What’s up with the decline of religion? Is it even a thing since Trump?
A lot of liberals predicted that Trump was going to be a disaster for the Evangelical church, and they were wrong. According to this Pew research survey, in 2016, 25% of white Americans polled identified as Evangelical or Born Again protestant, and in 2020 that number was 29%. So, the Evangelical church actually gained followers under Trump.
This actually reversed a trend, where Evangelicals had been losing congregants from 2009 and 2018-ish (implying perhaps a sharp uptick of people identifying as Evangelical Christians late into Trump’s term.) There was nothing special about the Evangelicals losing congregants; over that period, the number of people identifying as christian in the US dropped from 78% to 65%, and the number of people who didn’t identify with a religion rose from 16% to 26%. This is a continuation of a trend that started in the 70s, but that has been intensifying since the turn of the millennium, where people are leaving Christianity but not replacing it with a new organized religion.
So, what’s going on with the Evangelicals? Has Trump turned the tide — or, slowed it down at least — and brought religion back into vogue?
Doesn’t look like it. In 2021, a Gallup poll found that only 47% of Americans belonged to a formalized place of worship (like, a Church, Mosque of Synagogue.) This was the first time ever that more than half of Americans did not belong to a house of worship, so it seems that organized religion still appears to be on the decline. So, while the Evangelicals may be gaining members, they seem to be an anomaly as membership in other religious institutions is on the decline.
So, what’s going on with the Evangelicals?
Quite simply, they’ve become the House of Trump. An interesting thing that’s happened, is that the values the GOP espouses and the values the Evangelical church espouses have become completely aligned:
There’s really some fascinating research done by Ryan Burge, who is a statistician and a scholar of religion at Eastern Illinois University. He has shown how different American religious strands, whether it’s Black Christians, Mormons, atheists, Catholics, they all maintain some distance in their ideology from the the party they most affiliate with. But this isn’t true for white evangelicals. It is an exact overlap. The identification between white evangelicals and the GOP is almost perfect.
Vox interview with David French
As French mentioned, it is actually rare that a person’s religious beliefs are reflected perfectly by their political party — in fact, it really doesn’t happen for any group other than the white Evangelicals. So, while membership in most religious groups is declining, the Evangelicals are gaining ground because they’ve effectively become a religious-political hybrid, and they’re gaining ground through political means rather than traditional religious means.
(It’s also important to note; there is a large Black Evangelical group that votes differently from the white Evangelical group, and it is primarily the interests of white Evangelicals who are being served by the GOP. Black people in the US overwhelmingly voted against Trump, so it’s important to note that even though they have the same name, Black Evangelical Churches and white Evangelical Churches must be functioning very differently.)
So, what does that mean for the rest of us?
Unfortunately, what it means, is a group that makes up a relatively small percentage of the population (about 30% that identify as white Evangelical or born again) has a disproportionate amount of power, because they control a consistent voting bloc. Only about 65% of the US public votes, so if you can get 30% of the population to come out in higher numbers than that, you can get a lot of political power. If we now add to that, some degree of Democrat disenfranchisement because they represent a more diverse group of people, and so can not as consistently cater to one set, you have a situation where a highly organized, smaller minority has the ability to impose their will upon a larger majority.
However, that strong voting bloc is based on an institution (Christianity) which is in sharp decline, especially in recent years. So, what does that mean?
Well, first we must ask ourselves the question; why is Christianity in sharp decline? It is partly because younger people are less religious than their elders, however, there has been a drop in religious affiliation across all ages. So, what’s going on?
I read this most excellent blog post on why Christianity is declining in the US, but to sum up some of the major points:
- Historically, a major advantage of religion, is it got couples to pump out a lot of children. However, in the modern era, children are no longer a source of free labor and are more often an expense, so the the value of having many children has dropped.
- People are becoming more interested in self expression and free choice rather than obedience to religious institutions — especially since the benefits of those institutions often seem outdated
- People’s (especially Millennials) faith in all institutions is declining (from a different post.) This is in part due to many scandals of power in recent decades, and so people are less willing to sacrifice their own interests for the benefit of institutions they see as corrupt.
And, at the end of the day, the conservatives and Evangelicals have a big problem; they are putting out an ideology that is becoming less interesting to modern people. They are espousing policies that keep birth rate high (by banning abortion and birth control) which is consistent with historical religion, but not with modern desires. They continue to espouse the value of obedience and respect — to things like the Church and GOP — but modern people are more interested in self expression than obedience, and they don’t want to continue supporting institutions they see as corrupt.
However, due to organization, consistency, and quirks in the US electoral system that disproportionately benefit them, white Evangelicals are likely to be able to keep imposing their will upon a population that disagrees with their underlying policies; and that population on average is likely to continue to drift further from Evangelical beliefs because the underlying trends driving people away from religion seem to increasing in intensity, not decreasing.
So, what happens then? Either a total reorganization of the GOP to be palatable for the modern era, or a slide into a harder authoritarianism that we have seen yet. This would be a kind of authoritarianism that would seek to impose the values of Evangelical Christianity onto the population at large, even if they didn’t hold those same religious beliefs.
And, what if we do slide into hard authoritarianism? Well, I’ll remind you of this quote from Ghandi’s autobiography:
“Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always.”
In the long run, it is not possible to impose your will on an unwilling population indefinitely, and the currents are still moving against traditional white Evangelicalism. The question is, what will it take to move us past this authoritarian moment in our history?
I don’t know.
