Posted on 12/30/2019 6:24:12 AM PST by TigerClaws
Like the tumultuous adolescent years of human development, the changes during the teen years of the 21st century disrupted American identity as we’ve known it. These transformations have come upon us quickly, upending long-standing assumptions — particularly among white Christians — about the American social fabric. And as with teenagers, they have created a lot of anxiety and fear about the future.
Of all the changes to identity and belonging, the century’s second decade has been particularly marked by a religious sea change. After more than two centuries of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance, the United States has moved from being a majority-white Christian nation to one with no single racial and religious majority.
The United States has moved from being a majority-white Christian nation to one with no single racial and religious majority.
When I first identified this shift mid-decade in my 2016 book “The End of White Christian America,” I noted that the percentage of white Christians in the general population had dropped from 53 percent to 47 percent between 2010 and 2014 alone. Now, at the end of the decade, only 42 percent of Americans identify as white and Christian, representing a drop of 11 percentage points.
In the world of demographic measurement, where changes typically occur at a glacial pace, this drop in self-identified white Christians, averaging 1.1 percentage points a year, is remarkable. Changes of this magnitude are large enough to see and feel at the local level, as church rolls shrink and white Christian institutions hold less sway in public space. Related Opinion What Merry Christmas vs. Happy Holidays reveals about your identity
In addition to white American Christianity crossing the majority-minority threshold, the last decade also saw a particularly significant decline within one subgroup: white evangelicals. While the ranks of white mainline Protestants and white Catholics have been shrinking for decades, white evangelical Protestants had seemed immune to the forces eroding membership among other white Christian groups.
But since 2010, the number of white evangelical Protestants has dropped from 21 percent of the population to 15 percent. While white evangelical Protestants have enjoyed an outsized public presence over the last four years because of their predominance in President Donald Trump’s unshakeable base, it is notable that today they are actually roughly the same size as their white mainline Protestant cousins (15 percent vs. 16 percent, respectively).
The underlying tectonic forces producing these trends are the result of both demographics and departures. According to an analysis of U.S Census population projections by William Frey at the Brookings Institution, racial changes are partly fueling this trend.
In 2017, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that, for the first time, there was an absolute decline in the country’s white, non-Hispanic population. In other words, whites not only lost ground as a proportion of the population, but in actual numbers; there were more deaths than births. The U.S. Census Bureau now predicts that the U.S. will no longer be majority-white by 2045, and among children at every age below 10, whites are already a minority. Related Opinion We want to hear what you THINK. Please submit a letter to the editor.
But this is only part of the story. The simultaneous development in the religious landscape — the one that is turbocharging these trends — is the exodus of young people from white Christian churches and into the ranks of “the nones,” the growing number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation.
As recently as the 1990s, the percentage of religiously unaffiliated Americans was in single digits. That number increased to 19 percent by 2010 and rose another 7 percentage points over the last decade to 26 percent today.
The explosive growth of religiously unaffiliated Americans is primarily driven by white Christians; African American Protestants and the relatively small block of non-Christian religious groups (e.g., Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus) are largely holding steady as a proportion of the population, while Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander and other nonwhite Christian groups are generally growing.
The reasons for these departures from white Christian churches are complex, but many are rooted in the way that culture war politics played out over the last few decades of the 20th century. As white Christian millennials were coming of age, the rise of the Christian Right meant that the public faces of Christianity, and even religion overall, were a cadre of white male religious leaders who were almost exclusively supporting conservative Republican political candidates and who had opposing LGBTQ rights at the top of their agenda. Related Opinion Why Jewish parents need to concede defeat on Christmas
These commitments were an exceptionally challenging fit for a cosmopolitan cohort that leans progressive and for whom affirming LGBTQ rights is a near-consensus issue. For example, among Americans under the age of 30, only 18 percent identify as conservative while 75 percent support same-sex marriage.
Because throngs of their young people are heading for the church exits, white Christians are also graying as they are shrinking. Today, the median age of white Christians (55 years old) is 7 years older than the general population (48 years old) and 17 years older than religiously unaffiliated Americans (38 years old). Related Opinion America might be divided now, but we've overcome much worse (and can again)
The white Christian population’s anxieties about the future as they lose traction in the present have created a nostalgia for the past that has fueled support for Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda, and not just among white evangelicals. Solid majorities of each white Christian subgroup voted for Trump in 2016 and, in the Public Religion Research Institute’s most recent American Values Survey, nearly 9 in 10 (88 percent) white evangelicals and approximately two-thirds of both white mainline Protestants (68 percent) and white Catholics (65 percent) oppose impeaching and removing him from office. Recommended Congress Rep. John Lewis to undergo treatment for stage 4 pancreatic cancer Opinion Health care in America is dysfunctional — but its lack of transparency is downright dangerous
White Christian America’s attraction to Trump has little to do with his personality or character — a slim majority (52 percent) of white evangelicals, for example, say they wish his speech and behavior were more like previous presidents — and everything to do with something more important: their belief that “making America great again” necessarily entails restoring white Christian demographic and political dominance.
One PRRI survey question right before the 2016 election made the power of this nostalgia especially clear: “Since the 1950s, do you think American culture and way of life has changed for the better, or has it mostly changed for the worse?” Americans are divided nearly equally on this question, with 48 percent saying things have changed for the better and 51 percent for the worse. But solid majorities of white Christian groups — 57 percent of white Catholics, 59 percent of white mainline Protestants and fully 74 percent of white evangelical Protestants — believe things have changed for the worse. Among religiously unaffiliated Americans, nearly two thirds (66 percent) say things have changed for the better.
From the perspective of a healthy democratic society, one of the most alarming developments is that these trends have been compounding the political polarization in the country. Despite the demographic changes of the last decade, Republicans remain 72 percent white and Christian, three times the percentage of Democrats. And only 9 percent of Republicans are religiously unaffiliated, compared to 29 percent of Democrats.
This demographic and cultural sorting means that our partisan conflicts are increasingly driven not just by political disagreement but by entire worldviews.
This demographic and cultural sorting means that our partisan conflicts are increasingly driven not just by political disagreement but by entire worldviews that are rooted in religious, racial and generational values and identities. This arrangement leaves us ill-equipped to deal with a past that cannot be resurrected and to build a new, pluralistic future together.
Psychologists sometimes talk about the teen years as a period of “temporary insanity.” Adolescents, hurtling forward toward an unknown destination at unaccustomed speed, often assume high risks for short-term rewards and double-down on ill-conceived decisions. The teen years of the 21st century, with their massive demographic and religious changes, have produced much in our culture and politics that fit that description. Here’s hoping that the upcoming decade may find us able to accept and even embrace a future that — while different from our past — is already and inevitably well on its way.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/using-merry-christmas-or-happy-holidays-no-longer-about-putting-ncna1106181
Using Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays is no longer about putting a stranger at ease
The primary function of both greetings now is to characterize the speaker, serving as a badge of group identification.
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If you aren't going to say Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah then just say “Good day!”.
Telling me “holiday” without saying WHAT holiday is just rude. Your delivery is artificial, not genuine.
“...The brutal oppression of Christianity is the core goal of Democrats....”
The god-less RAT communists worship at the feet of Satan via of the altar of the abortion god, Molech where the most innocent amongst us are offered up as human sacrifice to “self”.
They are the enemy of this country and should be treated as such. No one with a modicum of common sense should ever vote for these demons....that includes all those Trump-hating soccer moms across the fruited plain.
Wow, to watch the “news”, one might think there was nothing in America but Atheists, queers, and social justice warriors. They need to get outside their little bubbles. White Christians need to keep rejecting the BS perpetrated by the media.
Pertaining to Citizenship, America should return to the strict wording of the Naturalization Act of 1790, the very first legislation by the first Congress. That would resolve White people from becoming a minority in a country that was created for them by the founders.
“until the loser decides they don’t like the game anymore and tears up the game board. “
That, my friend, is spot on.
Flood the country with third world trash, kill all the babies, corrupt and empty out the churches, believe men can be women . . .
And we wonder how we got here?
Tear up the game board
He’s one of their PR persons.
“The brutal oppression of whites is the core goal of Democrats.”
*Fixed
It’s not headcount, it’s culture.
“Did he identify this trend in 2014 and seek to prove it by 2016 and declare it correct in 2020?”
Shoot the messenger at your own peril. Understand that US society for good or bad was underpinned by Judeo-Christian values; Western European ethnicity; English common law and an accepted common language etc. It would be interesting to see a post-Christian America absent these underpinnings but fortunately I will likely not have that “opportunity.”
If you cannot see with your own eyes the things that the author describes in terms of demographic “diversity”, changes in local laws, new political faces and near empty church parking lots, you aren’t looking very hard.
Oh I read the “article”, but you absolutely must know from two decades of my posts here that I’m well aware of the National Question.
The absolute decline was predicted over a decade ago: the white population peak was due to “population momentum”, i.e., a maximum reached due to births decades before and including their attenuated offspring numbers...followed by an absolute decline, assuming the same aggregate birth numbers, which are below replacement rate.
The “dark conspiracy” is indeed at work in proportionate numbers: it is entirely the result of both flavors of immigration, AND of course the central sin: Abortion.
That the number of abortions since 1973 is about equal to the number of immigrants in roughly that time period is no accident: the economy fills its needs somehow. And it needs bodies to do the work.
But that economic reality is turbocharged by the ethnic interests of foreign populations and their enablers in the Civil Rights bureaucracies who design policies to favor them over the native WASP populaton. We can call them the “fundamental transformation enforcers”.
So you’re right up to a point about earning this on “merit” (more like demerit..) but remember that at every step of the way to this cliff, the herding party kept cooing that nothing like this would ever happen, and working to encourage that absolute decline (”Just have replacement children! No more, Mama Gaia can’t take it!”).
It will become known as the Greatest Crime in human history: the holocaust which wiped out what had been the Greatest Nation in human history. But it didn’t happen by accident, but by design.
Just ask Marcuse or Gramsci, since they proposed the structure of the national suicide.
Not all progressives wear D jerseys.....
Whatever stats are being used here are probably influenced by the Trump Effect. Trump always polls low because who knows who is on the other end of the phone or mailing. So, this is mostly BS.
PS
Population Momentum is not a new concept, but rather well defined:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3345894/
What’s new is the recognition of its effect on the native American (not native Aboriginal) population.
Where?
Certainly not in this piece.
I agree. But this article is most definitely about “headcount.”
I’m going with “when they wish you Merry Christmas” it’s codespeak for “FU!”. In that spirit I wish every libtard a Very Sincere Merry Christmas.
His forthcoming book is “White Too Long”
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/White-Too-Long/Robert-P-Jones/9781982122867
“As the nation grapples with demographic changes and the legacy of racism in America, Christianity’s role as a cornerstone of white supremacy has been largely overlooked.”
“White Too Long demonstrates how deeply racist attitudes have become embedded in the DNA of white Christian identity over time...”
“Jones challenges white Christians to acknowledge that public apologies are not enough—accepting responsibility for the past requires work toward repair in the present.”
“More broadly, it is no exaggeration to say that not just the future of white Christianity but the outcome of the American experiment is at stake.”
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