https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2016/09/16/what-the-end-of-white-christian-america-has-to-do-with-trump-part-1/?utm_term=.1a8bd007b3e6https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2016/09/18/what-the-end-of-white-christian-america-has-to-do-with-trump-part-2/?utm_term=.1ff2786ea2b9By Jennifer Rubin
September 16/18
Robert P. Jones, the founder and CEO of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, is author of the exceptionally timely book “The End of White Christian America,” which chronicles the transition of white, Protestant Americans from majority to minority status. In 2009, the country was 54 percent white, Christian; now it is 45 percent. Jones looks at the experience of two main sub-groups, mainline Protestants and evangelical Protestants. (The latter one might recognize as the “hillbillies” from “Hillbilly Elegy.”)
Right Turn, regular readers know, has been investigating this subject and trying to understand its correlation to the current election. I sent a series of questions to Jones, who was good enough to send extensive answers that go to the heart of some of the issues raised in the 2016 election. We would caution here that the end of White Christian America’s grip on American society is not a political event but a much broader social, economic and cultural trend; we cannot understand it just as a political phenomenon (“The Trump voter”). Rather, it is a broader societal phenomenon showing up — dramatically so — in the 2016 election.
The southern evangelicals seem to have reacted more emotionally to the decline of WCA than the mainline WCA’s. Is this because of socio-economic class? Because mainline churches have adapted better?I think the principal reason white evangelical Protestants are reacting more viscerally to the end of White Christian America is because they represented the last phase of its health and vitality. While the decline among their more northern mainline Protestant cousins began in the 1970s and continued through the turn of the twenty-first century, the decline among white evangelical Protestants did not occur until the last decade. As a result, there was a significant period of about four decades where white evangelicals adopted a fairly self-congratulatory posture, concluding that their more conservative theology was what had protected them from decline.
But over the last decade, the evidence showing that white evangelicals are declining and graying has become irrefutable. Just between 2007 and 2015, white evangelical Protestants have slipped from being 21 percent of the population to 17 percent of the population. Like their white mainline Protestant cousins, they are now significantly older than the general population. And if you look at their distribution across age groups, the future is pretty clear. White evangelical Protestants account for nearly three in ten seniors but only one in ten adults under the age of 30. The Southern Baptist Convention, which is not only the largest evangelical denomination but the largest Protestant denomination of any kind, has now posted nine straight years of negative growth rates.
Most importantly, it was this second wave of decline among white evangelical Protestants that pushed the country from being a majority white Christian nation (54 percent white Christian in 2008) to a minority white Christian nation (45 percent white Christian in 2015). While white mainline Protestants have had decades to adjust to their diminished power, white evangelical Protestants are feeling the loss in a more acute way, which often get expressed as denial, anger, or both.
You don’t make a value judgment but isn’t this just white racism – the belief that whites should be in charge? It seems like we are back to the South’s infatuation with the “Lost Cause.”I’m white and grew up in Mississippi in the 1970s and 1980s, and “my people,” as we say in the South, have roots in Georgia’s Bibb County going back into the 1700s. So I can say with some certainty from both the data and personal experience that white southerners, and white southern Christians in particular, have hardly begun to deal with the legacy of racism and prejudice that has shaped their identity and institutions and that continues to shape their attitudes today. That reality, it seems to me, is simply a given. But the issue of racism is a partial manifestation of a larger dynamic.
White southern Christians, at least since the Civil War, have been vulnerable to the siren song of nostalgia. One of the most illuminating survey questions PRRI has asked recently is about perceptions of the 1950s. When asked whether American culture and way of life has changed for the better or changed for the worse since the 1950s, the general public is fairly divided. But more than seven in ten white evangelical Protestants say things have changed for the worse since the 1950s.
So what do the 1950s represent for many conservative whites? It’s an idealized vision of a pre-civil rights, pre-women’s rights, pre-gay rights world where races didn’t mix and social roles were fairly rigidly defined. It’s Andy Griffith and Mayberry, and not the later Technicolor episodes. It’s this sentiment that is captured so well in the lyrics sung by Archie and Edith Bunker from the opening song of the 1970s sit-com, “All in the Family,” which was so far ahead of its time: “And you knew who you were then/Girls were girls and men were men/Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again/People seemed to be content/$50 paid the rent/Freaks were in a circus tent/Those were the days.”
So race, particularly the sense of a loss of white power and a sense of unquestioned white ownership of power in local communities, certainly figures prominently here. It would be hard to overstate the lingering power of race in white Christian communities.
But it’s also important to remember that these racial attitudes were set within what seemed to many white conservative Christians to be an ordered, hierarchical world that now seems to be in chaos. For example, Phyllis Schlafly, one of the few female leaders of the Christian Right, just died this month. She rose to prominence, somewhat paradoxically, as the outspoken, anti-feminist opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment. Schlafly was a strong backer of Barry Goldwater in 1964, and toward the end of her life, she was an early and outspoken supporter of Donald Trump. Trump was invited to speak at her funeral, where he called her a “hero” to the conservative movement. Imagining Schlafly looking down on the funeral, Trump vowed, “We will never, ever let you down.”
Yes, racial attitudes—and, yes, some unvarnished racism—are certainly at work. But I think it’s more accurate—and more illuminating—to understand this broader sense of loss and nostalgia when describing the anxieties among the descendants of White Christian America.
We will post the next portion of our conversation on Sunday.
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Robert P. Jones, CEO and founder of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute and author of the exceptionally timely book “The End of White Christian America,” has traced the decline of white, Protestant Americans from majority to minority status. The first part of my interview with Jones can be found here. The conversation concludes below:
Are the white Christians whose decline you document the Trump voters?The most straightforward answer is “yes.” But this is not as dramatic or unexpected as it may sound at first. Since the 1980s, the American electorate has been settling into partisan divisions that are starkly marked by racial and religious divides. Generally speaking, Republicans have become increasingly reliant on white Christian voters, while Democrats have a more diverse coalition consisting of majorities of Latino Catholics, African American Protestants, Jews and other non-Christian religions, and the growing group of religiously unaffiliated voters. In the last presidential election, for example, about eight in ten of Mitt Romney’s supporters were white Christians, compared to only about one third of Barack Obama’s supporters. White Christian voters have been favoring Republican presidential nominees for nearly four decades now.
But the surprising story of the election is why white evangelical Protestant voters, who staked their identity and reputation as “values voters,” have been so quick to abandon their own stated principles to support Donald Trump, especially in the Republican primaries when they had other candidate choices who clearly aligned more closely with their values, such as Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Ted Cruz. The key, I believe, is that Donald Trump successfully converted these “values voters” into “nostalgia voters” by tapping their anxieties about the massive demographic and cultural changes the country has recently experienced. When he promised to “Make America Great Again,” white evangelical voters heard a familiar refrain about taking back the country and restoring their more prominent place in it.
In the election we seem to think of Trump voters as economically displaced people. You suggest they are culturally displaced. Are both at work here?There is no doubt that economic anxiety is playing a prominent role here as well. It’s important to remember that a majority of white evangelical Protestants are also working class Americans, and tend to live in harder hit rural areas that have seen slow recovery from the recession. In fact, more than seven in ten white evangelical Protestants also say that they believe the country is still in a recession.
But you can’t understand the depth of the loss and anxiety, or really understand Trump’s appeal, without understanding cultural displacement. And this is a mistake too many journalists and pundits are making.
Trump’s promises to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico and to bring back manufacturing jobs are not just appeals to economic wellbeing. These appeals are often coupled with promises to restore power to the Christian churches, although that part of Trump’s appeal is not prominently reported. For many white evangelical Protestant and white working class voters, those appeals are about restoring a sense of place and a lost cultural world. Trump’s promise is that if he is elected, the factory gates will reopen, the boards will come down off the storefront windows, the pews will fill, different races and genders will be clearly defined and will know their place, and America will make sense again.
Any thoughts on how right-wing media stirs the resentment and anxiety of these white, Christian Americans?Both the far left and the far right media are capable of trading in conspiracy theories and extremist rhetoric that exploits fear. Notably, some recent studies have shown that Americans are less ideologically siloed in their media consumption habits than conventional wisdom has suggested. But there is a higher density of these media outlets on the right, and they also have a deeper pool of Christian apocalyptic culture and language to draw upon.
Most importantly, over the last decade, conservative whites have experienced more cultural changes that they perceive to be threatening. Within the last two election cycles, for example, we have become a minority white Christian nation, witnessed a black man win the White House, and watched the U.S. Supreme Court lose its last Protestant member (the court is currently comprised of five Catholics and three Jews). And, while many on the left do not grasp this, the sea change in public opinion on gay marriage—from roughly four in ten support in 2008 to roughly six in ten today—and its legalization nationwide have been nuclear events in conservative white Christian circles. Add to this context the concerns generated by the growing number of Latinos in the country and racial tensions around the Black Lives Matter movement, and you’ve got a pretty volatile cocktail.
It’s clear that we’ll continue to hear apocalyptic rhetoric, especially on the right. Ann Coulter’s recent book title says it all—Adios America: The Left’s Plan to Turn our Country into a Third World Hellhole. We also heard a lot of this “last stand” kind of language, for example, at the recent Values Voters Summit in Washington, D.C., where Trump argued that if he didn’t get elected, Republicans may not see a Republican president for a generation. And there was this from Gary Bauer: “This country is the equivalent of that hijacked plane right now. We’re headed to a disaster, unless we can get control of the cockpit again. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a Flight 93 election. This may be our last shot. It’s time to roll. It’s time to run down the aisle and save Western civilization.”
Many liberals simply dismiss these anxieties. But you can’t understand our current historical moment without grasping their significance.
