White Christians Are Now a Minority in America

With all the bad news of late and weather related destruction, it is nice to see a little bit of what I regard as good news: self-identifying white Christians are now no longer make up a majority of citizens.  Better yet, white evangelicals have declined to only 17% of the overall population, not that we are not suffering daily from the toxicity of their poisonous version of Christianity.  These and other findings come from a new report by the Public Religion Research Institute based on a survey of a sample of more than 101,000 Americans from all 50 states.  The membership of virtually every Christian denomination has declined with the largest declines being among Millennials who have walked away from religion in no small part due to the hate and bigotry that are the hallmarks of fundamentalist and evangelical denominations and so-called "Christian" "family values" organizations.   Like previous surveys, white evangelicals are the least educated denomination.  Also, the survey confirms that the GOP is in the stranglehold of white Christians.  Here are some of the survey findings:

     Today, fewer than half of all states are majority white Christian. As recently as 2007, 39 states had majority white Christian populations. These are two of the major findings from this report, which is based on findings from PRRI’s 2016 American Values Atlas, the single largest survey of American religious and denominational identity ever conducted. Among the major findings:

1. White Christians now account for fewer than half of the public. Today, only 43% of Americans identify as white and Christian, and only 30% as white and Protestant. In 1976, roughly eight in ten (81%) Americans identified as white and identified with a Christian denomination, and a majority (55%) were white Protestants.

1. White evangelical Protestants are in decline—along with white mainline Protestants and white Catholics. White evangelical Protestants were once thought to be bucking a longer trend, but over the past decade their numbers have dropped substantially. Fewer than one in five (17%) Americans are white evangelical Protestant, but they accounted for nearly one-quarter (23%) in 2006. Over the same period, white Catholics dropped five percentage points from 16% to 11%, as have white mainline Protestants, from 18% to 13%.

1. Non-Christian religious groups are growing, but they still represent less than one in ten Americans combined. Jewish Americans constitute 2% of the public while Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus each constitute only 1% of the public. All other non-Christian religions constitute an additional 1%.

1. America’s youngest religious groups are all non-Christian. Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists are all far younger than white Christian groups. At least one-third of Muslims (42%), Hindus (36%), and Buddhists (35%) are under the age of 30. Roughly one-third (34%) of religiously unaffiliated Americans are also under 30. In contrast, white Christian groups are aging.

1. There are 20 states in which no religious group comprises a greater share of residents than the religiously unaffiliated. These states tend to be more concentrated in the Western U.S., although they include a couple of New England states, as well. More than four in ten (41%) residents of Vermont and approximately one-third of Americans in Oregon (36%), Washington (35%), Hawaii (34%), Colorado (33%), and New Hampshire (33%) are religiously unaffiliated.

1. No state is less religiously diverse than Mississippi. The state is heavily Protestant and dominated by a single denomination: Baptist. Six in ten (60%) Protestants in Mississippi are Baptist. No state has a greater degree of religious diversity than New York. 

1. Jews, Hindus, and Unitarian-Universalists stand out as the most educated groups in the American religious landscape. More than one-third of Jews (34%), Hindus (38%), and Unitarian-Universalists (43%) hold post-graduate degrees. Notably, Muslims are significantly more likely than white evangelical Protestants to have at least a four-year college degree (33% vs. 25%, respectively).

1. Nearly half of LGBT Americans are religiously unaffiliated. Nearly half (46%) of Americans who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) are religiously unaffiliated. This is roughly twice the number of Americans overall (24%) who are religiously unaffiliated.

1. White evangelical Protestants remain the dominant religious force in the GOP. More than one-third (35%) of all Republicans identify as white evangelical Protestant, a proportion that has remained roughly stable over the past decade. Roughly three-quarters (73%) of Republicans belong to a white Christian religious group.

If the country is lucky, the decline of white Christians will not only continue but accelerate.

A Long Overdue Eulogy for White Christian America?

Despite Donald Trump's election thanks in no small part to evangelical Christians who demonstrated that hate, bigotry and white supremacy were far more important to them than the Gospel message of Christ, things are not looking auspicious for white, heterosexual Christian America over the longer term.  As author Robert P. Jones notes in  “The End of White Christian America,” white Protestants lost their majority status in 1993, and the U.S. Census Bureau projects that the America will no longer be majority white by 2042 and that the number of whites will decline by 2060.  For Trump voting evangelicals who see no common humanity in anyone who doesn't share the same skin color and religious beliefs, this is a calamity of incalculable proportions.  

For the rest of society which has been abused and discriminated against by white conservative Christians, I would argue that this is a positive thing.  Covenant Magazine looks at the decline facing this most hate and bigotry -filled element of American society. Note that yet again we see the mistreatment of LGBT citizens as being a major catalyst for younger generations leaving Christianity. I predict that the anti-LGBT jihad about to be unleashed by Trump and his gay-hating cabinet nominees will accelerate the exodus.  Here are article excerpts:

The rapid disintegration of the Crystal Cathedral[in Orange County, California] represents the “canary in the coal mine” for what Jones calls White Christian America (or WCA), a term he uses to identify white Protestant America, both mainline and evangelical. Protestant Christianity in America is facing a demographic and cultural tsunami, he argues, that is amply illustrated by the statistics collected and analyzed in the book. The mainline church experienced its heady times of cultural influence and political power during the first half of the twentieth century. Its fall was nearly as spectacular as its rise, with both influence and numbers waning through the 1960s and ’70s. The evangelical movement had an equally heady rise in the ’80s, only to see slippage in the first and especially the second decade of the twenty-first century. White Protestants lost their majority status in 1993. The U.S. Census Bureau predicts that the country will no longer be majority white by 2042 and that the number of whites will decline by 2060. This is bad news for the church of WCA, chiefly because it has shown itself singularly incapable of “desegregating.” Jones argues that because white Americans have so few people of color in their social networks they suffer from a “racial perception gap.” They have great difficulty understanding or seeing the world from the standpoint of an African American citizen of one of our largest cities or a recent Hispanic immigrant, documented or otherwise. Thus white Americans are frequently perplexed and angered when black Americans protest the latest police shooting or express frustration with the slow rate of change in matters of social justice.

Jones points out that while the mainline denominations were involved early on in support of the civil rights movement, their local churches have done no better at becoming multi-ethnic and multi-cultural than evangelical churches.

In a powerful section of the book entitled “Why Is Desegregating Church So Difficult?” Jones points to the work of Jennifer Hardy, who argues that, paradoxically, one of the reasons efforts have failed in both communities is “the powerful hold that ‘reconciliation’ has on white Christian imagination.” . . . For many it seems that once they have said “I’m sorry” to a person of color, that is enough. As my friend Michael Murphy puts it, it is like a husband who has beaten his wife for years saying, “Let’s put that all behind us.” White Christians, in other words, frequently go in for “cheap reconciliation” when the true path of reconciliation is arduous and painful.
 WCA is protected by its suburban isolation and, in many cases, living with denial. But WCA is not only facing a demographic cliff, it is experiencing a generational disaster. Whereas in 2014, 67 percent of people over the age of sixty-five were “white Christians,” only 29 percent of those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine were. And 34 percent of the latter population were “unaffiliated.”

Both the mainline and evangelical church were losing their young adults—and the evangelical losses were even greater than the mainline. Whereas 27 percent of Americans sixty-five and over were “white evangelical Protestant” and 20 percent “white mainline Protestants” only 10 percent of those eighteen to twenty-nine were—for both groups. Evangelical young adults reported that their reasons for leaving the church were the over-identification of the movement with conservative politics and its cruelty toward gay persons. Couple this with a declining birth rate and you have a disaster in the making.
 Wishful thinking and flashy new programs will not help if the mission of the church does not address the world that is rather than the world that was.  It is abundantly clear that WCA must become something else entirely. It must lose the “white” tag and learn from the growing African American, Asian, and Hispanic churches both in the United States and throughout the world. It must address its privilege and the cheapness of its reconciliation. It must recover the gospel of “costly reconciliation”—a gospel that addresses all persons and the whole planet. Hunkering down with the old hymns and worship songs and looking back to the glory days is a pathway to irrelevance and death. Evangelicals who believe God’s Spirit is alive and active in the world must ask, where is that Spirit moving? How can we catch that wind? It will not happen if WCA stays safely anchored in the harbor of the past.

Again, the fact that 81% of evangelicals voted for Trump and his overt calls to white supremacist demonstrates that WCA is not letting go of its "white tag" anytime soon.  We can only hope that the road to irrelevance and death is even more rapid than so predict. 

I was raised conservative Catholic, was an altar boy for 10 years and ultimately rose to the 4th Degree in the Knights of Columbus.  For 7 years I usually attended daily mass.  Now, neither I nor any of my siblings, my nieces and nephews or my children and their families attend church.  Why? Just look ate the Catholic Church's continued protection of predator priests and mistreatment of women and gays.  Then look at the racism and homophobia rampant in conservative protestant denominations.  Why would anyone moral and possessing ethical decency and empathy for others want to be a part of such hatred and misogyny? 

PRRI Study: White Christian America is Dying

Robert P. Jones, the founding CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), has a new book out entitled “The End of White Christian America.” For Christofascists, the findings will likely fuel their rebellion against sanity and modernity.  For others, the findings on white Christianity will be welcomed.  As regular readers know full well, I am no fan of religion in general and conservative Christianity in particular.  Sadly, religion has  brought more death and misery to the world over the centuries than nearly anything else save wars, disease and natural disasters - and many wars were ultimately based on religion  One need look no farther than ISIS and the horrors it has unleashed because of religious dogma.  Closer to home, the ugliness that has engulfed the Republican Party is in many ways based on the hate, racism and general misogyny that are, in my view, synonymous with conservative Christianity.  One delicious irony is that it is the conservative Christians' anti-gay attitudes that are most fueling defections from Christianity as a whole.  Here are some highlights from a Washington Post e-mail interview with Robert P. Jones:

Today, young adults ages 18 to 29 are less than half as likely to be white Christians as seniors age 65 and older. Nearly 7 in 10 American seniors (67 percent) are white Christians, compared to fewer than 3 in 10 (29 percent) young adults.

Although the declining proportion of white Christians is due in part to large-scale demographic shifts — including immigration patterns and differential birth rates — this chart also highlights the other major cause: young adults’ rejection of organized religion. Young adults are three times as likely as seniors to claim no religious affiliation (34 percent versus 11 percent, respectively).

The American religious landscape is being remade, most notably by the decline of the white Protestant majority and the rise of the religiously unaffiliated. These religious transformations have been swift and dramatic, occurring largely within the last four decades. Many white Americans have sensed these changes, and there has been some media coverage of the demographic piece of the puzzle. But while the country’s shifting racial dynamics are certainly a source of apprehension for many white Americans, it is the disappearance of White Christian America that is driving their strong, sometimes apocalyptic reactions. Falling numbers and the marginalization of a once-dominant racial and religious identity — one that has been central not just to white Christians themselves but to the national mythos — threatens white Christians’ understanding of America itself.

[O]ver the last decade, we have seen marked decline among white evangelical Protestants, the more conservative part of the white Protestant family. White evangelical Protestants comprised 22 percent of the population in 1988 and still commanded 21 percent of the population in 2008, but their share of the religious market had slipped to 18 percent at the time the book went to press, and our latest 2015 numbers show an additional one-percentage-point slip to 17 percent.

These indicators of white evangelical decline at the national level are corroborated, for example, by internal membership reports during the same period from the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest evangelical Protestant denomination in the country. It has now posted nine straight years of declining growth rates.

As a result, both white mainline Protestants and white evangelical Protestants are graying. In 1972, white Protestants’ median age was 46 years old, only slightly higher than the median age of the American population (44 years old). Today, white Protestants’ median age is 53, compared to 46 among Americans as a whole. Notably, by 2014, there was no difference between the median ages of white evangelical and mainline Protestants.

Catholics simply do not fit neatly into the story of White Christian America. In the book, I use White Christian America as a metaphor for the dominant cultural and institutional world built primarily by white Protestants, which until recently set the terms and tone for national debates and served as a kind of “civil glue” for the country, to borrow a term from E.J. Dionne.

While anti-Catholic sentiment has generally cooled today, it remained strong up through the 1960s, as President John F. Kennedy’s campaign demonstrated. In the 19th and early 20th century, many Catholics were seen as neither “white” nor “Christian.”

The rise of religiously unaffiliated Americans over the last few decades is one of the most important and dramatic shifts in American religious history. As recently as the 1990s, less than 1 in 10 Americans claimed no religious affiliation. By 2014, the religiously unaffiliated rivaled Catholics’ share of the religious marketplace, with each group making up 22 percent of the American population.

Looking ahead, there’s no sign that this pattern will fade anytime soon. By 2051, if current trends continue, religiously unaffiliated Americans could comprise as large a percentage of the population as all Protestants combined — a thought that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago.

The reasons for the growth of religiously unaffiliated Americans are complex. First, it should be noted that the growth of this group has come almost entirely at the expense of white Christian denominations, . . . .

When PRRI surveys have asked religiously unaffiliated Americans who were raised religious why they left their childhood religion, respondents have given a variety of reasons — stopped believing in teachings, conflicts with science, lack of time, etc. — but one issue stands out, particularly for younger Americans. About 70 percent of millennials (ages 18-33) believe that religious groups are alienating young adults by being too judgmental about gay and lesbian issues. And 31 percent of millennials who were raised religious but now claim no religious affiliation report that negative teaching about or treatment of gay and lesbian people by religious organizations was a somewhat or very important factor in their leaving.

I’m certainly critical of the way that white evangelical Protestants have historically intertwined racial segregation and Christianity. That’s a normative perspective, but I don’t take it to be a controversial one.

White evangelicals have themselves started disentangling Christianity and racism, albeit slowly and recently. For example, the Southern Baptist Convention did not get around to apologizing for the role slavery played in the denomination’s founding and for its consistent failure to support civil rights until 1995. And only this year, 2016, did the SBC vote to officially disavow the display of the Confederate battle flag.

The issue of LGBT equality is more complicated and more divisive. But even here, attitudes are shifting. . . . . For example, 45 percent of young evangelicals (ages 18-29) and 43 percent of young Mormons favor same-sex marriage, compared to only 19 percent of white evangelical seniors and 18 percent of Mormon seniors. Most notably, the data show that young Republicans have passed the tipping point: 53 percent of young Republicans now support same-sex marriage. . . . I think younger evangelicals and younger Republicans are increasingly challenging the assumption that equality before the law is a progressive value.

Trump’s appeal to evangelicals was not that he was one of them but that he would “restore power to the Christian churches” if he were elected president. This explicit promise, along with his anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric, signaled to white evangelical voters that when he crowed about “Making America Great Again,” he meant turning back the clock to a time when conservative white Christians held more influence in the culture. Trump has essentially converted these self-described “values voters” into “nostalgia voters.”

[T]he patterns in the electorate are clear. Every four years, there is a shrinking pool of white Christian voters; if current trends continue, 2024 will be the first year white Christians will not make up a majority of voters nationwide.

I begin the book with an obituary for White Christian America, and I conclude the book with a eulogy. This construction is consistent with the book’s stark title. My argument in the book is that we have already experienced the passing of White Christian America. While this claim is grounded in demographic changes, it is also supported by the fading power of major institutions, such as the National Council of Churches or the Christian Coalition of America. There are no indicators that the country will see the likes of White Christian America as a dominant cultural force again.

Personally, I view the decline - and hoped fro demise - white conservative Christianity as a positive good.  So much of the hate and racism that plagues the nation today ultimate traces back to lily white "Christian" family values organizations which, upon inspection, do little other than fan the flames of hatred and disseminate lies about anyone and everyone who isn't a white conservative Christian.   The work to be done is to continue to expose the truth about these people while dispelling the lies they disseminate - often to gain power or self-enrichment. 

Is A Post Religion America Close at Hand?

One of the focuses of this blog is the hypocrisy of Christian fundamentalists and the over all evil that conservative - can we say unreasoning - religious belief is to not only politics in this country, but the nation as a whole.  A review of what religion has brought to mankind - war, hatred, mistreatment and murder of others, in my view, outweighs any positive benefits.  Some predict that we may be on the cusp of a time when religion's toxic influence may be close to a long over due decline.  Here are highlights from a piece in Salon:

With fire-breathing religion figuring anew in global conflicts, and political discussions at home often dominated by the nuttery of the Christian right, you might get the sense that somebody’s god is ready to mug you around every street corner. But if you’re the type who doesn’t like to hang your hat on organized religion, here’s a bit of good news: In America, your numbers are growing.

There are more religiously unaffiliated people in the U.S. today than ever before. Starting in the 1980s, a variety of polls using different methodologies have come to the same conclusion: people who do not identify with religious labels are on the rise, perhaps even doubling in that time frame.

[A]ccording to the latest research, Americans checking the “none of the above” box will make up an increasingly important force in the country. Other groups, like born-again evangelicals, have grown more percentage-wise, but the nones have them beat in absolute numbers.

The nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute has documented this sea change in its American Values Atlas, which it released last Wednesday. The fascinating study provides demographic, religious and political data based on surveys conducted throughout 2014. According to PRRI director of research Dan Cox, “The U.S. religious landscape is undergoing a dramatic transformation that is fundamentally reshaping American politics and culture.”

Last year, for the very first time, Protestants lost their majority status in the Institute’s annual report, making up only 47 percent of those surveyed. The religiously unaffiliated, who come in at 22 percent, boast numbers on par with major religious groups like American Catholics. All told, the unaffiliated is the second-largest group in the country. It was also the most common group chosen by residents in 13 states, with the largest share (a third or more) in Washington, Oregon and New Hampshire. In Ohio and Virginia, this group was tied for first place.

[W]hat do we know about these people? Nones tend to be more politically liberal — three-quarters favor same-sex marriage and legal abortion. They also have higher levels of education and income than other groups. While about one out of five Americans is unaffiliated, the number is much higher among young people: Pew research shows that a third of Americans under 30 have no religious affiliation. 

One thing is certain: voting nones are making their presence felt in politics. They are thought to have helped Obama win a second term.

But the GOP doesn’t seem to show many signs of reducing the outsized influence of white evangelicals, who represent only 18 percent of the population, at least publicly. Just a couple of weeks ago, presidential hopeful Scott Walker could be seen refusing to answer a question about evolution, as if embracing widely accepted science would make him an apostate.
[Republicans ] till have to mask their agenda behind appeals to popular religion so the non-rich will vote against their economic interests in places like Tennessee, which has the highest share of white evangelicals, at 43 percent.

As you might expect, the fact that religion is losing its grip on the daily lives of Americans is freaking a lot of people out.  The New York Times’ David Brooks is quite alarmed, admonishing nones that “secularism has to do for nonbelievers what religion does for believers — arouse the higher emotions, exalt the passions in pursuit of moral action.” Of course, secularists only form one portion of the unaffiliated group, but considering that Mr. Brooks likes to wax on about the moral probity of America’s founders — your George Washingtons and so on — he might ask himself which box they might have checked.

The Descent of Evangelical Christians into Abject Ignorance

This blog has looked before at the correlation between the belief in Bible inerrancy and low levels of education with evangelicals routinely being revealed as the least educated overall and the most believing in the Bible as inerrant fact.   As the evangelical Christians - those I call the Christofascists - have taken over the Republican Party we now see only 43% of self-identifying Republicans believing in evolution.  The sane and educated people have simply left the GOP, a party that once valued science and knowledge.  But even among Evangelicals there is an exodus of the younger educated factions who go to college, receive an education and come to see the religious faith in which the have been raised/brainwashed as unacceptable.  A Piece in The Daily Beast authored by a professor at an evangelical college looks at the downward spiral among evangelicals.  Here are excerpts:

According to a December 2013 Pew poll, among white evangelical Protestants, a demographic that includes many Republican members of Congress and governors, almost 64 percent reject the idea that humans have evolved.

The connection between acceptance of evolution and political affiliation has grown stronger over the past three years, exacerbating the polarization now plaguing Congress. Among Democrats, acceptance of evolution increased by 3 percent, to 67 percent, while among Republicans it decreased from 54 percent to 43 percent.

The trajectory is not encouraging, especially as it runs in parallel with a steady increase in the evidence for evolution—evidence now piled so high that not even one evolutionary biologist at any of America’s research universities rejects the theory. Evolution is as widely accepted in biology departments as gravity is in physics departments.

So how is it that 64 percent of America’s “white evangelical evangelical Protestants,” an unusually powerful and wealthy demographic, remains so strongly opposed to evolution?

I am a white evangelical Protestant, or at least I was until persuaded to leave a couple of years ago. Raised in a parsonage, I grew up in that tradition and, after earning a Ph.D. in physics, I taught science, including evolution, at an evangelical college, one of approximately 160 similar—and accredited—institutions in the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). Most evangelical colleges teach evolution, albeit quietly, carefully, and often tentatively, although there are exceptions. 

In an ideal world these efforts should slowly trickle onto Main Street, where they would inform ordinary evangelicals, including those who run for Congress. In time, Darwin’s dangerous idea should become widely accepted, just as Christians gradually gave credence to Galileo’s dangerous idea about the motion of the earth.  But that is not what is happening.

For a quarter century I taught scientific theories of origins—evolution and the Big Bang Theory—under a cloud of suspicion that waxed and waned but never totally disappeared. With few exceptions, my mostly evangelical students accepted these ideas. I took informal polls indicating that most of the 50 percent of my students who rejected evolution at the beginning of my course accepted it by the end. My colleagues at other evangelical colleges report similar experiences. We were hopeful that these evangelical students would become leaders of their faith communities and gradually persuade their fellow evangelicals that evolution was not a lie from hell—which was what many of them had been taught in Sunday school. But instead scientifically informed young evangelicals became so alienated from their home churches that they walked away, taking their enlightenment with them.

An alarming study by the Barna group looked at the mass exodus of 20-somethings from evangelicalism and discovered that one of the major sources of discontent was the perception that “Christianity was antagonistic to science.” Anti-evolution, and general suspicion of science, has become such a significant part of the evangelical identity that many people feel compelled to choose one or the other. Many of my most talented former students no longer attend any church, and some have completely abandoned their faith traditions.

[S]ome professors, alarmed by the persistent gap between the evangelical community and the findings of science—the gap that drives their students out of their churches—have naively presumed to educate their larger faith communities by writing books and articles in support of scientific theories of origins such as evolution and the Big Bang. Their quiet whispers thus become loud proclamations. Influential leaders read their books and are horrified to discover that a faculty member at “their” college is spreading “lies from the pit of hell” and destroying the faith of the students. Campaigns of various sorts are mounted and pressure exerted on the college leadership to remove that dangerous professor.

Productive scholarship that would be highly valued at other institutions became instead a major liability. Administrators complained that I was too controversial and creating public relations problems . . . 

I spent countless hours in the office of a succession of college presidents, explaining why Christians needed to make peace with evolution, no matter how painful. I was forced to communicate and even meet with hostile external constituents to defend well-established science against people who knew nothing about it beyond the challenges it posed to their interpretation of the Bible. One such watchdog group, the Reformed Nazarenes, rejoiced when I finally left the college.


My story is far from unique. Indeed, it’s almost typical. Understandably, only a handful of evangelical scholars have published books and articles in defense of evolution, but many of them have been forced to resign as a result.

It is no surprise that American Christofascists are focusing so much effort on Africa.  To thrive, their poisonous religious beliefs require (i) an ignorant, uneducated audience, or (ii) simple minded individuals who due to their own psychological issues are terrified to think or question hogwash that has been spoon fed to them.   It is frightening that such mental midgets now hold so much sway over the GOP which seems engaged in a race towards utter ignorance.

One-third of Americans - And A Majority of Republicans - Reject Evolution

There was a time when the Republican Party embraced knowledge and intellect and held scientific knowledge in high regard.  Now, the Party seems to be in a race to see how dumb and ignorant its base can become.  It is no coincidence, however, that these growing embrace of ignorance directly correlates to the rise of the Christofascists in the GOP.  Greed, racism, homophobia and the rejection of modernity and knowledge are now the principal traits of Republicans.  Oh, they can try to blow a smoke screen by claiming that the support fiscal conservatism, but that dog doesn't hunt given the reality that it has been GOP administrations, particularly that of the brainless Chimperator George W. Bush, that have blown the nation's budget time and time again. Here are highlights from Reuters that looks at the frightening number of Americans who embrace idiocy and ignorance:

One-third of Americans reject the idea of evolution and Republicans have grown more skeptical about it, according to a poll released on Monday.


Sixty percent of Americans say that "humans and other living things have evolved over time," the telephone survey by the Pew Research Center's Religion and Public Life Project showed (Click here for the full survey).

But 33 percent reject the idea of evolution, saying that "humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time," Pew said in a statement.

Although this percentage remained steady since 2009, the last time Pew asked the question, there was a growing partisan gap on whether humans evolved.

"The gap is coming from the Republicans, where fewer are now saying that humans have evolved over time," said Cary Funk, a Pew senior researcher who conducted the analysis.

The poll showed 43 percent of Republicans and 67 percent of Democrats say humans have evolved over time, compared with 54 percent and 64 percent respectively four years ago.

Among religious groups, white evangelical Protestants topped the list of those rejecting evolution, with 64 percent of those polled saying they believe humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.

Other modern nations must shudder at these figures.  Meanwhile, our enemies must be elated.  The irony is that the far right and Christofascists blather on and on about the enemies of America within the nation yet it is they themselves who will be the downfall of the nation.

Changing Religious Denominational Attitudes on Gay Marriage

Click image to enlarge

A new Pew Research Center survey confirms what most of us already knew: White evangelical denominations and black churches - often lead by black pastors in my opinion duped into doing the bidding of white racist in "family values" organizations like The Family Foundation here in Virginia - continue to be the main founts of anti-gay bigotry and opposition to same sex marriage.  In these two groups, the embrace of ignorance and modern day Pharisee like selective application of Biblical inerrancy remain the norm.  Among the non-affiliated, support for gay marriage is at 74%.  The Catholic laity and mainline denominations are at well over 50% in support as shown in the chart above.  Here are highlights from Pew:

Among people who are religiously unaffiliated, a solid majority have supported same-sex marriage since 2001... and among Catholics and white mainline Protestants, roughly half now express support for same-sex marriage.  Support among white evangelical and black Protestants remains lower than among other groups.

Ebracing Christianism - A Political Dead End for the GOP

Despite the changing views on religion sweeping across America, including a wholesale exodus of the under 30 generations for institutional religion, the Republican Party for the most part remains locked in an embrace of the Christofascists that will ultimately prove fatal.    The elderly ranks of the Bible beaters are dying off and not being replaced by similarly unthinking/believing younger ranks.  Indeed, as the study cited in an earlier post found, outside of white evangelical Christians, every Christian denomination is trending towards acceptance of gay marriage.  But it is not on just the issue of gay marriage where the GOP is courting political suicide.  Contraception, climate change, the acceptance of scientific fact and objective reality - modernity itself - all are gaining growing acceptance and recognition by a majority of Americans.  Meanwhile the Christians and the GOP remain in a shrinking bubble.  Andrew Sullivan has a post that is a follow up to a debate that he had with a hard core Christianist that looks at the dead end the GOP is racing towards.  Here are highlights:

Last week, as regular readers know, I went to the University of Idaho to debate whether civil marriage equality was good or bad for society as a whole. My interlocutor was and is a fundamentalist, a believer in Biblical morality .  .  .  .  . My hosts sincerely believe that there can be no solid separation between church and state and no basis for social order or “truth” other than Biblical morality as strained through the New Testament. And so purely pragmatic political arguments can quickly become problematic for them. Peter Leithart, who attended the debate, wrote it up on First Things and admirably homed in on the core divide:

Sullivan demanded that Wilson defend his position with secular, civil arguments, not theocratic ones, and in this demand Sullivan has the support of liberal polity. Sullivan’s is a rigid standard for public discourse that leaves biblically-grounded Christians with little to say … That leaves Christians with the option of making theologically rich, biblically founded arguments against gay marriage.  .  .  .  . If that’s a hard case to make, it’s even harder to make the case that homosexuals are in any way a threat to our civilization.

 The traditional Christian moral arguments depend on a metaphysical understanding that is no longer widely shared, not even by Christians.

This is why Christianism cannot win a majority – and is fast becoming a smaller minority. If your agrument is that God says so – and your fellow citizens don’t believe in that same God – how can you even engage in secular debate? New analysis (pdf) of polling and the last election results on the gay marriage question, for example, reveal that only one major religious group now opposes marriage equality across the board: white evangelical Christians, who are pretty close to synonymous with the Tea Party. Even every other Christian population supports it [gay marriage]! From white non-evangelical Christians to Catholics, clear majorities favor the reform.

The GOP’s problem is that this is their base; it cannot compromise because God’s word is inviolable; and yet it is also losing the argument badly. You either stick with this base and lose – or you fight them and lose. Which is why so many in the GOP are now just not talking about the issue.

In Idaho, the crowd was largely white and evangelical. They voted overwhelmingly against marriage equality at the start and after a debate in which my opponent conceded that his argument was ultimately rooted totally in Biblical truth and not secular consequences, and who declared the state of heterosexual marriage as in crisis. In other words, that night mirrored the last twenty years. The longer this debate has gone on, the more the opposition has withdrawn to claims of simple Biblical authority. That is not an appeal to the center of the American polity.

The theo-conservative response to this was an attempt to revive “natural law” arguments against gay marriage, derived from updating Aquinas.  .  .  .  .  Aquinas didn’t know, for example, that humans were conceived by a woman’s egg as well as a man’s sperm. He couldn’t possibly have known what Darwin and his followers have unfolded: a vast, constantly shuffling of DNA, designed to generate diversity in order to survive the challenges of subsistence through time and environment. He couldn’t have known that the animal kingdom is full of homosexuality .  .  .  .

Personally, I care nothing about the slow eventual death of the extremist white evangelical denominations.  But I do care and am troubled by the fact that one of America's major political parties seems trapped in the grip of a dying and increasingly irrational segment of the population.  A segment that sadly views everyone who doesn't look and think just as they do with hatred and contempt.  They will be the death of the Republican Party and their rabid homophobia is hastening the move of many younger Americans from Christianity itself.  The irony is that the Christofascists claim that gays will destroy western civilization yet it is they themselves who are destroying Christianity.

Did Conventions Put Obama in Front-Runner’s Position?

Click image to enlarge

Numbers cruncher and statistical analyst Nate Silver suggest that the back to back GOP and Democratic conventions may have pushed Barack Obama into the front runner position.  There is certainly no question that the two conventions highlighted the alternate universe that is today's GOP versus the Democratic Party.  Whether or not the apparent Obama lead will hold is anyone's guess, but the data suggests that the GOP attempt to portray Mitt Romney as anything other than a cold, money loving, arrogant man who knows - and worse yet cares - nothing about the lives of most Americans.  He and Ann Romney are truly today's would be Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.  Here are highlights from Nate Silver's piece in the New York Times:

On Friday, we began to see reasonably clear signs that President Obama would receive some kind of bounce in the polls from the Democratic convention.

Mr. Obama had another strong day in the polls on Saturday, making further gains in each of four national tracking polls. The question now is not whether Mr. Obama will get a bounce in the polls, but how substantial it will be.

Some of the data, in fact, suggests that the conventions may have changed the composition of the race, making Mr. Obama a reasonably clear favorite as we enter the stretch run of the campaign.

On Saturday, Mr. Obama extended his advantage to three points from two points in the Gallup national tracking poll, and to four points from two in an online survey conducted by Ipsos. He pulled ahead of Mitt Romney by two points in the Rasmussen Reports tracking poll, reversing a one-point deficit in the edition of the poll published on Friday.

A fourth tracking poll, conducted online by the RAND Corporation’s American Life Panel, had Mr. Obama three percentage points ahead of Mr. Romney in the survey it published early Saturday morning; the candidates had been virtually tied in the poll on Friday. (The RAND survey has an interesting methodology — we’ll explore it more in a separate post.)

The gains that Mr. Obama has made in these tracking polls over the past 48 hours already appear to match or exceed the ones that Mr. Romney made after his convention. The odds, however, are that Mr. Obama has some further room to grow.

Obviously, I hope the bounce for Obama grows since, in my view, it is critical that the GOP in its current state must be defeated in November for the good of the country.  It is far past time that angry white evangelicals be impacting the future of the country.  

The Increasely Open Racism of the GOP and "Conservatives"

Every now and then I receive comments that are almost down right scary in their venom - these typically come from the "godly Christian" crowd.  I don't publish these remarks for several reasons not the least of which is I refuse to provide a platform for such unvarnished hatred.  Other comments that go unpublished often reveal the dark racism of putative "conservatives" and many self identified Republicans.  These latter comments often are chilling because they reflect an utter inability on the part of the writer to see the humanity in anyone who isn't a white heterosexual.  And then there are the nutcases like the author of a comment I received yesterday that are obsessed with the lunacy that Barack Obama is out to "destroy American."  The author of this comment apparently sees the "destruction of America" to be ending a period in time dominated by white heterosexual Christian privilege where gays stayed deep in the closet out of fear and where blacks and other racial minorities "knew their place."   I will not publish the comment in full, but here are some highlights that are to me indicative of what has become of supposed conservationism and the GOP:

I have known since day one that this man is out to ruin America. One might wonder why he would do bad things to this country;.....after all wouldn't that result in destroying his "Presidential legacy"? Of course it would if he valued an "American legacy". My belief since his beginning, has been that he doesn't not like this country and never has. He has studied from past men who despised this country and he has been brainwashed into believing that America is the enemy of the Muslim world.

[H]is Father was a dark skinned African Arab Muslim, NOT an African Black. His ultimate goal would be to be known in the Muslim world as the man who "took down" America and paved the way for the Muslims to take over world dominance. If you think my view of this is radical, then OK, just hide and watch, and remember.  .   .   .   .   We are in a very dangerous time right now, and our country is in peril if we allow this man to continue. 

The author identified himself as a retired military officer.  Apparently, he never figured out during his career that the the Constitution and the rights of citizens extend to everyone, not just white Christian conservatives.  The idea of someone who is not 100% white in the White House has put this sad individual over the edge.  What's disturbing is that this mindset is now the norm in the GOP and among those likely sitting in church pews in conservative denominations this morning congratulating themselves on the piety and godliness.

Religion and a Non-White American Future

For far too long the "public religion" if you will in the USA has focused on white conservative Christianity.  Now, with the USA headed towards becoming a minority white nation within a few decades, the "public religion" will be facing increased pressure to cease granting special rights and special deference top the white Christianist who have long sought to impose their religious beliefs on all of American society.  It is a pretty safe bet that these religious extremists who hold little but hatred and bigotry towards non-whites and anyone deemed "other" and that they will not peacefully and willingly give up their special status.  Indeed, it is more than likely that that increased hatred and acrimony will be the hallmarks of the process that ensues as the white Christianist ultimately assume minority status in America. Moreover, we can expect to see anything but "godly behavior" as the Christofascist struggle to hold on to their dwindling power.  A piece in Religion Dispatches looks at the coming conflict as the white Christofacsists slide to minority status.  I for one, have absolutely no sympathy for the white modern day Pharisees as they slide to a minority position that they have long deserved given how they have utterly perverted Christ's Gospel message.  Here are some article highlights:

The U.S. Census Bureau, never one to rush to judgment, has now made it official: fewer than 50% of the babies born in the United States during the year ending in July of last year were white.

That’s right: among the nursery set, certifiably white bundles of joy are now in the minority, and this trend is considered irreversible in view of the higher fertility rates among immigrant groups already living here and a virtual end to the in-migration of whites from abroad.

This observation implies that younger people of color might take counsel among themselves and decide that it’s not such a great idea to subsidize old white people. Myself, I think it’s much more likely that the old white people will use their undue political influence to squeeze more from those whom they were once pleased to refer to as “the minorities” (and other less polite terms).

Seeing the end in sight, conservative white Californians began more than three decades ago to implement a series of voter-enacted restrictions on the raising of any new taxes or fees.

Taken together, these restrictions created the ironclad supermajority requirements that now block the California legislature and all local elected bodies in this state from raising adequate revenue to support the education of kids who (surprise!) don’t look like “us” anymore. The effects of the revenue chokehold are plain to see: K-12 schools in California now rank at or near the bottom on various national scales, and California’s once-vaunted high-quality, low-cost public higher education system has been almost entirely trashed. 

 America’s most visionary spirits (e.g., Walt Whitman in “Democratic Vistas”) always expected the idea of American democracy and the idea of a new and blended population to lift people above any form of tribalism. Alas, this is not that kind of sane culture. Tribalism, especially white tribalism, still runs deep. And as religion has everything to do with this particular form of insanity, religion is where we should look, both to gauge the scope of the problem and to scan for possible pathways to sanity. 

The distinctly American hierarchical system, the comprehensive system of economic and social control that James Lawson tellingly refers to as “plantation capitalism,” has long been thoroughly bonded to a white supremacist ideology. Bad religion functions as the binding agent, sanctifying hierarchy and validating racial subordination. No one, then or now, seems to catch the irony of Christianity—a distinctly un-tribal religion in its origins—becoming a primary vector for raw white tribalism on American soil. 

  

[J]ust consider (if you please) the seamlessness lying within the old expression “white Christian nation.” When world-bestriding figures like Theodore Roosevelt spoke of “the nation” or “the national interest,” he did not need to spell out (although he often did) that he was referring to white Christian people, particularly white Christian men.

More than a century beyond Roosevelt’s day, one does not often hear the words “white Christian nation” uttered out loud any longer. What one does hear, however, amounts to code for the same thing. Thus, R.J. Rushdoony’s still-influential ideas about forging a godly nation—a nation organized according to biblical law—take it pretty much for granted that godly social organization has whites on top. Rushdoony, who lived into the current century, condemned interracial marriage as “unequal yoking.” 

Un-dead David Barton, another hugely influential figure and hero to the religious right, doesn’t really need to say anything at all about retaining white hegemony   .   .   .   But it’s there by implication when Barton assaults church-state separation as a heathenish imposition upon the Founders’ original plan to build the new nation on Christian principles and to keep (white) Christians in charge. 

  To be clear, again: this openly racist view is no longer trumpeted in the public square in the plain light of day.  . .     So, for example, laws and practices known to subjugate and suppress the political voice of millions of African Americans via mass incarceration remain, on their surface, race-neutral.  .  .  .   But does anyone doubt that the threat to white hegemony (both economic and cultural) plays a major role in creating such legislative monuments?

 [T[he implied continuing linkage of “American” to “white Christian” also accounts for a good bit of the obsession with Obama as an outsider: neither a true American (where is that birth certificate?), nor a true Christian.  .   .   .  Here’s a proposition: if breaking the grip of plantation capitalism and its political enablers requires the empowerment of immigrant communities and communities of color, then white liberals who are serious about wanting a significant progressive shift in the way this country is governed must offer maximum strategic support for the organization and mobilization of non-white people and non-white movements.

White skin privilege among educated elites is every bit as persistent as white tribalism among non-elites—and in some ways more destructive.

The power struggle will be ugly.  I expect non-whites to ultimately win.  But along the way it will become painful obvious that the white Christianists are anything but true Christians who  embraces the Gospel message.  Hatred, lies, untruths and vile behavior will likely be their main attributes.  The world will be a far better place when their claim to being the arbitrators of morality is ended.

A Cynical Look at Obama's and the NAACP's"Evolution" on Gay Marriage

Sometimes even if the end result may be beneficial, it still is galling that (1) the result took so long to achieve and (2) the real motives for the result remain open to question.  Such is the case with the recent embrace of same sex marriage by Barack Obama and the NAACP among others.  Why the change in attitude now?  Was a sense in a change in the wind direction finally enough to convince the cynical that it was finally safe to do the right thing?  Or was there a fear that by not "evolving" the political price might be too high?  These are the questions raised in a piece in Salon that looks at black homophobia and the political gyrations that have transpired over the last few weeks.  The piece also looks at the very real damage that black homophobia wreaks on the black community as black pastors continue to all too often act as willing water carriers for anti-black white Christianist organizations such as The Family Foundation here in Virginia.  Yes, there's snark in the column, but also a lot of truth.  Here are highlights:

I still believe that President Barack Obama, for his ubiquitous campaign promises of “hope” and “change,” publicly came out for same-sex marriage too late in his presidency — the time to do the right thing is (almost) always right now — and I still believe that Obama publicly came out for same-sex marriage only after he’d calculated that it was politically safe to do so (and maybe even only after he’d calculated that it was politically harmful to continue not to do so).

And I certainly don’t want to be told that I should be thankful that Obama politically went out on a limb for my fellow non-heterosexuals and otherwise non-gender-conforming individuals when, in fact, we helped put him in the Oval Office, and when, in fact, our equal human and civil rights always have been and always will be far more important than is one politician.

All of that said, Obama’s belated pro-same-sex-marriage proclamation seems to be having benefits that perhaps even he didn’t foresee.  Not only have leaders within the black community such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton proclaimed that they support same-sex marriage — Jackson not long ago enough was adamant that same-sex marriage is not about civil rights – but the NAACP yesterday announced its support of same-sex marriage, calling same-sex marriage a civil right.

[T]he good news is that old bigots do die, that they have fewer days ahead of them than they have behind them. And as today’s younger bigots grow older and their bigotry becomes less and less acceptable, at least they increasingly will keep their stupid fucking mouths shut and keep their ignorance and hatred to their miserable selves.

Given that blacks have been the one racial group in the United States most opposed to equality for non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals, having the likes of Obama and Jealous and Jackson and Sharpton now proclaiming that the black community should share the civil rights pie already with non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals should, within a few years, I surmise, put a fairly solid majority of Americans (say, at least 55 percent of them) in favor of equality for all.

Saletan’s article even indicates that perhaps black homophobia helped get George W. Bush a second term in 2004:

A report from the pro-gay National Black Justice Coalition attributes President Bush’s 2004 re-election in part to the near-doubling of his percentage of the black vote in Ohio, which he achieved “by appealing to black churchgoers on the issue of marriage equality.” This year, blacks in California were targeted the same way.

Saletan then goes, at some length, into the black homophobes’ “mutability”/“immutability” “argument,” which I just don’t fucking buy. (Who chooses to be a member of an historically reviled and oppressed minority group? Fucking duh.) I still surmise, as I wrote recently, that most homophobic blacks remain homophobic primarily because (1) they want to remain, in the national story, the only victims of prejudice and discrimination and oppression, because their identity is wrapped up in race-based victimhood, real or imagined/fabricated, and (2) because they want there to be one minority group that even they still can shit and piss upon, because it’s better to be near the bottom of the sociological dog-pile that is the United States of America than it is to be at the very bottom, isn’t it?

This is cruelty and hypocrisy, of course, to demand equality for one’s own minority group but to continue to shit and piss upon the members of another historically oppressed minority group.

And, of course, homophobia within the black community doesn’t just hurt gay whites like me.  .  .  .  . The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in fact, reports:

African Americans face the most severe burden of HIV of all racial/ethnic groups in the United States. Despite representing only 14 percent of the US population in 2009, African Americans accounted for 44 percent of all new HIV infections in that year. Compared with members of other races and ethnicities, African Americans account for a higher proportion of HIV infections at all stages of disease — from new infections to deaths.

Black homophobia — and its attendant ignorance and fear and stunning lack of education and enlightenment – probably is the No. 1 reason for those grim statistics, and, of course, heterosexual black women are less likely to contract HIV and other STDs if their black male sexual partners who actually are homosexual or bisexual don’t feel pressured to lead double lives in order to give the appearance of heterosexuality in order to please the homophobic bigots in their lives.

And, of course, it’s much easier for me and other non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals to be supportive of the members of the black community if we have the same love and respect from them that they want from us. With equal human and civil rights for everyone, everyone wins.

Except, perhaps, for the members of the right wing, who have opposed equal human and civil rights, who have opposed liberty and justice for all, forever.  That so many blacks have shared that trait with the white wingnuts is nothing short of tragic.

 I suspect some will not like some of these opinions, but that fact doesn't make them any less true.  Even more in the black community need to wake up to the reality of our common enemy.

Right Wing: America is Becoming Non-White-That's a Bad Thing

We all knew it was coming - the far right's freaking out over the new census data that reports that off all new babies born in the United States, whites now make up less than 50% of new births.  Uber-bitch herself, Phyllis Schlafly (at left) of Eagle Forum is beside herself and is lamenting that this is bad news for America.  In Schlafly's always bigoted mind, being non-white immediately equates to being an immigrant which she says means not "sharing American values."  Her equally big concern: "it is a good bet that they will not be voting Republican when they start voting in large numbers."  One might ask what are "American values"?  Native American values?  Whites after all were not the first Americans.  As for not voting Republican, given the party's anti-immigrant, anti-non-white, anti-non-ultra-right Christian agenda, the GOP and people like Schlafly have no one to blame but itself for its unattractiveness to those who do not belong to the white supremacist right wing Christian crowd.  Here a sampling of Schlafly's odious comments:

For decades, the NY Times has been promoting immigration policies that heavily favored a huge influx of non-whites. Today's lead story brags:

WASHINGTON — After years of speculation, estimates and projections, the Census Bureau has made it official: White births are no longer a majority in the United States.

It is not a good thing. The immigrants do not share American values, so it is a good bet that they will not be voting Republican when they start voting in large numbers.  

The NY Times liberals seek to destroy the American family of the 1950s, as symbolized by Ozzie and Harriet. The TV characters were happy, self-sufficient, autonomous, law-abiding, honorable, patriotic, hard-working, and otherwise embodied qualities that made America great. In other words, the show promoted values that NY Times liberals despise.

Instead, the USA is being transformed by immigrants who do not share those values, and who have high rates of illiteracy, illegitimacy, and gang crime, and they will vote

Not surprisingly, Schlafly considers herself a "good Christian." And sure enough, her core principles are scorn and hatred towards others and -  self-congratulatory feigned piety. 

Democrat when the Democrats promise them more food stamps.

Why Obama’s Gay Marriage Endorsement Won’t Matter Much in November

With the Christofascists seeking to benefit from Barack Obama's endorsement of gay marriage, the political pundits are all over the map as to what impact, if any, Obama's endorsement will have on the 2012 election.  While the Christofascists will seek to use the issue to generate voter turn out, the reality is that they and those inclined to listen to them already hate Obama with a passion and they would be doing the same thing regardless of Obama's action this week.  Moreover, for those not drinking deeply from the well of laced Kool-Aid, the gay marriage issue alone likely will not be decisive - poll after poll has ranked so-called social issues dead last in terms of importance to voters.  And for those who would point to what happened in North Carolina, it's important to remember that the primary vote over all was very low turn out.  Something that will not be the case in November.  A piece in The Daily Beast makes a similar argument.  Here are highlights:

Could Barack Obama be the next Patrick Murphy?

 But here’s the thing that all of these salivating GOP strategists—and Democratic worrywarts—may be overlooking: if you actually sit down and try to identify which votes (in which states) Obama is likely to lose over gay marriage, it’s tough to come up with much.

 

To win reelection, the president doesn’t have to replicate his 2008 blowout. He just needs 270 electoral votes—95 fewer than he racked up four years ago. Team Obama sees five ways to get there, as I reported in January. The West Path would add Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada to the Kerry states, for 272 electoral votes. The Florida Path would add just Florida, for 275. The South Path runs through North Carolina and Virginia (274 electoral votes), while the Midwest Path includes Ohio and Iowa (270 electoral votes). Finally, there’s the Expansion Path: Obama carries all the John Kerry states except blue-collar Pennsylvania and libertarian New Hampshire, then compensates with victories in Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and John McCain’s home state of Arizona, which was uncontested in 2008, for obvious reasons.

Take a closer look at those paths. Which voters do they rely on? Several require the president to beat Kerry’s margins among Latinos, the fastest-growing subset of the electorate: the West Path, the Expansion Path, and to a lesser extent the South Path (both North Carolina and Virginia have experienced double-digit Hispanic growth over the last decade). The latter also hinges on increasing African-American turnout vis-à-vis 2004. To follow the Midwest Path, Obama will have to outperform Kerry among working-class Iowans and Ohioans. And Florida is ... well, Florida. It almost always reflects the larger electorate, voting for the eventual winner in every presidential contest since 1964.

So to figure out whether gay marriage will hurt Obama in the fall, you have to figure whether gay marriage alone is likely to block any of these five paths—that is, whether Obama is likely to receive fewer votes from these specific constituencies in these specific states than Kerry received in 2004. For that to occur, Obama would have to suffer a 32-point net loss in Latino support in Nevada; a 27-point net loss in Latino support in New Mexico; a 27-point net loss in Latino support in Florida; a 9-point net loss in black support in Virginia; a 19-point net loss in black support in North Carolina; a 12-point net loss in working-class support in Iowa; and a 5-point net loss in working-class support in Ohio.  
In other words, it’s unlikely.   .   .   .  It’s hard to imagine that Obama’s personal opinion about same-sex marriage—remember, he’s not pushing any kind of federal legislation—will be such a turn-off for key demographic groups in key states that their support for the president will plummet to sub-Kerry levels come November.

That said, politics does not occur in a vacuum. Outside organizations may use Obama’s announcement to mobilize evangelicals who would have otherwise been unenthusiastic about voting for Romney; if the president doesn’t match Kerry’s performance among white men, which seems likely, his cushion among minorities will shrink. And so on. But it’s just as likely that these forces will be balanced out by equal and opposite forces: young voters reinspired to volunteer and turn out on Election Day; Latinos appalled by Romney’s far-right immigration stance. The bottom line is that it’s very hard to imagine Obama shedding enough votes on gay marriage to really make a difference where it matters most.

 If Obama ends up being another Patrick Murphy—if he surrenders all 96 of his spare electoral votes—it won’t have much to do with the announcement he made on ABC earlier this week. Gay marriage might, at most, tip the scales at the margins. But the economy will have to do the rest.