I wanted to visualize, as clearly as I could, how white Christianity has shifted politically over the last 46 years.
White mainline Protestants used to clearly be the most Republican – now that distinction belongs to white evangelicals. https://t.co/emzf3AIw0D
— Ryan Burge 📊 (@ryanburge) January 16, 2020
Every four to eight years, mainstream journalists start writing hopeful stories about the potential for the religious left — that should be Religious Left — to rise up and save America from the Religious Right.
This is the sort of thing that we write about here at GetReligion and the topic came up again in a post called, “Mayor Pete evolving into Pastor Pete? Prepare for latest uptick in MSM ardor for religious left.” That led to this week’s “Crossroads” podcast. Click here, please, to tune that in.
The religious left, of course, has changed and evolved over the decade that I have followed it and reported stories about it. But, basically, we are talking about liberal Mainline Protestants, liberal Catholics, a few evolving evangelicals, liberal Jews and so forth and so on.
The problem, of course, is that so many of those ancient doctrines keep clashing with the creeds of the emerging Zeitgeist (mostly the Sexual Revolution, in post-Roe v. Wade America).
Lots of folks who were part of the old religious left go with the flow. But some are troubled. Go to any traditional African-American church and talk to people. Go to a multi-racial Assemblies of God church. Talk to Catholics who go to Vespers and then stay for Confession.
So, White House race after White House race, we see stories about the latest set of “lesser of two evils” challenges faced by people who are, sincerely, religious/moral traditionalists, but they are also economic populists. There are the people who do not exist, according to MSNBC and Fox News. They don’t fit in the Democratic Party’s faculty lounge or the GOP’s country club.
So is the latest attempt to raise up the religious left a valid story?
Of course it is. The African-American church vote really mattered to Barack Obama (think his evolving beliefs on gay marriage) until the moment in time when he no longer needed those votes.
Latino voters matter, as well. Hold that thought!
The religious left also is very important in mainstream newsrooms — at least the ones in which I have worked. As I keep stressing: The world is not packed with journalists who hate religion, no matter what far-right folks say. Lots of journalists believe that there is good religion and then there is bad religion. Want to guess who is who?
I put together a really simple linear model to project what American religion will look like in the next decade.
The results indicate that the “nones” will unequivocally be the largest group in America in 2029, and that’s largely a result of more mainline decline (10.8%->4.4%). https://t.co/NF6PbrEAMR
— Ryan Burge 📊 (@ryanburge) October 24, 2019
Meanwhile, the religious left is the perfect political partner for the surging tide of “Nones,” as noted eight years ago by researcher John C. Green when the Pew Forum released it’s blast of numbers about the religiously unaffiliated. Remember this comment from one of my On Religion columns?
The unaffiliated overwhelmingly reject ancient doctrines on sexuality with 73 percent backing same-sex marriage and 72 percent saying abortion should be legal in all, or most, cases. Thus, the “Nones” skew heavily Democratic as voters — with 75 percent supporting Barack Obama in 2008. The unaffiliated are now a stronger presence in the Democratic Party than African-American Protestants, white mainline Protestants or white Catholics.
“It may very well be that in the future the unaffiliated vote will be as important to the Democrats as the traditionally religious are to the Republican Party,” said Green, addressing the religion reporters. “If these trends continue, we are likely to see even sharper divisions between the political parties.”
Also, the religious left has done a great job holding on, in terms of the high ground in mainline religious institutions and denominations (think seminary faculty lounges).
But the religious institutions themselves have been caught up in a demographic death dive (hello Anglicans in Canada) while, at the same time, polls keep showing that the ordinary people in mainline and Catholic pews, as opposed to pulpits, are trending Republican (see both of the Ryan Burge charts with this post).
So the big questions remain, in terms of the swing voters who decide tight election:
* Will Democrats nominate someone who is moderate enough for the ordinary Sunday Mass Catholic?
* Will Republicans ever nominate someone who can appeal to believers in African-American megachurches, both evangelical and Pentecostal?
* How many evangelicals (see my typology of white evangelical voters here) will stay home or vote third party, rather than vote for the lesser of two evils?
* What about the changing world of Latino Americans?
Let’s end with an important observation from historian Thomas Kidd of Baylor that is linked, if you stop and think about it, to this discussion of the religious left:
This national obsession with the clout of the “81 percent” of white evangelicals who voted for Trump may even be causing journalists and pollsters to miss important political stories, especially in rapidly changing states like Florida and Texas.
Right now, said Kidd, Latinos are the “most intriguing evangelicals, to me, because their numbers are growing so fast and their allegiances are totally up for grabs. … If you want to know where evangelicals are going, you have to watch all the independent churches, the storefront churches in big urban areas. Look at the churches that are growing and they are immigrant churches — all kinds of immigrants.”
That’s all for now — until the next wave of stories about Buttigieg and others courting the religious left in the Bible Belt and the Rust Belt.
Enjoy the podcast, and please pass it on.
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