Religion and Politics

[SLD]

American Christianity Is, Alas, Political

Bad news for religious liberty: Data show white liberals leaving religion in large numbers

www.theamericanconservative.com

US Christianity is a clear political marker. A white liberal is ten times more likely to be an atheist or none, than a white conservative. Ten years ago white liberals were 48% Christian, now they are barely 31%, whereas Atheists/nones have grown from 36% to 55% in ten years.

Among Gen Z the nones/atheists/agnostic now outnumber Christians. How will that impact the future Of American politics? Will they continue to not believe as they settle down and start families?

What has caused this shift? Is the internet to blame? The internet may be like the printing press. The invention of the printing press sparked a revolution in learning that has not stopped yet. it caused the dissemination of radical ideas that could not be stopped by the authorities. The internet makes it even harder to stop the spread of ideas as it has given everyone a platform. I’ve probably written dozens of books on the internet and they get read! I’ve disseminated Atheist thought on Alabama religious forums. Not sure though if I convinced anyone.

But maybe there are other factors like the politicalization of religion started by Jerry Falwell and others that have so turned many people off of religion. Many millennials report a dissatisfaction with the Church over such issues as sexuality and their increasing ties to the Republican Party. This has only been exacerbated by the rise of Trump.

Or is it because of rising scientific literacy? The evangelical Church has stood firmly against science despite growing and growing evidence. In the last thirty to forty years, we’ve also seen the rise of popular science books like Steven Weinberg’s The First Three minutes, to popular evolution books like Stephen J. Gould’s, The Burgess Shale, and many others that have become bestsellers. The country has also placed a premium on scientific learning in schools starting with the fear of the Soviets surpassing us after the Sputnik scare.

Or is it because of pop culture? The evangelical criticism of Hollywood culture does ring true. Our movies are not just overtly secular, they in many ways undermine faith subtly and even overtly. This is especially true of science fiction. Note Star Trek‘s society almost open hostility to organized religion. Star Wars created its own faith in the Force, vastly different than traditional religious values and basically godless. Jurassic Park openly celebrated evolution as it’s central theme. The Big Bang show also has popularized the interest in physical cosmology without explicitly undermining faith. But many other movies as well subtly dig at religion, often mocking evangelical beliefs or ignoring faith all together as if it’s irrelevant. How many sitcom characters actually go to church? None that I know of.

Or is it just a few well placed atheist influencers such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris? Their books have been best sellers earlier this century. One doesn’t see many such books nowadays. So I’m a bit skeptical of their overall influence. Still they could have acted as a spark that set much of the country talking about such things openly whereas before such talk was taboo. Dawkins book didn’t so much turn me into an atheist as it made it feel ok to express it.

I suppose there is no single explanation and all of the above are the correct answer. But what happens next? Will the nones, etc., bring down the Republican Party? Or will the Republican Party try to bring down the nones? If a Trump, or Trump like character, can motivate enough people as a backlash to our secularism, will that stop the rise of the nones? Will the parties shift their stances to appeal to nones instead? I’m skeptical that the Republican Party can without losing its base, which it absolutely cannot do.

Also will the rise of the nones come to such conservative places like Alabama? I wonder if it has already shifted Georgia into blue column, and maybe places like Texas and North Carolina are next. If that happens, the political landscape could change irrevocably against the Republican Party.

 

[Trausti]

Heh. They have not abandoned religion; they just follow the new one.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Another factor: The corruption of religious organizations has been more and more exposed.

 

[prideandfall]

Among Gen Z the nones/atheists/agnostic now outnumber Christians. How will that impact the future Of American politics? Will they continue to not believe as they settle down and start families?

so i pretty much totally disagree with everything you posited, because i think the fundamental premise is flawed (and because several of your examples seem completely opposite of reality to me).
there's a very big difference between "what one tells a political survey giver" and "what one actually believes" - i'll agree that in many places it's becoming less fashionable to be outwardly christian, but i'd wager that most people who tell a pollster that they are 'none' are just an unaffiliated form of cherry-picker christian.
so the numbers are misleading in the first place if your rhetorical goal is to convince people religion is on the decline. maybe rabid fundamentalism is becoming less prevalent, but faith in general has hardly seen a dent.

Is the internet to blame? The internet may be like the printing press.

while i'm sure the internet does more to foster lack of faith than to foster faith, only by a marginal degree.
and the internet is less like the printing press and more like if, after having invented the wheel, the only thing humanity ever did with it was to see how far they can cram it into their anus.

Many millennials report a dissatisfaction with the Church over such issues as sexuality and their increasing ties to the Republican Party

that one i can see being a factor. the moral majority crusade started in the 70s that tied politics and religious zealots together pretty much made it so that religion = extremism in the public zeitgeist.
low-key passive religious adherents don't really exist in the national consciousness of the US, so any faith is an act of extremism, and then that is tied to republicans since they hijacked the concept of being religious within the pop-cultural narrative.
it's ironic i suppose that it was the meekness of liberal christians not pushing back, and the zealotry and avarice of the morally uppity claiming the very concept of faith for themselves only, that lead to this paradigm which pushes people away from the church entirely.

Or is it because of rising scientific literacy?

ha! hahahahahahahahaha. hhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
rising scientific literacy? have you SEEN the US lately?

Or is it because of pop culture? The evangelical criticism of Hollywood culture does ring true. Our movies are not just overtly secular, they in many ways undermine faith subtly and even overtly.

here i disagree entirely, and in fact would posit exactly the opposite.
"hollywood culture" as you put it is explicitly theistic and almost universally in favor of religion generally when it's not supporting christianity in particular.

by your own example, the show 'big bang theory' ... the only character on that show that is ever confirmed for certain to be an atheist is sheldon, who is portrayed as a narcissistic man-child asshole who everyone hates.
his mother is a conservative christian, but is wise and compassionate and everyone loves her.
big bang theory may make fun of tropes and stereotypes surrounding the pop-culture of organized religion, but the show is very pro-christian in its subtext.
(also, side note, sheldon's mother goes to church)

likewise any other franchise you care to name... star wars has the force, sure, but its underlying message is that there are forces beyond our understanding that control our lives and we must submit to it.
the entire jurassic park franchise could have the tagline "we tried to play god and paid for our hubris" - it's not celebrating evolution, it's condemning man for reaching beyond his place.

the political landscape could change irrevocably against the Republican Party.

not going to happen any time soon... the republican party as a political body relies on the limitless well of human stupidity to fuel itself, and that isn't running dry ever.
conservatism as an ideology is inherently toxic and will rot itself out eventually, it's not a sustainable political strategy in a world post industrial revolution... however, we're talking on a geological scale here, not in slogans to make turnout in the next election higher.

the only thing that would kill off republicanism in the US within the next 50 years is either:
A. the rules and bylaws of how the federal government functions are altered to prevent the republicans from maintaining a majority of governmental control while representing a minority of the actual US population.
B. the democrats stop being a pack of whinging corporatist lapdogs who only seek to maintain the status quo (re: a society dominated by wealth, and that wealth being controlled by an increasingly elite few) and who only feign interest in serving the betterment of society when forced to do so for the sake of appearances.

either that or i guess a break in the current two party paradigm - either the dems and repubs breaking off into smaller more specialized groups, or new groups rising to prominence and sharing power with the others.
but, the entrenched nature of the political system in the US means that won't be happening naturally or within the next century, so we're pretty much all just stuck with this interminable back-and-forth we've had for the last 60 years where politically things get slightly better all at once before getting shittier for one or two decades and then getting slightly better all at once, over and over again.

 

[southernhybrid]

A few of us have been discussing the rise of the Nones in another area of the board. It's true that millennial are leaving organized religion in very large numbers. I've been reading the fairly well researched book that was mentioned in the OP of the other thread.

https://iidb.org/threads/rise-of-the-nones.25396/#post-968759

However, while I will have to do some looking to find an article that I read several weeks ago in either the NYT or the WaPo, Christian Nationalism is also on the rise. It's my concern that will be a more effective, but harmful influence in the US. Perhaps that movement is a reaction to the high percentage of Americans who are leaving organized religion. I haven't read or studied that issue enough to be sure, but it is something to be concerned about. If I find the time, I'll see if I can find that article that describes the thread of Christian Nationalism. I doubt that the Nones, regardless if they are atheists or simply those who have rejected organized religion are organized or that involved in politics.

 

[southernhybrid]

I'm not sure if the link I"m going to post is the same one that I read. It's an opinion piece on the rise of Christian Nationalism and it makes some good points.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/16/...-authoritarianism.html?searchResultPosition=2

The 2020 election is proof that religious authoritarianism is here to stay, and the early signs now indicate that the movement seems determined to reinterpret defeat at the top of the ticket as evidence of persecution and of its own righteousness. With or without Mr. Trump, they will remain committed to the illiberal politics that the president has so ably embodied.
As it did in 2016, the early analysis of the 2020 election results often circled around the racial, urban-rural, and income and education divides. But the religion divide tells an equally compelling story. According to preliminary exit polls from Edison Research (the data is necessarily rough at this stage), 28 percent of voters identified as either white evangelical or white born-again Christian, and of these, 76 percent voted for Mr. Trump. If these numbers hold (some other polls put the religious share at a lower number; others put the support for Mr. Trump at a higher number), these results indicate a continuation of support for Mr. Trump from this group.
The core of Mr. Trump’s voting bloc, to be clear, does not come from white evangelicals as such, but from an overlapping group of not necessarily evangelical, and not necessarily white, people who identify at least loosely with Christian nationalism: the idea that the United States is and ought to be a Christian nation governed under a reactionary understanding of Christian values. Unfortunately, data on that cohort is harder to find except in deeply researched work by sociologists like Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry.

Others stopped short of endorsing Mr. Trump’s wilder allegations of election fraud, but backed his right to challenge the results. Mr. Reed told Religion News Service, “This election will be over when those recounts are complete and those legal challenges are resolved.” The Rev. Franklin Graham tweeted that the courts will “determine who wins the presidency.” The conservative pastor Robert Jeffress, who gave a sermon before Mr. Trump’s inaugural ceremony in 2017, noted that a Biden win was “the most likely outcome.”
After processing their disappointment, Christian nationalists may come around to the reality of Joe Biden’s victory. There is no indication, however, that this will temper their apocalyptic vision, according to which one side of the American political divide represents unmitigated evil. During a Nov. 11 virtual prayer gathering organized by the Family Research Council, one of the key speakers cast the election as the consequence of “the whole godless ideology that’s wanted to swallow our homes, destroy our marriages, throw our children into rivers of confusion.” Jim Garlow, an evangelical pastor whose Well Versed Ministry has as its stated goal, “Bringing biblical principles of governance to governmental leaders,” asserted that Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris are at the helm of an “ideology” that is “anti-Christ, anti-Biblical to its core.”

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