https://religionnews.com/2023/03/14/five-charts-that-explain-the-desperate-turn-to-maga-among-conservative-white-christians/

RNS is not paywalled, so I'd recommend reading the entire article. It is not specifically about LDS, though they are included as a separate category in the charts.

It is interesting that most of the conclusions are based on a book that came out in summer of 2016, which is to say before Former Guy drove his particular stake through the heart of conservative Christianity.

From the article:

(RNS) — I prefaced my 2016 book, “The End of White Christian America,” with an “Obituary for White Christian America.” It read, in part:

After a long life spanning nearly two hundred and forty years, White Christian America — a prominent cultural force in the nation’s history — has died. WCA first began to exhibit troubling symptoms in the 1960s when white mainline Protestant denominations began to shrink, but showed signs of rallying with the rise of the Christian Right in the 1980s. Following the 2004 presidential election, however, it became clear that WCA’s powers were failing.

Although examiners have not been able to pinpoint the exact time of death, the best evidence suggests that WCA finally succumbed in the latter part of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The cause of death was determined to be a combination of environmental and internal factors — complications stemming from major demographic changes in the country, along with religious disaffiliation as many of its younger members began to doubt WCA’s continued relevance in a shifting cultural environment.

“The End of White Christian America” was published in July 2016, just as Donald Trump was securing the Republican nomination for president and the Make America Great Again worldview was supplanting policy considerations within the GOP (indeed, by the end of Trump’s presidency, the party officially abandoned any attempt to adopt an official policy platform). The data I had available at the time identified a watershed event that was driving this desperate movement: The U.S. had become — for the first time in our history — a country that was, demographically speaking, no longer a majority white Christian country.

The newly released 2022 supplement to the PRRI Census of American Religion — based on over 40,000 interviews conducted last year — confirms that the decline of white Christians (Americans who identify as white, non-Hispanic and Christian of any kind) as a proportion of the population continues unabated.
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Lots of charts and graphs in the remainder of the article chronicling the continued decline of white Christian America, now with a significant portion that is also Christian nationalist America.

The article doesn't say much we haven't already discussed here, but I tend to like actual charts and numbers to confirm what we all "know" to be true, on the off chance that it is not as true as we thought, or in the same way that we thought.

In this case, no disconfirming evidence that I can see. Mainline Protestant is way down, but more or less stable now. Conservative white Christian, and LDS, on a downward slide.

I love me some pics. And when I don't like the ones some one else provides, I make another one up.

If I had the data to do so, mine might show the political power of the various groups all the way from CWC (which almost reads like a QAnon insult) to flaming libtard democrats. I would then paint some vertical bars showing how over time the CWC group's institutional power had risen despite its flagging numbers.

That makes sense, doesn't it? Because what does a dominant force do when it starts to weaken? Why, it establishes dominant monopolies in power centers that are slow to change: places like the bodies that decide on electoral districting and, I dunno, the supreme court and stuff.

Then I might make a chart showing the divergence between demographic trends on the one hand and the distribution of power on the other, with the yawning gap in the middle labeled something provocative like "Lost Rights" or "Here be Tyranny."

But lucky for RfM, I'm a lousy artist.

Not an artist? Well, maybe you could provide a nice poem?

Mormonism showed a *very* slight increase in the under-49s. I wonder why that is? Mormons hedging their bets as they raise their families? But the over-49s appear to be over it.

The conclusions that the article's author draws don't surprise me. White, evangelical Christianity is on a downward slope, and the extreme political happenings of late are a reflection of the ensuing panic. What I find most interesting is the conservative Christian-funded "He gets us" campaign. The conservative white evangelicals must truly be desperate to be courting minorities.

The really sad (and scary) part is that they can't accept living in a multi-ethnic, multiracial, multicultural, secular, tolerant society.

That's the crux of the matter (pun intended).

They way the fundies see it, either they are in total control, or they are oppressed -- therfore making any compromise impossible, and if they no longer see democracy as working for them (the present situation), their only other viable alternative is draconian minority rule via a fascist authoritarian dictatorship.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/15/2023 07:01PM by anybody.