Although it has never been a christian nation America is becoming even less and less christian, and yes, even in the deep South.
The 2014 midterm elections are drawing near, and it appears that the
Democrats will control the Senate, even though they’re fighting on
unfriendly territory – a large number of seats in red states are up for
grabs.
But if you look deeper than the national picture, there’s a more interesting story. In southern states like
Georgia and
Kentucky –
which in the past would have been easy repugican holds - the races are
unexpectedly tight. In fact, the only reason that the questions of
which party will control the Senate in 2015 is unsettled at all is that
an unusual number of races in dark red states are toss-ups, despite an overall political climate that generally favors wingnuts.
What
we’re seeing may well be the first distant rumblings of a trend that’s
been quietly gathering momentum for years: America is becoming less christian. In every region of the country, in every christian
denomination, membership is either stagnant or declining. Meanwhile,
the number of religiously unaffiliated people – atheists, agnostics, those who are indifferent to religion, or those who follow no conventional faith – is growing. In
some surprising places, these “nones” (as in “none of the above”) now rank among the largest slices of the demographic pie.
Even in the deep South,
the repugican base of white evangelical christians is shrinking –
and in some traditional wingnut redoubts like Arkansas, Georgia
and Kentucky, it’s declined as a percentage of the population by double
digits.
Even Alabama is becoming less christian. Meanwhile, there’s been a corresponding increase in the religiously unaffiliated, who
tend to vote more Democratic.
While
the effect on evangelicals is new, the general pattern isn’t. The catholic cult, the largest single religious denomination in America,
was the first to feel the pinch. The cult leaders and catholic apologists
have been fretting for years over the problem of aging and shrinking
congregations, declining attendance at Mass and fewer people signing up
to become priests or nuns – although
their proposals for how to solve the problem all consist of tinkering around the edges, or insisting that they need to try harder to convince people to believe as they do.
America’s
next-largest denomination, the southern baptist coven, held out a
bit longer but has now come down with the same affliction. Membership
has been declining for the last several years – to the point where
half of sbc cults will close their doors by 2030 if
current trends persist. And as with the catholic cult, the sbc
defenders with the biggest platforms have insisted that they don’t need
to change anything if they just double down on their existing policies
and pray harder for revival.
What’s driving the steady weakening of christianity? The answer, it would seem, is demographic turnover.
The so-called millennials (Americans born between 1982 and 2000) are
far more diverse, educated and tolerant than their predecessors. They’re also the least religious generation in American history – they’re even
getting less religious as they get older, which is unprecedented – and the majority of them identify christianity as synonymous with harsh political wingnuttery. As
older, more religious generations fade away and younger generations
replace them, the societal midpoint shifts. And this trend is going to
accelerate in coming years, because the millennial generation is big.
They’re
even bigger than the baby boomers.
The influence of the millennials showed in the (by historical standards)
remarkably rapid acceptance of same-sex marriage,
which in just a few short years has become legal in more than half the
country. Millennials view religious demands for the oppression of LGBT
people to be a
bizarre and offensive anachronism.
And as the major denominations vocally assert that opposing equal
rights for LGBT people is a nonnegotiable condition of membership in the cult of Not-Gay, young people are driven away in greater and greater
numbers. This may well be a self-reinforcing cycle, as people turned off
by constant homophobic rhetoric leave the churches, which results in
diluted power for religious wingnuts, who then bear down even
harder on the anti-gay message. The same arrogance and institutional
blindness that got them into this spiral make it almost impossible for
them to see the problem and pull out of it.
But even if this
secularizing trend continues, it’s likely that there’s a hard core of
believers who will persist no matter what: no one is forecasting the
total extinction of the religio-wingnuts in politics.
Still, for
progressives, the eroding power of the cults is a most welcome
development: the religio-wingnuts can no longer claim to be the sole
source of morality and virtue, nor can they expect to assert their will
in political matters and be obeyed without question. Instead, they’ll
have to muster evidence and make their case in the marketplace of ideas
like everyone else.
In other words, the religio-winguts will
finally have to fight fair, and I’m willing to bet that, in the long
run, that’s a fight they’ll lose.
