The Rise of the Political Christian

[Chuck Naill]

Last week I was reminded of my own spiritual journey when Jimmy Carter was president and when Ronald Reagan was elected to replace Mr. Carter. I don't remember politics being discussed. I knew my family on both sides were Democrat, primarily because they remembered Hoover Days and the rise of social programs that got people back on their feet in many ways.

As I said, Francis Schaffer was writing about civil disobedience and getting involved politically. Since that time, it seems to me that it has destroyed the American church.

When I was coming up I endured and was made to study the Bible as a child. Later, I did it voluntarily with men and women the same age as my grand and great grandparents. They knew the scriptures and had interpretations. Some were cessationists. Some were pre trib and some post. The common thread is that they had come to know about Jesus and what he said and taught. It occurs to me that the modern person in the pew is not educated in what the texts say. They know they like Republicans. Actually, I'd say they are not a curious sort at all.

Some think the worse thing that happened to Christianity is when it was adopted by Roman as the official religion.

Thoughts?


"But American church attendance was declining. The share of self-identified Christians in the United States dropped from 75 percent in 2011 to 63 percent in 2021 while the share of religious “nones” — i.e., those who identified as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” — jumped from 19 percent to 29 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. The G.O.P. has not been immune to this trend. The share of Republicans who belong to a church dropped from 75 percent in 2010 to 65 percent in 2020, according to Gallup. Although the sharp drop-off in religiosity began in the liberal mainline Protestant denominations, it has spread to their conservative counterparts as well. Fewer than half of Republicans said “being Christian” was an important part of being American in 2020, according to Pew — a 15 percentage point drop from 2016. Across the ideological and theological spectrum, organized religion is waning.

As a result, the religious right’s influence in the G.O.P. has been declining since the Bush era. The party’s 2008 presidential nominee, John McCain, repeatedly flip-flopped on Roe, voted against a proposed constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman and decried Jerry Falwell as one of several “agents of intolerance.” Mitt Romney, who sat atop the G.O.P. presidential ticket in 2012, had a similarly spotty track record on social issues.

While President Donald Trump delivered on a number of religious conservative priorities — most notably, appointing enough conservative justices to the Supreme Court to cobble together a likely majority of anti-Roe votes — he is a lifelong pro-choicer and sexual libertine who made explicit appeals to gay and lesbian voters on the 2016 campaign trail and was the first openly pro-same-sex-marriage candidate to win the presidency. “It is hardly surprising that the religious right is no longer even perceived as a relevant force in U.S. politics,” George Hawley concluded in The American Conservative. “Far from a kingmaker in the political arena, the Christian right is now mostly ignored.”

Revolution From the Middle
The decline in Republican church membership directly coincides with the rise of Mr. Trump. As Timothy P. Carney found in 2019, the voters who went for Mr. Trump in the 2016 primary were far more secular than the religious right: In the 2016 G.O.P. primaries, Mr. Trump won only about 32 percent of voters who went to church more than once a week. In contrast, he secured about half of those who went “a few times a year,” 55 percent of those who “seldom” attend and 62 percent of Republicans who never go to church. In other words, Mr. Carney wrote, “every step down in church attendance brought a step up in Trump support, and vice versa.”

The right’s new culture war represents the worldview of people the sociologist Donald Warren called “Middle American radicals,” or M.A.Rs. This demographic, which makes up the heart of Mr. Trump’s electoral base, is composed primarily of non-college-educated middle- and lower-middle-class white people, and it is characterized by a populist hostility to elite pieties that often converges with the old social conservatism. But M.A.Rs do not share the same religious moral commitments as their devoutly Christian counterparts, both in their political views and in their lifestyles. As Ross Douthat noted, nonchurchgoing Trump voters are “less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced” than those who regularly attend religious services. No coincidence, then, that a 2021 Gallup poll showed 55 percent of Republicans now support gay marriage — up from just 28 percent in 2011."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/01/o...pgtype=Article