The Decline of White Christian America with Robert P. Jones
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In this episode of Straight White American Jesus, Brad dives into PRRI’s 2023 Census of American Religion with Dr. Robert P. Jones, author of The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy. Together, they break down the ongoing decline of White Christian America, the growing number of younger people who are religiously unaffiliated, and the stark differences between the religious demographics of the Democratic and Republican parties. They dig into how these demographic shifts are shaping the culture and politics of the country, offering key insights into the religious and racial trends transforming the U.S. today.
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Axis Mundi White Christian America continues to decline.
That's what new survey data from PRRI tells us.
In its Census of American Religion from 2023, which was just released, the PRRI data dump shows us that what we've already known for almost a decade continues to be true.
White Christian America continues to shrink, while the ranks of the unaffiliated swell.
Those under 50 continue to trend as less and less religious as time goes on.
We also learned that self-identified Democrats look a lot like 18-year-olds in America in terms of their racial makeup, their identities, their background.
While the Republican Party looks like those who are 70 years old.
There's a striking difference between the two parties and their demographics.
As the country has become more religiously diverse, the Republican Party has remained overwhelmingly a white Christian party.
It is a minority in the United States.
I discuss all this data and more with Robert P. Jones, the author of The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, White Too Long, and a number of other works.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Well, joined, I think this is the third time, I think this is the third time, by Dr. Robert P. Jones on Straight White American So first off, Robbie, thanks for joining me.
Hey, Brad.
I'm glad to be back.
Thanks for having me.
So you, as I just told everybody, your book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, is coming out in paperback soon.
So folks can look for that.
We'll talk a little bit about the new afterword to the book that is available in that paperback edition.
But this week, Here at the end of August, PRRI did something that religion nerds are like so excited for.
Some people are excited for like the new release of an album, others it's like a new Marvel movie for religion journalists and scholars and dorks it is.
Hey, honey, PRRI census data just dropped.
Sorry, I'm not going to be able to do anything for the next three days.
So congratulations to you and everyone else at PRRI for releasing 2023 census of American religion data and a whole host of things.
You made just a really fantastic Substack post about this yesterday and with 11 points or 10, I should say, 10 points about the study.
So let me ask you about a couple of them.
We may not get to all of them, but I want to just kind of get your take.
So you started down this road 10 years ago or so when you started writing The End of White Christian America.
I I taught that book in my religion and politics class at Skidmore College.
And in that book, you talk about the decline of the percentage of white Christians in the United States.
The new census data, the data you just released, what story does it tell about this trend?
Well, you know, it basically says that the trends have continued unabated.
So, you know, it's always gratifying when you write something a decade ago and you're trying to be quick, you know, on the draw and you're, you know, worried that, okay, maybe the next few data points are going to disprove my theory or whatever, but...
It's gratifying to see.
So, you know, back in 2016, yeah, I wrote The End of White Christian America, and I will say, like, I was using 2014 data in that book, and it was well before Trump, you know, hit the scene, and his whole interaction with evangelicals and all that wasn't even a thing.
But even then, what we were seeing was this really fairly dramatic, in terms of demographic change, fairly dramatically fast drop in the percentage of white Christians in the country.
So if you kind of use 2008 as a kind of beginning point, even then, from 2008 to 2014, I was marking a drop in the percentage of white Christians, you know, from 54% down to 47%.
And we had just enough data points to conclude confidently that that was a trend back in that book in 2016.
So here we are, basically, you know, nearly a decade later, and looking at it, and again, if we use that beginning point, in 2008, the number of white Christians, and by the way, that means all white Christians, white, non-Hispanic, If they identify as Christian in any way, Protestant, Catholic, non-denominational, whatever, this is all white Christians together.
So it was 54% in 2008, it dropped to 47% by 2014, then it covered in the end of white Christian America, and then latest number today is 41.
Right?
So, it just kind of continued to drop, and that drop is across basically all of the major groups, right?
So, it's not just one.
It's certainly not just the one that I think people are accustomed to hearing about, and that is the mainline Protestant group, the kind of non-evangelical end of the Protestant spectrum.
It is true that that group has declined a bit, but the group with the steepest decline over this period are white evangelical Protestants, right?
Again, if you kind of go back, they were, you know, more than one in five Americans, you know, back in 2008.
And if you go back just a little bit further, they were about a quarter of Americans at the turn of the 21st century.
Today, they are down to 13% of the general population.
It's exactly the same size as white mainline or non-evangelical Protestants.
This is a striking part of your work.
So I remember teaching your book right when the Trump year started.
And, you know, I was teaching largely secular students who had no idea how conservative Christians thought.
They had no idea about their culture, and then they certainly had no idea why Trump would be their man.
But it is striking, Robert, to speak to you in this moment and to see that much of a decline.
I think a lot of folks are aware of the Minority-majority tipping point in this country, when the United States will become a majority-minority country.
But I think what your work has showed us over the last 10 years and what you're highlighting today is, you know, that tipping point of no longer being a majority white Christian nation is a really important one.
And it's probably a really helpful decoder ring for understanding a lot of the fear and anxiety and persecution complex and other things that we see in conservative white Christian spaces these days.
Yeah, I love the decoder ring.
I'm going to steal that.
But, you know, I do think it's right, just to comment on that real quickly, is I do think that, you know, A lot of the mysteries that many people talk about with white evangelicals—why do they abandon their principles and back somebody like Trump, or at least their professed principles, and back somebody like Trump?
And a lot of that can be, I think, understood by this shift.
And there is a kind of great white Christian freakout moment.
It's not because it's something in 2040 that's on the horizon.
It's because it's something that's already happened, right?
And that is that the country is no longer majority white and Christian.
And that's the freak out moment that we're experiencing that has kind of driven them, I think, in a moment of kind of like last stand, apocalyptic thinking, you've written so much about so eloquently as well, that has kind of driven them into this really shotgun marriage with Trump.
Yeah, and one of the things that you highlight in the post and is clear in the data is that those folks are, many of whom are who are no longer white Christians, are religiously unaffiliated.
So, you know, in your post you talk about Americans who are 30 to 49 as having a huge jump in terms of being unaffiliated.
You also talk about a 50 50 gap, those who are over 50 and those who are under 50, and the difference between somebody who's over 50 or under 50 in terms of their likelihood to be religious.
Wondering if there's just any comment there about what that might mean for our cultural political landscape.
Yeah, well, you know, a couple of things.
I mean, you know, it's been known for a while that the ranks of the unaffiliated are overpopulated by younger people leaving religion, right?
So we know that.
One of the things that we found here is that while that's true, the ranks of every generational cohort, the ranks of the unaffiliated have risen among every generational cohort.
Even those over 65, right?
If we look over the last decade, in 2013, among those over age 65, only 11% were religiously unaffiliated.
Today, that's 18%, right?
Even among the oldest Americans.
But by far, it has been this, you know, the bigger jumps have been among younger Americans.
And as you said, there's kind of an under 50, over 50 way of Kind of looking at this jump, and I'm sad to say that I'm barely on the other side of that over 50 side of things today.
But what's notable here, though, is that you just see the jump in both ends of the spectrum.
On the one hand, those over 50, much more likely to be white and Christian, much less likely to be religiously unaffiliated.
And then exactly the opposite, right, among those under 50.
And, you know, again, as you've written about as well, part of the thing here is that those who are in that kind of under 50 age group came of age with the Christian right being the face of the public face of religion.
And I think many of those younger people have just reacted negatively, right, to that being The thing that stands in for, certainly for Christianity and maybe for religion as a whole, and if it's anti-gay and anti-immigrant, you know, and anti-abortion and all these things, anti-evolution, anti-climate, you know, kind of climate deniers.
If it's all those things that just do not sit well with the younger generations of Americans, and you could just see that rift so clearly in the data.
One of the things that stands out to me here is that the median age of white Catholics is 58.
The median age of Jewish Americans is in the 50s, is 56.
And the same goes for mainline Protestants.
White evangelical Protestants, 54.
So like those, those, Religious traditions all have people who are 54, 56, 58 as their median age.
But the median age of minority faiths, such as Muslims and Hindus, Latter-day Saints, is much younger, which is telling me something.
And we probably don't have time to dig in today, and I'm not totally prepared in terms of my understanding of the data to comment at length on this, but my initial reaction is, Muslims, Hindus, Latter-day Saints are having more luck keeping some of their folks who are in their 30s as part of those spaces for various reasons.
And I just think that's interesting, and I think it's something to look out for in the coming decades in terms of how that pans out.
Well, you know, it's a combination of retention and fertility rates.
It's both.
You know, that we're seeing they're having more children, and they're retaining those children within the faith as well.
I always am, you know, cautious when it comes to kind of projections forward.
You know, what we have with surveys and studies are snapshots in time that we can say, this is what it looks like right now.
We can say that with confidence and we can say, here's what the trends look like over the past, you know, decade or a couple of decades.
And you could, you know, you can always extrapolate a little bit, but I always want to kind of have that same little cautionary thing you see like on the bottom of your kind of retirement account letters that say, you know, past performance is no predictor of future performance.
And I think just with that caveat, having said that caveat.
You know, if you are going to kind of, you know, get out the crystal ball and look at the future of American religion, one way of doing that is looking at those median ages, right?
And see who's coming of age, who's holding on.
And it does look like these trends that we've been talking about are likely to continue going into the future.
I mean, it's one thing to have children.
There's, there for a long time, white evangelicals in specific have had an emphasis on I mean, some at least, not all, but there have been things like the quiverful movement.
There have been things like basically the idea of children as, you know, becoming part of God's army.
And so it's one thing to have children.
It's another thing for those children to remain in your church, in your religious tradition and so on.
Yeah, and there's a whole, like, you know, the trad wife thing and all of that, emphasizing, you know, just having more children.
But on the other hand, I mean, what's interesting is that the counter force among evangelicals is that more women have been getting college degrees.
Among white evangelical protestants, and that has been exactly the same dynamic with other, like, for example, white non-evangelical protestant women began getting college degrees a whole generation earlier, really, than white evangelicals did.
So part of the reason we're seeing these trends is that You know, this dynamic of women have college degrees, they want to have careers, which means they space out children, which means that they typically have less, have fewer.
Children's fertility rates tend to go down, and we're seeing some of that kind of underlying dynamic with white evangelicals today as well.
Well, and it leads into conversations we really can't divulge into today.
But, you know, when I think of J.D.
Vance talking about childless cat ladies, when I think of the reactionary Catholic forces behind J.D.
Vance that are very into discussions of banning contraception and strict gender roles, you know, that's where my mind goes as you're talking.
But nonetheless, it brings me to another topic that I get asked about a lot.
I'm sure you get asked about it even more.
And that is, There are a lot of non-white folks in this country who identify as born-again Christians.
Now, we can kind of quibble and debate whether or not they're evangelical.
That's a whole set of books and articles and scholars on stage disagreeing with each other.
But we have a lot of born-again black Christians in the United States.
Indeed.
And not to mention there are Native American born-again Christians, there are multiracial American Christians.
The reason I bring that up is just because those folks identify as born again and or evangelical does not mean that their politics are the same as their white evangelical counterparts.
And I'm wondering if you would just give us a primer on that.
It's something you address throughout your work.
It's something I get asked almost everywhere I go.
Hey, are there black Christian nationalists?
What does that look like?
How do they vote?
And so on and so forth.
Well, the word evangelical is very elastic.
It's got a long and kind of varied history, as you know, and we see that history creeping in today.
So just to give you a couple of things even before we even get to race, you know, Harris's running mate, Tim Walz, is a member of a denomination with the word evangelical, and it's titled the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.
Now that's not a evangelical, in quotes, kind of organization in the way that we would understand it in political terms.
It is a mainline Protestant denomination, the way that sociologists classify it kind of a denomination affiliated with the National Council of Churches.
It's more upper Midwest than it is Southern, like all those kinds of things.
So it's got this kind of long and varied history.
But also in the survey, just so everyone's clear, when we ask on the quantitative survey, we ask actually both sociologists.
So part of the identifying question asks, do you consider yourself to be an evangelical or born-again Christian?
And so if you answer yes to that question, you get put and classified as evangelical.
And notably, you know, among white Americans, it's 21% of white Americans who say yes.
They consider themselves to be an evangelical or born-again Christians.
But among black Americans, it's 38%.
Now, that is not what you would expect from just the way you hear this term used in political space, but what we know is that it just does not mean the same thing.
It is more theological than political.
In African American circles, it just does not translate really in the same way to the kind of political activity that it does among white non-Hispanic Americans.
I mean, if I'm not mistaken, there's other data out there from PRI that shows us that identifying as born again or evangelical on the part of a black Christian American, it only increases their likelihood of voting for supporting Trump or watching Fox News by like a minimal margin, where it really seems to be that there are many black American Christians who would say, yes, I'm born again.
And I do not support Trump.
I do not watch Fox News.
I do not vote Republican, so on and so forth.
Somebody might think of Raphael Warnock as perhaps a representative of this tradition.
And so I think this is a point that we could make a million times and it'd be worth making it again.
Well, I think the way to think about this is we've got to have some more complex ways of visualizing things.
And I'm going to borrow a little from, put up my academic hat for a minute, borrow a little from Pierre Bourdieu, and sort of thinking about that people are always cross-pressured, right?
All of us, right?
We have complex identities.
You know, gender, race, geography, you know, family situations, local communities, all these kinds of education levels, all these things kind of pull us in different directions.
And so if you think about these things as kind of, you know, we're always kind of pulled by different gravitational fields, right?
So maybe race pulls us one way, theology pulls us another.
And sometimes they pull all in the same direction, but sometimes they don't.
And I think that's what we see, particularly with African Americans, in the term evangelical.
There are many, many things pulling them one way, and even if they have this kind of more evangelical understanding, it does pull them a little bit to more conservative views.
There are so many other forces pulling them that it's so moderate compared to the way that that identification pulls someone who's white and non-Hispanic.
Yeah.
Pierre Bourdieu, always welcome on this show, so don't apologize for that ever.
Well, I think that image of the ways that our identities are pulled and cross-hatched is really helpful for the next part, because you say that self-identified Democrats look like 18-year-old America, while Republicans look like 70-year-old America.
What does that mean?
I'll just leave it there.
What does that mean?
What does it mean for Democrats to look like 18-year-old America and Republicans to look like 70-year-old America?
Well, it's another, like, little bit of a crystal ball kind of chart that you can think about, you know, the political future.
But basically what we did is we took every generational cohort and we did a kind of horizontal bar of their racial and religious identification.
So like we have white, how many of 18 to 29 year olds are white evangelicals, white non-evangelicals, white Catholics, Christians of color, other religions are unaffiliated.
We did that for every generational cohort.
And then we overlaid onto that So where do the two party coalitions fit, right, in terms of generation?
Like who, which, if you look at the kind of racial and religious composition of Democrats, which generational cohort are they closest to?
And the same thing with Republicans.
And when you overlay them onto this generational map, you see something quite extraordinary.
Again, Republicans, self-identified Republicans today are nearly 70% White and Christian, right?
Now remember, we're in a country that's 41% white and Christian, right?
And yet this one or two political parties is nearly 70% white and Christian.
So if you kind of overlay them, the people who look like that are basically 70-year-olds who are 70% white and Christian.
The Democratic Party, on the other hand, is only about a quarter.
White and Christian, just to use that metric.
And if you overlay them, they look about like 18-year-olds.
That's what 18-year-olds in the country look like.
So in terms of like where the parties are situated to appeal to which generational cohorts, just in terms of racial and religious identity, you've got the Democratic Party looking much closer to younger people and the Republican Party really, you know, virtually aging out.
They're like on the very bottom of the chart.
And this is why when we talk about Christian nationalism, we often talk about, I mean, I'm speaking for myself, I guess, white Christian nationalism, that's because in the ways that you've explained, there are many spaces in the country where the identity flows of white and the identity flow of perhaps evangelical or some other form of conservative Christianity, they flow in the same direction politically, right?
So if you don both the white And the Christian identities, those are flowing as two streams going to the same place or coming from the same place.
And so there's no dissonance, there's no sense of a cross current.
Whereas when you have people of color, where you have black Americans, when you have folks who identify as queer, people who identify as trans, it could be immigrants, we can add another identity And sometimes they're pulling in a way that goes against, you know, some of those other those other identity streams.
And you can see why certain ones went out and others don't.
And so this is really fascinating to me.
And I think it's something this is one of those moments where social science, I think, confirms something that most of us Like, when we watch the Democratic National Convention as compared to the Republican National Convention, when I see the senators of the Republican Party take a picture, and then I see the senators or the congresspeople... Or the interns.
Or the interns.
That's a great... Yeah, the interns walking around Capitol Hill.
Yeah, that's right.
All right.
I want to talk a little bit more about where people are religious.
So again, I think folks might intuit this, but counties in the Deep South remain the least religiously diverse places in the nation.
And, you know, we kind of go from there.
The most religiously diverse 10 counties in America are in five states, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and California.
What does this mean?
You know, I think folks identify the South as a place that's overwhelmingly Christian.
Is that confirmed here?
What's happening in these kind of coastal regions, you know, Maryland, California, Massachusetts, these are not Nebraska, Kansas, the Dakotas, Indiana.
So what's happening there in terms of religious diversity and what else can we say about the rest of the country?
Yeah.
Well, this is kind of a fun single measure we came up with to kind of score every county in the country with a religious diversity score.
And basically it goes zero to one, where like if a county got a score of zero and there's no county that did get a score of zero, but if it did, it would mean that one religious group entire, and it comprises the entire population of the county, right?
If it got a, if it got a one, it would mean that's complete diversity where every religious group in the county is of equal size.
Right.
And so that's the kind of scale here.
Overall in the country, the kind of median score or the average score is 0.6 in the country.
So that kind of gives you where folks are.
But as you said, what's interesting for me personally is that I grew up in the state with the least religious diversity and I currently live in the county with the most religious diversity.
Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live, and you can see it, you know, like in my son's public school, there are 15 languages spoken, right?
In the school, you know, we, the school calendar has Jewish, Muslim, Christian holidays, like as official holidays on the, on the calendar.
So there's ways in which you can just see it in the, anecdotally.
But it's notable that, you know, they're, they're mostly in the South.
Um, mostly more in Mississippi than anywhere else, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, South Carolina.
Um, and you can just get, we have a heat map that you can really, it's actually interactive.
You can hover over it and see every county, um, if you want on PRI's, uh, website, that's PRI.org.
They're on the homepage and it's just remarkable.
You just see these kind of south up and just kind of like this pattern of.
The Deep South and kind of up the Appalachian Mountains into West Virginia are the least diverse states.
And again, this measure is measuring both kind of racial and religious diversity.
So we are separating black Protestants from white evangelical Protestants, for example.
And that's one of the reasons why you see the diversity the way it is.
It is.
I love, I love maps.
I love maps so much.
And so like getting to scroll across this and just look at counties is like amazing and, and fascinating.
Like the upper, like Shasta County, California, like the, like the upper East, Northeast County in California, which has always wanted to be Oregon or Nevada and hate California.
Like there's like actual militia members who controls like city councils there.
Is the darkest, like, dot, right, in California for the most part.
I will just say, anecdotally, I live in the Bay Area.
My daughter's preschool, when I drop her off, she's mixed race, white and Japanese American.
But if we call her a white kid, She's one of two white kids in her 15-person preschool class.
There are South Asian kids, there are Latinx kids, so on and so forth.
And then in terms of the religious diversity, we also have all of those different holidays that you just talked about and so on.
It's fascinating to think about our country in these ways.
Let's talk about the group that nobody talks about if you listen to certain folks on Twitter, and that is mainline Protestants, a group that is often overlooked, has not been the public face of Christianity for, say, the last half century, nonetheless are really an important part of the American religious landscape.
And I think the Tim Walz vice presidential pick might have put A certain brand of mainline Christian, kind of in front and center for the first time in a while, and that's the Minnesota Lutheran of the ELCA.
We now have a case where I believe, if I'm reading the data, 13% of Americans are white mainline Christian, 13% are white evangelicals.
They're mainly in the upper Midwest.
Talk to us about this group and what we're seeing in terms of the data.
Thanks for listening today, y'all.
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