Posted on 12/25/2015 7:49:27 AM PST by SeekAndFind
About 15 years ago, on Christmas Eve, our family departed from the traditional American Jewish observance of the holiday (ordering Chinese takeout) and elected to find an open restaurant. We drove to the local city center (or what passes for it in suburbia) and were stunned to find that not only were all the restaurants open, they were also packed.
I had pictured my Christian friends and neighbors at home, gathered around the table Norman Rockwell–style, eating goose or ham or whatever gentiles eat bathed in the twinkling lights of decorated trees. In fact, I liked to think of them that way, and finding crowds treating Christmas Eve as just another night was almost a sacrilege.
Americans have long resisted the secularizing trend of Western Europe. In many Western European countries, churches stand virtually empty on Sundays and few profess belief in God (37 percent in the United Kingdom, 27 percent in France, 28 percent in the Netherlands). In the United States, according to Gallup, 92 percent said they believed in God in as recently as 2011, which was down only 4 points from the 1944 response.
If belief in God has hardly budged in the post-World War II era, religious life has steadily declined. Pew reports that just since 2007, the number of Americans who identify as Christian has dropped by 8 points, from 78.4 percent to 70.6 percent. A bit more than one point of that change is attributable to the growth of other faiths, but most is accounted for by the increase in those who are unaffiliated. Among the unaffiliated, the big story is the young.
Great-Grandma and Great-Grandpa's generation, born between 1928 and 1945, is 85 percent Christian (57 percent Protestant, 24 percent Catholic). Their Baby Boom children are 78 percent Christian. The Generation Xers are 70 percent Christian, and Millennials are between 57 and 56 percent Christian depending on when they were born. Americans are dropping out of church, marrying outside the faith they were raised in, and switching confessions at record rates. In 2014, 22.8 percent of American adults described themselves as unaffiliated with any church.
The loss of congregants has been most marked among mainline Protestants and Catholics, but evangelical churches have declined too (at a slower pace).
What does this mean for politics? It's good news for the Democrats. Religious observance, like marriage, is a good predictor of political preference. Adults with no religion lean Democrat by 36 points. Young, white evangelical Protestants lean strongly Republican. The more religious identification sags, the fewer young Republicans there are.
Similarly, married adults tend to vote Republican, while singles, especially single women, lean heavily Democratic. Fifty-three percent of married women voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 (there is also overlap between religious identification and the tendency to wed). But marriage is declining. Whereas 65 percent of American adults were married in 1980, just 51 percent of adults were married in 2012. Among the 20-to-34-year-old cohort, 57 percent are never-marrieds.
Republicans who imagine that these changes don’t affect voting might want to look at party ID. Between 1992 and 2014, the number of adults who said they were Democrats fell from 33 to 32 percent. The number who called themselves independent rose from 36 to 39 percent. And the number who identified as Republicans dropped from 28 to 23.
The 2016 election is an opportunity for many voters who would naturally be inclined to vote Democratic due to their age, ethnicity, region, lack of religious commitment, and marital status to consider a Republican. It’s always difficult for the same party to hold the White House for three consecutive terms, and Hillary Clinton is widely mistrusted.
But the Republican party, judging by the polls so far, seems more determined to “send a message†than to choose a candidate who can win. Marco Rubio is practically conjured from central casting to win this election. He carries a big swing state, he has a great immigrant story, he is deeply knowledgeable on the issues, he's a superb debater, a tea-party favorite, and (with the exception of immigration -- if you accept the premise that building a wall and deporting illegals is the conservative position) he is a firm conservative. Unlike Trump or Cruz, he articulates conservative ideas without needlessly antagonizing or frightening independents.
Portions of the Republican base are ferociously determined to punish Rubio for his immigration stance (though it differed only slightly from Senator Cruz's -- as for Trump's views, name the day). But the new Republican establishments -- talk radio, Twitter, Heritage Action -- are single-issue constituencies, and they seem to be in the driver’s seat.
-- Mona Charen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center
“Portions of the Republican base are ferociously determined to punish Rubio for his immigration stance...”
I haven’t met anyone who wants to “punish” Rubio. He’s free to play with Chucky, Juan, and the establishment, and drink all the water he wants. But nobody I associate with will be voting for him either.
Marco Rubio looks like he can sell cars, but not a country.
The reason so many are leaving the church is because the pastors no longer teach about the Good News, word of Christ. Look at the recent Marxist pope and the homosexual loving Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists and other leftist members of the World Council of Churches. Is it any wonder, that church attendance is diminishing.
The Republican Establishment as reflected by Mona Charen and the Religious Establishment are both lacking.
God or the “Higher Power” or whatever term you or I wish to use is not lacking.
God Is Love and that Love is reflected to us at Christmas.
I must take the actions of God and Love in my life and those actions will make the world better in spite of the “Establishments” I mentioned above.
I am not on this Earth to hate people but I must do the right things even if they are contrary to what “Establishments” want.
The article is myopic. Religously conservative Blacks remain the most religious. But they trend Democrat.
There is increasing immigration from South Asians, most of whom are not Christian. But many are religious.
Mexican immigrants (legal and illegal) are extremely religious. They cannot be ignored. Their politics can best be understood by watching FOR GREATER GLORY with Andy Garcia and Eva Longoria. Get the DVD.
If Republicans want to grow demographically and get the vote of the religious then understand what Rev Sam Rodriguez says.
Mona Charen may be right — in the short term. If she is, her type of hero — guys like Rubio, Bush, and Kasich — is not going to arrest our destructive move to the left. What will be needed are wise and determined fighters who will not cave and who will be prepared to pick up the pieces when liberalism crashes. This has happened before.
Try to sneak a final entry to the Wile E. Coyote Trump Frustration Award contest. This one is novel but not very impressive.
Precisely. None of these candidates approach perfect in my estimation, but Rubio is in the unacceptable category.
Demographics is destiny; excellent article.
Revival is something Christians can validly pray for. That God will prepare souls who are ready to hear and arrange that they will hear now. That is needed, or our politics won’t mean a hill of beans, and whatever flawed example of Christian witness the country was will all slide back into spiritually penurious misery. The opposite of what we used to understand as a “Christmas spirit.” And I guess Mona is getting a point there. If Christians are saying with the way they live that there is nothing special about Christmas, then how will the unsalty salt be made salty again.
Well, spiritual demographics matters most of all.
And that depends on people being willing to do things God’s way. Which will dissolve the hateful balkanization back into the love of God and neighbor. Our modern illiberal liberals jawbone about hate (and they are often correct in that much, even if unbalanced), but then plunge into even worse hate in the name of trying to solve that problem. All dressed up and nowhere to go, because the vertical dimension to God is not in their capabilities.
Are they implying that's because the Godless vote demonrat?
If the GOP wants to be a politically correct, multicultural party, pro gay, pro Islam, pro global warming, it won’t provide much of a home for the Christian right. As Western culture goes pop, Christians will abandon it. Christians in church only, or will-o-the-wisp Christians blown about by every cultural breeze, will apostatize to the left, and some to Islam, wherever Satan can take them, but it won’t be to the GOP. Why hang with the lapdog when you can hang with the masters.
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