Exodus From Religion Correlates to Evangelicals/The Political Right

For years now I have argued that evangelicals and Christofascists are killing the Christian brand in America because of their hypocrisy, hatred of others and general Pharisee-like behavior.  During the Trump era, this demographic has merged with and become synonymous with the ugliest elements of the political right and behavior  made Donald Trump, a man who is thoroughly bankrupt when it comes to every aspect of true morality, their standard bearer. As the evangelical dominated Republican Party has doubled down on being the party of open racism, homophobia and general extremism, more and more Americans have decided they want nothing to do with institutional Christianity.  Thus, the surge in the number of "Nones" and alienation of younger generations from religion.  New data now confirms that the evangelicals and their lockstep ties to the GOP have accelerated the exodus.  The result is that those who most claim to value and honor Christianity are the ones bearing a large part of the responsibility for its decline.  A piece at Religion Dispatches looks at the data.  Here are highlights:

For centuries, American evangelical Protestants have been obsessed with religious ‘revival.’ Fear of ostensible societal, moral, and religious ‘decline’ is the other side of the same paranoid Christian coin.

The United States, deeply influenced by early Puritan settlers and other assorted Christian fanatics, has been slow to secularize relative to European countries. In fact, the rapid increase in the proportion of religiously unaffiliated Americans at the expense of Christianity—a trend that has generated significant buzz in recent years—can be traced back only to the 1990s. Since then, however, the shift has been stunning.

I’ll put my cards on the table here: I consider that a good thing, given that frequent church attendance consistently correlates with voting Republican, especially among White Americans. At the same time, I understand that religion is far more diverse than Christianity alone, and that even Christianity—despite its heavy imperialist baggage—comes in pro-social forms.

In order to understand American secularization, however, it is necessary to understand that because of Christian dominance and pervasive Christian privilege, many Americans’ primary association with religion is Christianity, and that shapes their responses to the questions about ‘religion’ they encounter in public opinion polls.

Some polling over recent years has suggested the trend toward disaffiliation might be slowing down or leveling off, but its continuation seems highly likely given that more and more children are growing up in non-religious families. And one of the primary factors driving the secularizing trend—the close association of Christianity with the cruel and anti-democratic politics of the Republican Party—is still very much in play, with intriguing findings about American attitudes toward religion and secularism from the latest Ipsos Global Religion report suggesting that this association continues to have an impact.

I’ll get to the details, but first, some context. Decades before the phenomenon we’ve come to call Christian nationalism became a defining feature of the Republican Party, the U.S. Christian Right’s push for political power was part and parcel of its members’ faith. As someone who was raised evangelical in the 1980s and 1990s, I know this all too well. . . . In our milieu, ‘liberal’ was a synonym for ‘godless’ that was frequently pronounced with a sneer; and supporting Republican politics, with a focus on banning abortion and ‘getting prayer back in schools,’ was an extension of our Christian practice.

[I]n the summer of 1980, the now highly organized Christian Right was denouncing abortion as ‘murder’ and using the goal of overturning Roe v Wade to win elections. That autumn, Republican Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in the presidential election, with the crucial support of White evangelicals, cemented that demographic’s place in the reactionary GOP coalition they’ve now come to dominate. . . . led many more moderate Americans to associate Christianity with meanness, hypocrisy, and reactionary politics.

In 2002, sociologists Michael Hout and Claude S Fischer first floated the thesis that politics was playing a key role in the religious disaffiliation that was by then showing up in surveys every year. They noted that religious affiliation was holding steady among American conservatives but declining among American moderates and liberals, and argued that “this political part of the increase in ‘nones’ can be viewed as a symbolic statement against the religious right.”

Subsequent events seem to have borne the thesis out, with the American population becoming more politically and religiously polarized. Since the early 21st century, the Christian Right—a mostly White coalition of evangelicals, traditionalist Catholics and Mormons—has fought vigorously (and increasingly successfully) to assert dominance and control over the rest of the population, abusing state law and the court system to do so. They made major gains under Donald Trump’s presidency, when the Supreme Court was stacked with the right-wing Catholic ideologues that made possible the dramatic step of actually overturning Roe.

Ipsos finds that since 2017, when Trump came into office, Americans’ attitudes about religion have shifted in ways that to me look telling. According to the new Global Religion report, the proportion of Americans who agree with the statement “people with a religious faith are better citizens” has fallen six points, to 39%. The percentage who “lose respect for people when I find out that they do not have a religious faith” also dropped six points, to 14%. Further, the proportion of Americans who agree with the statement “my religion defines me as a person” is down a full eight points and now stands at 41%.

One should always be wary of drawing sweeping conclusions from such bird’s eye view data, but given that these shifts took place between the beginning of Donald Trump’s Christian nationalist presidency and the present, they certainly look like confirmation of Hout and Fisher’s thesis. That is, since the proportion of Americans who see religious faith as important for good citizenship and for their own identity declined across this period along with religious affiliation, the decline likely has something to do with rising identitarian Christian nationalist politics. Christian nationalism has become increasingly explicit among Trump supporters and the Republican Party’s base over the past few years, as Trump and other Republican leaders like Florida governor Ron DeSantis have shattered political norms and vigorously pursued the culture-warring objectives of the raging Christian Right.

That marriage between conservative, mostly White Christianity and a Republican Party gleefully trampling the rights of queer people and women seems unlikely to end any time soon. And so long as that continues, we will probably continue to see empathetic Americans who grew up Christian deciding they no longer care to be religious in increasing numbers.

Meanwhile, I find myself part of the 39% of Americans who view religion as causing more evil than good in the world.