Total incoherence and shamelessness super-charges it:
If there was an epitome of Donald Trump’s hostile and often puzzling takeover of the Republican Party, it might have been his alliance with evangelical Christians. The thrice-married playboy who until relatively recently supported abortion rights became their champion. He did so despite demonstrating remarkably little familiarity with the Bible. The uneasy alliance culminated in Trump flashing the Good Book as a political prop in Lafayette Square last summer.
But new data suggests that whatever pull evangelicals have in American politics, it’s declining pretty significantly.
The Public Religion Research Institute released a detailed study Thursday on Americans’ religious affiliations. Perhaps the most striking finding is on White evangelical Christians.
While this group made up 23 percent of the population in 2006 — shortly after “values voters” were analyzed to have delivered George W. Bush his reelection — that number is now down to 14.5 percent, according to the data.
The partisan breakdown is interesting:
PRRI’s data suggest that, even within the GOP, White evangelicals are on the decline: White evangelicals have gone from 37 percent of the GOP in 2006 to 29 percent in 2020.
Just as important is the age disparity. While 22 percent of Americans 65 and over are White evangelicals, the number is just 7 percent for those between 18 and 29 years of age.
Again, some of that is the overall decline in religiosity in this country and that younger people are much more likely to be unaffiliated. And just because young people aren’t evangelicals doesn’t mean they might not become evangelicals later in life.
But the White evangelical population is even more disproportionately older than White nonevangelical Protestants and White Catholics. And previous data suggest the evangelical population has indeed trended significantly older over time.
I have always thought that quite a few conservative evangelicals were really “evangelicals” — people who used the term as a cultural rather than a religious signifier. But I suspect that many of those people are the ones who still identify that way which would mean the erosion is probably even worse than it seems.
The Christian Right is no longer even trying to be religious by any common definition. It’s a cultural and political movement dedicated to dominance.