Pew Survey: White Christians No Longer a Majority

Click image to enlarge

The latest Pew Research Center Religious Landscape survey results released yesterday have what in my view is very good news except perhaps for the Republican Party:  only 46 percent of American adults are white Christians, a decrease from 55 percent in 2007.  That's right, now the GOP is chasing the vote of a minority of the adult voting population.  When one winnows out the non-Christofascist elements, the number likely support the quasi-theocratic agenda of the Republican Party is even further reduced. Specifically, 31 percent of White Christians identify as supporting Democrats, so the net number supporting the GOP equates to just 31.7 percent of the adult Americans constitute the religious extremist base of the GOP.  Politico looks at the new survey findings.  Here are highlights:

White Christians now make up less than half of the U.S. population, largely receding from the majorities of most demographic groups, with one notable exception: the Republican Party.

According to the latest results from Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape survey published Monday by National Journal's Next America project, just 46 percent of American adults are white Christians, down from 55 percent in 2007.

At the same time, according to the report, the share of white Christians identifying as Republican has remained steady, even equal with the share of the party that carried President Ronald Reagan to his 1984 reelection. Nearly seven in 10 white Christians — 69 percent — identify with or lean toward the GOP, while just 31 percent do the same with Democrats.

Among nonwhite Christians, meanwhile, 32 percent identify with or lean toward Democrats, and just 13 percent do the same with Republicans.

In less than a decade, the gap in Christian identification between Democrats and Republicans has increased by 50 percent. According to the data presented, in 2007, 88 percent of white Republicans and 70 percent of white Democrats identified as Christian, an 18-point disparity. By 2014, 84 percent of white Republicans identified as Christian, but the share of white Democrats identifying as Christian fell by 13 points, to 57 percent, a 27-point gap.

The National Journal had this additional findings:

In a land­mark shift, few­er than half of White Demo­crats with a col­lege de­gree now identi­fy as Chris­ti­ans; that’s a much smal­ler per­cent­age than among the party’s Blacks and Lati­nos.

54 per­cent of all Amer­ic­ans who don’t identi­fy with any re­li­gious tra­di­tion now call them­selves Demo­crats. Just 23 per­cent of the “nones” identi­fy as Re­pub­lic­ans, with 22 per­cent call­ing them­selves in­de­pend­ents.

[W]hile black and Latino Demo­crats do some­times take dif­fer­ent views on so­cial is­sues than sec­u­lar white lib­er­als, af­fin­ity on oth­er is­sues—from im­mig­ra­tion to gov­ern­ment act­iv­ism—so far has trumped those dis­agree­ments. “You are not see­ing any evid­ence that there is less sup­port for Demo­crats among ra­cial and eth­nic minor­it­ies be­cause [re­li­gious] ‘nones’ are a grow­ing share of the party,” . . .

Personally,  I long for the day when Christians of all races are a small, powerless minority of Americans and they are no longer to infuse their hate and bigotry into the civil laws.  As for the right wing Christians, they best be hoping that as they become a smaller and smaller minority of the population the new majority doesn't treat them the way these godly folk have treated others.  

Census: Minority Babies are Now the Majority in USA

Click image to enlarge

Brace yourself for hysteria from the white Christofascists and the white supremacist allies once they digest this new census information:  of the new babies being born, most are members of minority groups.  Bryan Fischer, Rush Limbaugh, and similar talking heads of the far right will be sending out a veritable wave of flying spittle.  In a perverse way, it will be entertaining to watch.  Meanwhile, this ought to be a serious wake up call to the Republican Party that continues to pander to aging white conservatives while alienating everyone else.  Ditto for the Virginia GOP.  Will the Party wake up to reality?  I'm certainly not going to be holding my breath.  Here are highlights from the Washington Post on the new census numbers:

For the first time in U.S. history, most of the nation’s babies are members of minority groups, according to new census figures that signal the dawn of an era in which whites no longer will be in the majority.  Population estimates show that 50.4 percent of children younger than 1 last year were Hispanic, black, Asian American or in other minority groups. 

The latest estimates, which gauge changes since the last census, are a reflection of an immigration wave that began four decades ago. The transformation of the country’s racial and ethnic makeup has gathered steam as the white population grows collectively older, especially compared with Hispanics.  The census has forecast that non-Hispanic whites will be outnumbered in the United States by 2042, and social scientists consider that current status among infants a harbinger of the change.

 

Although minorities make up about 37 percent of the U.S. population, the District and four states are majority minority — California, Hawaii, New Mexico and Texas.

Metropolitan Washington, where whites are in the minority, is far ahead of the curve. Among children younger than 5, there are more minorities than whites in virtually every jurisdiction except Arlington and Loudoun counties. Statewide, Virginia has just barely more white children under age 1 than minorities, but they are on the verge of falling below half. 

One of the biggest factors in the demographic change is age. Whites are by far the oldest group. Their median age is over 42, so many are beyond their prime childbearing years. In contrast, the median age for Hispanics is under 28. Blacks and Asians have median ages in their early 30s. 

 

William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, said the slowdown in immigration may delay the nation’s transformation to a majority-minority society from 2042 to 2050 or beyond. But he said it will not prevent it.

“Eventually, when the economy returns, we’re going to get more immigrants, maybe not from Mexico but from other parts of the world,” he said. Without so many youthful immigrants, he added, the United States would look more like Japan, with its disproportionate share of elderly citizens.  “We were already seeing a declining youth population in large parts of the country,” Frey said.

The future is here, in Northern Virginia, where several hundred thousand immigrants have settled over the past 25 years from societies as different as Vietnam, El Salvador, Ethiopia and Iraq. 

In both Maryland and Virginia, the numbers of Hispanics and Asians continued to grow sharply. The number of blacks increased modestly, while the number of whites was virtually unchanged. 

Personally, the changes in the nation's demographics don't frighten me whatsoever.  But then, I'm not one who finds it impossible to see the common humanity of others unless they look and think just like me.  Among the Virginia GOP and at The Family Foundation, that's not a trait you're likely to see.  They only seem to be able to show empathy to white conservative Christians.  The rest of us - in their book we simply do not matter and are to be maligned and denigrated.    The white Christianists had best hope that as they become the minority the new majority doesn't treat them as they have treated minorities in the past.  Pay backs could be hell.

Demographics Favor Obama Over Romney

Besides lamenting the dramatic lurch of the Republican Party to far right/Christianist insanity, I continue to be dumbfounded that the GOP is placing all of its eggs in a shrinking demographic - i.e., aging white far right Christians and the ignorance worshiping loons in the Tea Party - and possibly throwing away the future.  Just about every report on the nation's changing demographics ought to be a loudly ringing alarm bell for the GOP, yet in its quest to be the party of political whores to the far right, the party embraces policies that alienate future generations of younger voters be it on issues of immigration to same sex marriage.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at how the nation's changing demographics will favor Obama, not Romney, in November.  Here are highlights: 

It was no fluke four years ago that America elected its first black president, and the trends that helped Barack Obama make history are evident today in demographics that favor his reelection. Millennials, the most liberal generation, are increasing at the rate of 4 million a year; there were 48 million in ’08, there are 64 million today, and Obama won them by 66 percent. Minorities too are growing as a share of the electorate, and Obama won them last time by 80 percent.

After the disappointments of the last four years, it’s unlikely that Obama will match his ’08 margins with these demographics. But to win, he has to do well enough among millennials and minorities to compensate for his weakness among white working-class voters, who were once the core of the Democratic base and now are the GOP’s bread and butter. “A real wild card is how many of them are going to show up,” 

 More single people, secular people, and people with college degrees are all part of what Teixeira calls a “warming trend” toward Democrats. White working-class voters, the group most resistant to Obama, were 28 percent of the electorate in ’08, and they’re down another 3 percent this year. But that’s a national number; in Ohio, a battleground state, they are 54 percent of the electorate. 

The white working class is “plummeting” as a share of voters, said Teixeira, replaced by white college graduates and minorities.   .   .   .    “Even if Obama lost working-class whites by 23 points, he could still win the election because the country has changed so much,” said Teixeira. 

The history of political parties is that over the long term they adjust to changing demographics and evolving attitudes. Trende predicts that by the time his young children are in college, the GOP will embrace gay marriage. And Teixeira said the Democratic Party, if it wants to retain the loyalty of Hispanics and young people, will have to deliver for them on economic growth and opportunity. “They can’t just rely on protecting Medicare and Social Security,” he said.

In the short term, though, there is a less harmonious scenario, a “racialized” politics that will play out over the coming months as the GOP doubles down on the share of the electorate it must carry by a big margin, those white working-class voters.  .   .   .   .  Evidence of this racialization is evident in Arizona, said Trende, where Gov. Jan Brewer “did everything she possibly could to alienate Latinos.” Running for reelection in 2010, Brewer ran behind McCain with Hispanics, but ahead of him by six or seven points among whites as he won reelection to the U.S. Senate.

The GOP: The "White Man’s Party"

A second Washington Post column looks at a phenomenon I have noted myself and commented upon: the fact that the Republican Party is becoming the party of white Christian conservatives while everyone else id decidedly unwelcome in the GOP despite lip service to the contrary. Some of the coded messages given by some of the GOP presidential candidates such as Newt Gingrich have not even been all that subtle in stirring the racism pot. The result is that the GOP seems headed further and further toward extremism while it panders to the bigotries of this shrinking core of the party. Gays, blacks, Hispanics, non-Christians - the list is endless - are truly not welcome unless they are willing to act like blacks trying to belong to the KKK. Here are some column highlights:

In 1868, Horatio Seymour ran for president as the nominee of the Democratic Party, or the “white man’s party,” as it was called. The Democratic heartland in those days was the “reconstructed” South. White men there loathed the Republican Party and its standard-bearer, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant — who relied on the votes of newly enfranchised blacks. Women, of course, could not vote.

Today, such overt racial appeals are as passe as the “solid” Democratic South. But racial polarization, alas, is not. As election analyst Sean Trende argues in a provocative new book, “The Lost Majority,” one plausible scenario for the American future is the entrenchment of “racialized” parties . . . .

We’re already well on the way. According to Trende, the Democratic share of the white vote for president has lagged its share of the total vote by a steadily increasing margin since 1980; the white electorate “leaned” against the Democrats by 10 points in 2008, even though Barack Obama did better with whites than John Kerry had four years earlier. A similar pattern holds for the congressional vote.

Data from other sources confirm these tendencies. More than three-fourths of African American voters identify with Democrats; Hispanics favor Democrats 47 percent to 24 percent, according to a 2011 Gallup poll.

According to Pew, barely a third of white men consider themselves Democrats. If the GOP is becoming the new “white man’s party,” the Democrats are reliant on women and people of color.

The causes are, by now, familiar: the white backlash against civil rights and the resulting long march of Southern whites from the Democratic Party to the GOP; the defection of white ethnic “Reagan Democrats” in the North; the GOP embrace of conservative positions on abortion and other social issues, which alienated many women;

The trend toward a whiter, maler GOP and a browner, more female Democratic Party took root over decades in which broad structural changes — constitutional, economic and social — incentivized politicians to appeal to voters, openly and otherwise, in such a way as to produce today’s racializing parties. Those habits won’t change easily.

Still, it’s hard to see much future for a GOP that has minimal support from blacks and Latinos, especially when the latter are such a fast-growing part of the population. Though the growth of the Latino population appears to favor Democrats, the party can hardly afford to write off white men altogether.

An optimistic view is that party racialization is approaching the point of diminishing returns — and that the losing party in 2012 will conclude that it must broaden its base, or die.

The End of White America?

The End of White America? That's the title of an new article in the Atlantic Monthly the substance of which will no doubt get the Kool-Aid drinking elements of the GOP and Christian Right all a twitter and hyperventilating since they go absolutely crazy over the idea that America may cease to be a white majority nation. These are after all the same folks - or their descendants - who used the Bible to justify segregation and bans on interracial marriage. The only segment of the population that they like less than non-whites and mixed race individuals are LGBT citizens. They do not judge people by their character or abilities but rather only by their skin color, religious affiliation and sexual orientation. In my view, they are what's wrong with America and U.S. politics. And I expect that we will see even more intolerance arise from these self-styled "real Americans" as they seek to marginalize non-whites, mixed race, and gay Americans, all of whom are examples of the dreaded "other." Here are some story highlights:

*

Whether you describe it as the dawning of a post-racial age or just the end of white America, we’re approaching a profound demographic tipping point. According to an August 2008 report by the U.S. Census Bureau, those groups currently categorized as racial minorities—blacks and Hispanics, East Asians and South Asians—will account for a majority of the U.S. population by the year 2042. Among Americans under the age of 18, this shift is projected to take place in 2023, which means that every child born in the United States from here on out will belong to the first post-white generation. Obviously, steadily ascending rates of interracial marriage complicate this picture, pointing toward what Michael Lind has described as the “beiging” of America.

*

As a purely demographic matter, then, the “white America” that Lothrop Stoddard believed in so fervently may cease to exist in 2040, 2050, or 2060, or later still. But where the culture is concerned, it’s already all but finished. Instead of the long-standing model of assimilation toward a common center, the culture is being remade in the image of white America’s multiethnic, multicolored heirs. For some, the disappearance of this centrifugal core heralds a future rich with promise.

*

Not everyone was so enthused. . . . [I]in his 2001 book, The Death of the West, [Pat] Buchanan rote: “Mr. Clinton assured us that it will be a better America when we are all minorities and realize true ‘diversity.’ Well, those students [at Portland State] are going to find out, for they will spend their golden years in a Third World America.” Today, the arrival of what Buchanan derided as “Third World America” is all but inevitable.

*

You can flee into whiteness as well. This can mean pursuing the authenticity of an imagined past: think of the deliberately white-bread world of Mormon America, where the ’50s never ended, or the anachronistic WASP entitlement flaunted in books like last year’s A Privileged Life: Celebrating WASP Style, a handsome coffee-table book compiled by Susanna Salk, depicting a world of seersucker blazers, whale pants, and deck shoes. . . . But these enclaves of preserved-in-amber whiteness are likely to be less important to the American future than the construction of whiteness as a somewhat pissed-off minority culture.

*

Like other forms of identity politics, white solidarity comes complete with its own folk heroes, conspiracy theories (Barack Obama is a secret Muslim! The U.S. is going to merge with Canada and Mexico!), and laundry lists of injustices. The targets and scapegoats vary—from multiculturalism and affirmative action to a loss of moral values, from immigration to an economy that no longer guarantees the American worker a fair chance—and so do the political programs they inspire.

*

[T]his white identity politics helped swing the 2000 and 2004 elections, serving as the powerful counterpunch to urban white liberals, and the McCain-Palin campaign relied on it almost to the point of absurdity (as when a McCain surrogate dismissed Northern Virginia as somehow not part of “the real Virginia”) as a bulwark against the threatening multiculturalism of Barack Obama. Their strategy failed, of course, but it’s possible to imagine white identity politics growing more potent and more forthright in its racial identifications in the future, as “the real America” becomes an ever-smaller portion of, well, the real America, and as the soon-to-be white minority’s sense of being besieged and disdained by a multicultural majority grows apace.

*

There will be dislocations and resentments along the way, but the demographic shifts of the next 40 years are likely to reduce the power of racial hierarchies over everyone’s lives, producing a culture that’s more likely than any before to treat its inhabitants as individuals, rather than members of a caste or identity group.