Another Side Effect Of Trumpism: Americans Are Losing Their Religion-- Rapidly

The latest Gallup poll concludes that Christianity is rapidly declining in the U.S.. "The religious landscape of the United States continues to change at a rapid clip. In Pew Research Center telephone surveys conducted in 2018 and 2019, 65% of American adults describe themselves as Christians when asked about their religion, down 12 percentage points over the past decade. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009. Both Protestantism and Catholicism are experiencing losses of population share... The share of U.S. adults who are white born-again or evangelical Protestants now stands at 16%, down from 19% a decade ago."

Are Trump and his satanic bagmen, disguised as religious leaders, driving people away from Christianity? If you know anyone who's losing their religion-- or their faith-- suggest they start reading, a progressive pastor's blog: John Pavlovitz's Stuff That Needs To Be Said-- for a refreshing and reinvigorating perspective on faith.





Yesterday's post, I Resist Because I'm A Christian starts with the words evangelical leaders have moved far away from in their twisted decision to worship Trump. "As a Christian," wrote Pavlovitz, "I take the words of Jesus seriously. They matter to me. I don’t think they’re theoretical ideas meant to be uttered for an hour on Sunday or kept locked in stained glass museums or contained solely in memorized prayers or resigned to live only in Twitter bios-- I think they’re supposed to propel me out of privilege and prejudice, and into the places where grieving, hopeless, hungry, tired people are so that I can give comfort and be a help. I think they’re supposed to cause trouble for the powerful and be good news for the poor. I think they’re supposed to bring peace and justice and equity-- even if they put me in harm’s way. I don’t think I can call myself a Christian without living the words."

[I]t is because of the words of Jesus and my commitment to trying to emulate his character in the world, that I resist right now.

It is not a political affiliation that moves me, but a moral conviction, a spiritual agitation.

My faith compels me to push back.

I resist this Administration’s bigotry, because I see Jesus celebrating Samaritans and dining with prostitutes and touching the lepers and welcoming outsiders.

I resist its callousness, because I see Jesus embracing the grieving and healing the sick and defending the oppressed.


I resist the bloated arrogance and spitting malice and unrepentant cruelty of this Presidency, because I hear Jesus say that the peacemakers and the meek and the pure in heart, walk the path that good people are called to humbly walk.

I resist all of this because the Jesus I find in the gospels first resisted it. He opposed power, hatred, greed, and contempt for difference. That was the whole story: loving loudly and being willing to suffer and die on behalf of someone else.

Jesus lived a life fueled by compassion for hurting people, one fiercely devoted to bringing equity and letting more people come to the table. He dismantled the walls between people, leveled the ground that separated them, showed their inherent worth.

He wouldn’t be abiding white nationalism or gun-waving hubris or the bullying of gay couples or the defending of Confederate monuments. He wouldn’t be tolerating  religious people making their beds with dictators or a Church that cowered to hateful power.

These would be the very tables he would be turning over, so I too am upending them.

Resistance isn’t a hashtag or a catch phrase or a bumper sticker slogan and it has nothing to do with a party or a President.

It’s the most sincere prayer I can utter, the most tangible expression of belief I can offer, the clearest declaration of my faith that I can make in these moments.

Resistance to hatred is continuing the work of Jesus and so I do this work-- so help me God.

This morning the New Yorker published an essay by Eliza Griswald, Teaching Democrats To Speak Evangelical, about the role Vote Common Good is playing in make a space for evangelicals turned off by Trump's nature and by his excesses. A few weeks ago, at the invitation of Ted Lieu, Vote Common Good founder Doug Pagitt and VCG political director, Robb Ryerse, both pastors, explained the group's work to progressives in Congress. "Trying to memorize John 3:16 in the car on your way to the event and then quote that is probably not the best way to connect with faith-based voters,” said Ryerse. "He had seen a candidate try this trick on the way to a rally in Kansas and then struggle to remember the phrase onstage."

The exodus of religious voters from the Democratic Party over the past several decades is typically explained by the culture wars, most notably over abortion. As the historian of religion Randall Balmer notes in his book Thy Kingdom Come, in the sixties and seventies, the Democratic Party had a large Catholic contingent and mostly opposed abortion. By contrast, many prominent Republicans-- including Nelson Rockefeller; Ronald Reagan, during his time as the governor of California; and Harry Blackmun, the Supreme Court Justice who wrote the opinion in Roe v. Wade-- affirmed and expanded abortion rights. But, beginning in the early seventies, evangelical preachers such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson worked with Republican strategists to press the Party to more vigorously oppose abortion. At the same time, the second-wave feminist movement pushed the Democratic Party to defend women’s reproductive rights. As a result, pro-life Democrats, most notably religious voters, began defecting from the Party.

Pagitt believes that this history is overly simplistic. He points out that a large percentage of Democratic voters--sixty-seven per cent, according to a Pew poll from 2018--still claim a religious affiliation. He believes that many moderate evangelicals would be happy to vote for Democrats, but that the Party often overlooks them during campaigns. In 2008, Barack Obama courted evangelicals, along with Catholics, mainstream Protestants, and Jewish voters, by asking religious leaders to appear as campaign surrogates and to take part in a regular conference call. Pagitt worked on behalf of the campaign, approaching conservative leaders and calling evangelicals who had voted for George W. Bush in 2004. “It wasn’t just me; they kept calling hundreds of leaders and asking if we could spare one more weekend,” Pagitt said. Obama succeeded in taking a large number of white evangelical and Catholic Bush voters.

But, in 2016, Hillary Clinton failed to woo these voters: between 2008 and 2016, the percentage of people who voted for the Democratic Presidential candidate declined among voters in every religious affiliation, and the dropoff was especially sharp among evangelicals. Pagitt pointed out that, though Clinton is a devout Methodist and received daily devotional readings during the campaign, she almost never spoke about her faith in public. “I don’t even know what her favorite Bible passage was,” he said. “I thought, Well, her polling numbers must tell her she doesn’t need religious voters.”

Pagitt describes himself as an evangelical, though he thinks of this as more of a sociological term than a strict theological one. “It’s like saying I’m Midwestern,” he told me. “It locates me.” He grew up near Minneapolis, in a non-religious family, and converted as a teen-ager. He spent eleven years as a pastor at Wooddale, an evangelical megachurch in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. In 1999, he planted a progressive, nondenominational church in Minneapolis called Solomon’s Porch. But, in 2018, feeling disappointed by Clinton’s loss, he founded Vote Common Good to target the voters that Clinton had overlooked. In the leadup to the midterm elections, he and fourteen other members held religious revivals in support of candidates across the country. The events featured beer on tap and thumping music from dirty-gospel acts, including Reverend Vince Anderson and Meah Pace. The family-friendly party atmosphere was modelled on revivals that the conservative evangelist Franklin Graham was holding for Donald Trump and other Republicans. “The larger goals were loving your neighbor and creating a check on power,” Diana Butler Bass, a prominent progressive theologian who joined Pagitt’s tour, told me.

Pagitt felt hopeful after the votes were cast. In 2016, eighty-one per cent of white evangelicals voted for Trump; last year, in the midterm elections, seventy-five per cent of white evangelicals voted Republican. Pagitt and the other members of Vote Common Good saw this small decline as a sign of progress: in ones and twos, evangelicals were becoming disenchanted with Trump--especially with his overt racism and misogyny, which some saw as against their values. “I don’t think it’s a silent majority,” Ryerse, Vote Common Good’s political director, told me, “but I think there’s a significant silent percentage.”

Katie Paris, a media trainer with Vote Common Good, discussed campaign tactics with the representatives. She noted that, during the midterms, Republicans had contacted religious leaders district by district to shore up their support, and often remained in close touch with them between election seasons. “You need to make it more difficult for the right to organize against you,” she said. She suggested that the representatives also reach out to religious leaders to introduce themselves. They didn’t have to fake piety, she said, but they should acknowledge that these communities were important to their constituencies. She also felt that Democrats had become afraid to mention religion at campaign events, which ceded faith to the right. She urged the representatives to discuss spirituality “wherever your values come from”--whether or not they were believers. The important thing was to make it clear that they took religion seriously and didn’t look down on the devout.

...After the meeting in Washington, Pagitt decided that the group would do more good advising candidates in the field and decided to take it back on the road. Since then, Vote Common Good has run several training seminars in New York City and around the country for Democratic congressional candidates. “In all five boroughs, there are evangelicals and other religiously motivated candidates,” he told me recently, while in New York. “We give candidates a breakdown by religious affiliation in their districts, and it’s shocking how many religious voters there are.” Last week, they launched a love-in-politics pledge, which is based on I Corinthians 13:4-7 (“Love is patient, love is kind . . .”) and calls on politicians to hold others to a standard of decency and compassion. “We’re skeptical of Mike Pence’s willingness to be swayed,” he said, of the Vice-President. “But we’re helping religiously motivated voters to have the rationale and support to change their votes.” The group is also planning a forum in Iowa, in January, where Democratic Presidential candidates could reflect on their vision of faith. Pagitt says that the major campaigns have indicated interest, though none has committed. “I think they should take religiously motivated voters seriously,” he told me. “If they don’t, it’s at their own peril.”