Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Ironically, White Christian nationalism has captured the U.S. government despite its steep decline in popularity among the public. The Pew Research Center has released a poll on the state of religion in the United States.
From the point of view of contemporary American history, Christianity in the U.S. has collapsed in the past 17 years. Only around 62% of Americans say nowadays that they are Christian. Some 78%, nearly 4/5s, of Americans, said they were Christians in 2007, when George W. Bush was in the White House and his Evangelical constituency still hoped to convert its Shiites to the Baptist persuasion of Christianity. That didn’t happen.
During the past five years, Pew found, the percentage of self-reported Christians has leveled off. Still, the younger generation is much less likely to say they are Christian. Only 46% do, compared to 62% of all Americans. And unless they change their minds as they age, this finding suggests that the day is coming when America will not be a majority Christian country.
I am wondering if these findings tell us about the character of our political moment, with the much diminished White Christian majority making a last stand before it declines into a minority by mid-century (a process already complete in California).
The determination of White Christian nationalists to impose their ideology on the country may come of desperation from seeing their hold on society evaporate.
The collapse of Christianity has been much more pronounced among political liberals. They have gone from 62% Christian in 2007 to only 37% today. As Pew notes, that is a 25 percent drop.
In fact, if you take political liberals as a whole, there are more religiously unaffiliated people among them than there are Christians.
Christianity has also declined among Republicans, but not nearly as much. For hard line Christians, the Republican Party is a tempting vehicle for disciplining an increasingly religiously unaffiliated population. Pew says, “For example, a majority of people in the most highly religious quartile of the U.S. adult population (61%) say they identify with or lean toward the Republican Party.”
Graph generated by ChatGpt with 4 data points from the Pew Research poll.
The Christian Right’s increasing antipathy to college isn’t justified by the Pew findings. The decline of Christianity is just as pronounced among people who didn’t go to college as among people who did. People without a college degree are only marginally more likely to be Christians than holders of a B.A. or more.
These observations mainly pertain to White Americans. Blacks are more religious and yet they vote Democratic. It is the small number of non-religious Blacks who vote Republican. Likewise, religious Latinos often vote Democratic.
Among Whites, the more religious people are, the more likely they are to be conservative Republicans.
The main reason for the decline of Christianity as a percentage of the U.S. public is not the rise of non-Christian religions, which have only gone from 4.7% of the population to 7.1% over the past 17 years. Jews are 1.7%, and Muslims are 1.2%, with Buddhists at 1%. These are small proportions. Though, it should be noted that the population of the U.S. was only 300 million in 2007 but is now 341,000,000, so the absolute numbers of these groups are actually higher. Muslims now amount to 4.5 million or so and are projected to be 8 million by 2050, likely outnumbering Jews at that time. There were only 1.9 million Muslims in the U.S.in 2000. Because of prejudices and expectations that people will be white Christians, the majority identity, people notice members of minorities like Sikhs, Muslims and Jews more than they do Swedish Lutherans, so they bulk large in the public imagination.
But note that among immigrants, 14% are non-Christian, twice the average in the population as a whole. Hence, the desire of White Christian nationalists to cut down on immigration, especially that of refugees.
The real reason for the decline is that each generational cohort of Christians in the U.S. has been less religious than its predecessors.
Photo by RDNE Stock project: https://www.pexels.com/photo/people-standing-on-gray-concrete-pavement-7502606/
Among 18-24-year-olds, only 27% say they pray daily. Among older people, half say they do. Some 43% of these youths say they are religiously unaffiliated.
If these young people are the future, the U.S. is destined to look religiously somewhat more like France in a couple decades than like the U.S. of the 1950s, when from a European point of view Americans were peculiarly religious for an industrialized society.
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