Shrinking Numbers, Holding Power: Iran, the UMC Schism,and More with Robert P. Jones
Brad speaks with PRRI CEO and author of "The End of White Christian America" Robert P. Jones. They discuss the ongoing developments with Iran, the United Methodist Church's split over LGBT issues, and how evangelicals are a shrinking demographic that somehow continues to hold enormous power in American politics.
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AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
I am Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College and we have a special announcement.
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With all of that out of the way, we now turn to my interview with Robert P. Jones, who is the CEO of PRRI and the author of The End of White Christian America.
I am absolutely thrilled to be joined today by Robert P. Jones, who is the CEO of PRRI, and also the author of The End of White Christian America, and the author of a forthcoming work, which we'll talk about in a minute, White Too Long.
And so, I know you're very busy, Robert.
Thanks for joining me.
I'm happy to be here.
Today is January 6, 2020.
I want to talk about what's happening with Iran and the U.S.
and evangelicals and all that stuff.
Before we get there, I'd like to just sort of contextualize some of your work for our audience.
Your book came out, I actually taught your book as soon as it came out, at Spring Semester 2017, My Religion and Politics.
Thank you!
And the students loved it.
We had great discussions surrounding white evangelical America.
And one of the things you say there is, There are huge demographic changes happening with this voting bloc and with this part of the U.S.
population.
I know you've talked about this endlessly, but for those listeners who are just not familiar with some of those statistics, what's happening with white evangelicals?
What's been so significant over the last decade?
Yeah, well the last decade has been absolutely critical.
Prior to that, white evangelicals were kind of an exception to the broader declines that were happening among white Christians in the country.
So white Catholics had been declining, white mainline Protestants, that group of kind of more progressive and more Northeastern based white Protestants had also been declining, but white evangelicals had not.
But in the last 10 years, that changed.
So just to give you a sense of it, we rewind the clock 10 years ago, white evangelical Protestants are a little more than 20%, 21% of the population.
And our latest numbers have them down to 15.
So a drop of 6 percentage points over the last 10 years.
And that's absolutely new.
And to kind of take it down, you know, to the denominational level, I grew up Southern Baptist.
It's the largest, as you know, evangelical denomination.
It's actually the largest Protestant denomination of all in the country.
And their numbers show, the internal numbers show the same thing.
They've lost more than a million members in the last decade.
With all of that, I mean, I know we have new Pew data on this as well, and I know we have new studies coming out all the time from PRRI that are supporting everything you're saying there.
You know, you wrote in The Atlantic that white evangelical Protestants, as you mentioned, went all the way from, in the mid-20s, down to 15%.
However, I think for many of our listeners, both those who are ex-evangelicals, those who are maybe mainline Protestants or Catholics who just wonder if the religious left is ever going to get some of the media attention that their counterparts on the religious right get, and even those who are just non-religious folks who wonder this question, why every time there's a political decision in this country, do we have to consult white evangelicals?
I guess what I'm getting at, Robert, is you're talking about 15% of the population, and yet it feels like they have a much bigger share of the power and the attention.
Is that true?
Well, yeah, it is true, and one of the reasons why it is true is because of the way our political parties are structured.
I think, unfortunately, we only have two political parties in this country, and white evangelicals Really, since the mid-1960s, after the Civil Rights Movement, really became an overwhelmingly Republican constituency.
It took a little bit of time, but by Reagan, by the Reagan years, white evangelicals have moved almost entirely inside the Republican Party.
So, you know, while they only make up 15% of the population, they make up twice that amount among Republicans.
They make up about a third Republicans.
So they're heavily, you know, they're overrepresented on one side of politics.
So that's a big base, you know, of one political party.
So, and particularly when that political party is in charge, as it is now in both the White House and in the Senate, that group holds an enormous amount of clout, despite their dwindling numbers.
Yeah, it certainly feels like it.
And And it's amazing to see the numbers when you realize they're at about 15% now.
And yet it just seems, I mean, we just had the Evangelicals for Trump rally last, you know, the end of last week, and it really does feel like they're everywhere.
And I think many people are surprised to realize how few of them are in the country.
With that said, you have written and you have data that shows that the 2024 election is going to be much different Then say the 2016 and even 2020.
2016 and even 2020.
So why does 2024 look different than either the 2016 or 2020 national elections?
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