In what I can only view as a form of slow suicide, the Republican Party has tied its future to the shrinking number of far right evangelical Christians. Between the literal dying off of elderly angry white far right Christians and the growth in numbers of those of other faiths or no faith at all, the GOP has for nor tied its fate to a demographic whose demise is as assured as the eventual sinking of the Titanic once it hit the iceberg. A new book The Great Evangelical Recession, tracks what's fortunately happening which, in time, will remove the poisonous influence of those I call the Christofascists from the American political scene. Here are excerpts from a review of the book and two others that track what is happening (note the rate at which young evangelicals are leaving their religious tradition):
The common thread in these books is the contention that Christianity, especially conservative Christianity, is rapidly losing strength and cultural authority in a changing America. Charting Americans’ religious beliefs is notoriously tricky, as comparison between any two religion-related polls will attest. Nevertheless, these authors’ argument that conservative Christianity — both evangelical Protestantism and conservative Catholicism — is losing sway in America has become the consensus view of most experts who study American religiosity. In 2012, the Pew Research Center made headlines with a study showing that for the first time, the percentage of Americans claiming no religious affiliation (19.6 percent) surpassed the number of white evangelical Protestants (19 percent). Other surveys conducted in recent years (by Gallup, the General Social Survey, Baylor University, and other research organizations) show declines in the number of people who identify as Christian, believe in God, and attend church regularly. American Catholicism has undergone its own similar involution, with nearly half of all Catholics under age 40 now Hispanic and a majority of Catholics favoring same-sex marriage, according to Pew.
For conservative Christians, the turnabout has been disorienting. Just 10 years ago, conservative Christianity appeared ascendant, with a coalition of evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics twice electing a born-again Christian to the presidency and, in 2004, outlawing gay marriage in 11 states. Today, laws against same-sex marriage are being rolled back and conservatives have failed to budge debate over access to contraception in the new health law.
Change has come so quickly to American conservative Christianity that conservatives are still scrambling to understand the challenges they face, and to persuade one another that their problems are real, which is telling.
The starting premise of each book is the claim that Christianity, especially conservative Christianity, is declining in America. For Ross Douthat, that decline is evidenced by present-day America’s near total abandonment of what he describes as a broad-based Christian culture that flourished in the decades following World War II, when rates of churchgoing were at an all-time high and Christian intellectuals such as C. S. Lewis and Reinhold Niebuhr enjoyed wide readerships.
In The Great Evangelical Recession, Dickerson turns his reporter’s eye on his own religious tradition, documenting in unsparing detail both evangelical Christianity’s recent decline and the numerous ways evangelicals have only themselves to blame for their situation . . . .
Dickerson’s statistics are eye-opening and, for anyone who cares about the future of American Christianity, sobering. Two hundred and sixty thousand evangelical young people walk away from their faith every year, he reports. Two-thirds of Christian 20-somethings will abandon their faith before they turn 30. Evangelicals nearing or past retirement age now supply the majority of their churches’ income. Younger members are not stepping up financially as their elders die off.
Dickerson, whose op-eds have appeared in USA Today, The New York Times, and elsewhere, does not hesitate to lay blame where he thinks it belongs. He condemns evangelicals’ foray into national politics as an unqualified disaster: it divided churches, won scant political gains, and earned Christians a hard-to-shake reputation as hypocritical, hard-hearted bigots.
[A] significant off note in Dickerson’s argument. To persuade his audience of complacent pastors that evangelicals are now viewed with hostility by much of mainstream America, Dickerson zeros in on what he calls a rapidly growing “pro-homosexual and anti-Christian reactionism” in American culture.
What’s symptomatic about Dickerson’s and Driscoll’s weirdly paranoid depictions of their movement’s troubles is their failure to recognize the actual source of those troubles. Dickerson’s reportage on Americans’ changing religious behavior is all sound and backed up by nonpartisan research organizations. . . . It’s only when these authors attempt to identify culprits for Christianity’s decline that they veer into arguments most secular readers would regard as bizarre.
Why? Because the chief problem facing conservatives is not simply demographic or cultural change in America but rather conservatism itself — a particular approach to Christian theology and practice that worked well for churches during a certain period in American history but now has become a serious impediment.
Biblical literalism, though, and its accompanying inflexibility on sexual issues, has proven harder to change. And therein lies the problem.
The problem is twofold. First, insisting on the literal, unalterable truth of Scripture (expressed in Catholicism as the unimpeachable authority of church doctrine) forces conservative Christians into unnecessary conflict with secular society, especially over issues of sexuality (issues that are far less straightforward in the Bible and church history, by the way, than conservatives claim).
Second, rigid literalism makes it extremely difficult for conservatives to change course, even when compelling arguments are raised against their particular biblical interpretations. One of young people’s chief complaints about present-day Christianity, polls show, is that the faith is anti-science.
Conservatives are similarly boxed in — and increasingly regarded as hypocritical, polls show — on sexual and economic issues. I’m a religion reporter, and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve interviewed conservative pastors who inform me of the Bible’s inflexible position on homosexuality even as their own churches violate explicit biblical prohibitions against divorce by employing divorced clergy or offering ministries to help couples get through their own divorces.
Driscoll conspicuously ignores the fact that Scripture, with its numerous prominent figures with multiple wives and its alternating endorsements of virginity, chastity, and traditional marriage, is in no way univocal on the issue of sexuality. Driscoll is similarly silent about the fact that evangelicals have been among the most enthusiastic political supporters of economic policies that are in part to blame for the litany of social dysfunction he cites in his book.
For some conservative Christians, this newfound antagonism is cause for dismay and a frantic search for a new formula to bring back the good old days. For other Christians, the demise of Christianity’s cozy relationship with the forces of American politics and capitalism is seen as more of an opportunity. What comes of that opportunity — new growth or a decline into irrelevance — remains to be seen.
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