdown on how religious affiliation maps to political party. It's understood that there are more evangelical Christians among the Republican party, and that the religiously unaffiliated tend to gravitate towards the Democrats, but a bit more formal data on the subject would be helpful. Mainly because I suspect that the religiosity of lawmakers reflects a split between the priorities (or "agendas" if you will) of primary voters and the public at large, rather than one between the lawmakers themselves and the public. Put another way, the reason why the Texas legislature has way more evangelicals than the population at large is less a matter of the primaries being partisan than the fact that evangelical voters are more likely to show up for the primaries in general.

I also suspect that when it comes to policies concerning religiously charged topics like, well, anything having to do with sex and sexuality, highly religious voters, being motivated to have civil and criminal law reflect what they understand to be in line with divine will, are much closer to being single-issue voters than the public at large. Given this, unless someone were to create a party that catered specifically to the non-religious, simply having more than two parties wouldn't change the nature of primaries. After all, even in states that don't have partisan primaries, like here in Washington, religious voters are more motivated to turn out than other demographics.

Elected officials are going to reflect the preferences of the most active voters in any participatory system. In that sense, they will always differ from the population at large.