They love America so much that if they can’t have her for theirs and theirs alone, they’ll burn it to the ground. Sharing? That’s like telling the truth and playing fair, something we teach children but don’t really practice ourselves.
Michelle Goldberg recounts the history of evangelical Christianity’s political ascendancy under George W. Bush. They knew that with God on their side they would reclaim the kingdom, put the sleeper hold on Satan, or whatever. Goldberg spoke with Public Religion Research Institute chief executive Robert P. Jones about its poll that suggests those visions are turning to dust:
On Thursday, P.R.R.I. released startling new polling data showing just how much ground the religious right has lost. P.R.R.I.’s 2020 Census of American Religion, based on a survey of nearly half a million people, shows a precipitous decline in the share of the population identifying as white evangelical, from 23 percent in 2006 to 14.5 percent last year. (As a category, “white evangelicals” isn’t a perfect proxy for the religious right, but the overlap is substantial.) In 2020, as in every year since 2013, the largest religious group in the United States was the religiously unaffiliated.
One of P.R.R.I.’s most surprising findings was that in 2020, there were more white mainline Protestants than white evangelicals. This doesn’t necessarily mean Christians are joining mainline congregations — the survey measures self-identification, not church affiliation. It is, nevertheless, a striking turnabout after years when mainline Protestantism was considered moribund and evangelical Christianity full of dynamism.
In addition to shrinking as a share of the population, white evangelicals were also the oldest religious group in the United States, with a median age of 56. “It’s not just that they are dying off, but it is that they’re losing younger members,” Jones told me. As the group has become older and smaller, Jones said, “a real visceral sense of loss of cultural dominance” has set in.
Now White evangelicals are just another subculture. The sense that they are losing the culture war has produced rage, resentment and paranoia.
“This sense of ownership of America just runs so deep in white evangelical circles,” says Jones. Donald Trump promised to restore them to their rightful place atop the cultural pecking order. Not in the sweet by and by, but now, today.
QAnon is “not unlike a belief in the second coming of Christ,” Jones told Goldberg. “That at some point God will reorder society and set things right. I think that when a community feels itself in crisis, it does become more susceptible to conspiracy theories and other things that tell them that what they’re experiencing is not ultimately what’s going to happen.”
I’ve been writing about people’s response to that feeling for almost 30 years. Adrift in a cold, mechanistic world of seeming chaos, New Agers sought empowerment in a transcendant world of secret or lost knowledge, and in the sense that wise guys in the spirit world or in the stars had everything under control. For Trumpists it was the their orange-hued god-man and/or the all-knowing “Q” and “The Plan” and “The Storm.”
Goldberg concludes:
I was frightened by the religious right in its triumphant phase. But it turns out that the movement is just as dangerous in decline. Maybe more so. It didn’t take long for the cocky optimism of Generation Joshua to give way to the nihilism of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. If they can’t own the country, they’re ready to defile it.
Republicans have reason to fear the religious right as well. One knock against Democrats is that they take minority groups for granted because there is nowhere else to go. The same could be said of the religious right and Republicans. But Lilliana Mason’s recent study indicates that the Trump-supporting faction in control of the Republican Party is not there for tax cuts, small government, and alleged family values. It is Trump’s blatant animus against minority groups keeping them in the GOP camp, not party loyalty. When Trump goes, what will the religious right do?
They are prepared to go “Banks of the Ohio,” to scorch the earth in retreat — country, Republican Party, and all.