The remarkable truth is this: America is no longer
a white, Christian country.
And that's going to have profound implications.
In the early 1990s, fewer than one in ten Americans
said that they were religiously unaffiliated.
That number today is nearly a quarter.
It's 23%. About two-thirds of seniors identify as
white and Christian. But if we go down to the youngest
Americans, those under the age of 30, only 29%
of that group identify as white and Christian.
Today, we have zero Protestants on the U.S. Supreme
Court, and if Merrick Garland is confirmed, we will have
five Catholics and four Jews.
The 2012 election with Romney versus Obama is a good
illustration of just how quickly the power of white Christian
America has declined.
Romney actually did pretty well with white Evangelical
voters. He had all his basic marks his campaign should
have hit. If he had run the same campaign he ran at the
same kind of support he got in 2004, he would've won.
But what had changed between 2004 and 2012
was that the religious and racial landscape had shifted
just enough that it wasn't enough to put him
over the top.
Now obviously, we're seeing Donald Trump running with
this playbook. We may have a real test case on our
hands about whether or not there are in fact enough
white Christian voters out there for a Republican
candidate to win, relying on those super majorities.
One key question is what does it mean to be an
American? What is the image of America that comes to
people's minds when they even hear the word America?
I think that's one of the things we're struggling over
in the country today. For many white Evangelicals,
I mean they see something that looks like a Norman
Rockwell painting - a white Protestant family gathered
around a Thanksgiving table - and I think for many that
evokes this era of the 1950s, where white conservative
Christian values really hold sway. Compare that to
the Coca Cola commercial that aired during the
Super Bowl. We had all kinds of families, you know.
They were black. They were white. They were Latino.
They were Asian. And they were Muslim.
And they were Christian. And it set off a firestorm
of controversy. You know many conservative white
Christians saying like this is not at all the America we
ought to be celebrating. In fact, it's a departure from
this image that we have. People fight like that when they
are losing a sense of place, a sense of belonging, and
a sense of the country that they understand and love.
So thinking about the descendants of white Christian
America that are still with us today, and again it's still
45% of the country. It's a lot of people.
How do they re-engage in public life when they can't be
the majority? On the one hand, their are leaders I think
such as Rusell Moore at the Southern Baptist
Convention, who is really trying to take these issues
really seriously and to figure out how to engage in
a way where they're taking one seat at the table
and not pretending that they own the whole table.
On the other hand, I think we're seeing some real
reactions against this. And we're seeing it with the
Evangelical leaders who are really supporting Trump.
calling for Christians to kind of turn out and reclaim
their dominant space in public life. There just aren't the
numbers out there for that to happen.
America is no longer a majority white Christian country.
