Debunking Myths About Religion, Race, and the 2020 Election
Are Evangelicals still in love with Trump? Do white "liberal" Protestants vote progressively? Is it fair to say that the Republican party is basically the party of white folks? Who are the religious nones and what role will they play in 2020 and beyond? Brad talks with Dr. Ryan Burge, Assistant Professor of Political Science, at Eastern Illinois University, about these questions and more.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
I am Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College, and I am here today to talk about race, religion, and myths, or debunking myths, regarding the 2020 election and sort of party affiliation and all that kind of stuff.
I'm joined in order to do that by Dr. Ryan Burge, who is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Eastern Illinois University.
And Dr. Burge's work has appeared all over the place, Politics and Religion, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, the Review of Religious Research.
He is a co-founder of Religion in Public, which is a great site.
If some of you out there are sort of academically inclined and also sort of willing to dig through numbers and analysis, it is an amazing resource, so check it out.
His work has been covered by Religion News Service.
Washington Post.
He's written for Christianity Today and many other places.
And so today we're going to talk about, I'm going to throw some ideas at him and I'm going to see if those are myth or if they're actually real.
So Ryan, thanks for joining me.
So glad to be here.
Thanks, Brad.
So I got in touch with you and said, hey, I've been following your Twitter feed.
It's It is been so helpful for me.
And it's really helped me think through, I think, some things that need to be clarified on this show.
But it also just brings up a lot of things that we've talked about for a long time.
So I want to start by talking about the Republican Party and evangelicals.
Listeners will then talk about mainline Protestants and Catholics, and whether or not they're actually what we would call progressive.
I want to talk about how race plays into all this, and then we'll get into the religiously unaffiliated, which are popularly called the nuns.
And so, here's the first idea, Ryan.
Here's something we've said on this podcast for a long time, that over the last generation and a half, the last 50 years, That evangelicals have basically merged into the Republican Party and they now exist as kind of a subset of the Republican Party in ways that are largely inseparable.
Do you think that the data shows that?
I mean, starting with maybe the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, do we see a large decline in white evangelicals being part of the Democrats and jumping into the Republican Party?
Yeah, so there's some facets like the Reagan years are wild when you look back at the data like the GSS specifically because it tracks back to 1972.
Man, like 30% of evangelicals were Republicans in 1980.
It was 60% by 1990.
So literally like the share doubled in just a decade and then it sort of like slowly drifted up from 60 to the upper 60s now.
So I think 30% in 10 years and then like 6% In 30 years.
So that's really where all the shift happened in American politics was when Ronald Reagan became president.
And really, that was when the religious right really took over as well, too.
The Summer of Mercy was in the early 1990s.
The pro-life movement hit its stride.
Falwell and Robertson hit their peak.
I mean, Robertson ran for office in 1988 and almost won, for goodness sakes.
I mean, all these things sort of coalesce at the perfect time in American politics for the religious right to take over.
And I think really what we're dealing with is sort of the tailwinds of what happened in the 1980s and 1990s.
It's inertia now.
I think a lot of white evangelicals are Republicans because they were born and bred as Republicans.
You know, I was born in 1982.
I grew up in that culture where it was just accepted that the Democrats were immoral and the Republicans were right, and you get inculcated with it as a child and you don't think anything else about it, and so it becomes almost generationally passed down from one group to the next group.
And so I think what we're seeing now is younger evangelicals, white evangelicals, are Republican, largely because their parents and grandparents became Republicans in the 1980s and 1990s, and they just don't see a reason to go the other direction.
So, to answer your question, yes, obviously, the actual number is 78% of white evangelicals voted for Trump, if you actually look at several different pieces of polling data.
And their approval rating, Trump's approval rating amongst white evangelicals today is north of 75%.
So even there, there's not been any sort of erosion amongst white evangelicals.
However, I published a piece today at Religion in Public that's showing there is some early, early evidence that there has been some backlash against Trump amongst evangelicals with college degrees and with graduate degrees.
White evangelicals have dropped off and now they're White evangelicals with graduate degrees, their approval of Trump is only about 64%.
It's 78% amongst white evangelicals who have a two-year college degree.
So, I mean, that's a significant drop-off.
Now, however, you don't see nearly that significant drop-off in the share of white evangelicals with college degrees who identify as Republicans, though.
So they're willing to push back on Trump somewhat, but they're not willing to shed that Republican identity because it means so much to them.
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