Culture War Update

 

Not for much longer: Photo by Jae C. Hong/AP, July 2016, via WBUR radio Boston.

Just as we were getting into the subject, some new research showed up in a report on NPR: 

Two dramatic trends that for years have defined the shifting landscape of religion in America — a shrinking white Christian majority, alongside the rise of religiously unaffiliated Americans — have stabilized, according to a new, massive survey of American religious practice.

What was once a supermajority of white Christians — more than 80% of Americans identified as such in 1976, and two-thirds in 1996 — has now plateaued at about 44%, according to the new survey, which was conducted by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute. That number first dipped below 50% in 2012.

The feared white Evangelical Protestants, around 19% in the Pew survey of 2015, have stabilized at just 14% of the population, which leaves them for the first time in donkeys' years behind the white members of respectable mainline churches at 16%, while white Catholics constitute 12%.

Meanwhile the number of "nones", people of all racial groups who claim no religious affiliation at all, having more than tripled since their expansion began in 1990s, has plateaued at 23% (it was around 26% in 2016). 

And even though those two big changes may have completed their cycle, I don't think that's the end of the political changes signified, though, because the mainline churches and Catholics (and Jews, of course, but that's a minuscule number) are changing from the inside, and that hasn't stopped; all the Methodist and Presbyterian and UCC churches are going Black Lives Matter, white Catholics like the Pope a million times better than the nasty old majority American bishops, and so on, in a process that isn't driven necessarily by the desire to retain young members—it's more about younger people, including lots of women and persons of color, joining the pastorate—but does have some of that effect.

I was especially struck, in that context, by a remark dropped by Robert P. Jones, the founder and CEO of PRRI, in the NPR interview:

"The Democratic Party today in terms of religion looks like about 30-year-old America, right, so it seems to have adjusted to the demographic changes quite well." While Republicans, he says, look like 70-year-old America.

That's a big difference!

And as the written version of the story amplifies it, it's not merely a matter of the age variable, but every kind of diversity: 

On the Republican side, the preferences of white evangelicals loom large, even as the overall number of white evangelicals in America continues to decline. Though they make up just 14% of Americans overall, they remain the largest single religious group among Republican voters with the power to sway party priorities — which this year have included anti-abortion bills and policies restricting healthcare and sports access for transgender people.

"If you look at [the white evangelical] presence in the national religious landscape, it's actually quite diminished from what it was even 10 years ago," says Jones. "I think it's still surprising to many Americans because of how visible this population has been, particularly during the Trump administration."

By contrast, Democrats are a more religiously diverse group, with significant numbers of religiously unaffiliated people and non-white Christians — including Black Protestants, Latino Protestants, and Latino Catholics — along with more Jews, Muslims, and other minority religions. White Catholics, like President Joe Biden, comprise just 13% of Democrats.

(That last number is so significant: that's one point larger than the number of white Catholics in the general population: the white Catholic identification with the Democratic party looks like it's coming back, not the old lunchpail Reagan Democrats, but young ones.)

We're at an inflection point, it seems to me, not unlike that of the 1920s, where a nativist movement of white Protestants, signified at the extremes by the Second Klan and shaken by "replacement theory", was able to seize control of the Democratic party long enough to wreck the immigration system with the 1924 Act, if no farther. But we're moving at the moment in a different direction, toward acceptance of greater diversity and more power to the young.

I've never felt more optimistic in a long time than I do contemplating these data. It's a situation that's not going to take care of itself without a lot of work, in the first place convincing more young and minority people that voting is worth the trouble. The process is going to take too long, while attaining our climate change goals isn't going to get any easier, and that's particularly scary.

But over all, the White Old Party is really dying, in spite of its noisy and occasionally violent irruptions, and we really are changing, as a country. If it's not already too late.

Update: Michelle Goldberg/NYT on the same survey:

White evangelicals once saw themselves “as the owners of mainstream American culture and morality and values,” said Jones. Now they are just another subculture.

From this fact derives much of our country’s cultural conflict. It helps explain not just the rise of Donald Trump, but also the growth of QAnon and even the escalating conflagration over critical race theory. “It’s hard to overstate the strength of this feeling, among white evangelicals in particular, of America being a white Christian country,” said Jones. “This sense of ownership of America just runs so deep in white evangelical circles.” The feeling that it’s slipping away has created an atmosphere of rage, resentment and paranoia.