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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWe're at the end of white Christian America. What will that mean? I Imagine - Peace on Earth.
We're at the end of white Christian America. What will that mean?After accounting for eight out of 10 Americans in 1976, white Christians are now a minority, a study has found. The political implications could be profound
America is a Christian nation: this much has always been a political axiom, especially for conservatives. Even someone as godless and immoral as the 45th president feels the need to pay lip service to the idea. On the Christian Broadcasting Network last year, he summarized his own theological position with the phrase: God is the ultimate.
And in the conservative mind, American Christianity has long been hitched to whiteness. The right learned, over the second half of the 20th century, to talk about this connection using abstractions like Judeo-Christian values, alongside coded racial talk, to let voters know which side they were on.
But change is afoot, and US demographics are morphing with potentially far-reaching consequences. Last week, in a report entitled Americas Changing Religious Identity, the nonpartisan research organization Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) concluded that white Christians were now a minority in the US population.
Soon, white people as a whole will be, too.
The survey is no ordinary one. It was based on a huge sample of 101,000 Americans from all 50 states, and concluded that just 43% of the population were white Christians. To put that in perspective, in 1976, eight in 10 Americans were identified as such, and a full 55% were white Protestants. Even as recently as 1996, white Christians were two-thirds of the population.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/20/end-of-white-christian-america
DemocratSinceBirth
(99,719 posts)gilbert sullivan
(192 posts)who wanted to be believed in and worshiped, it would have more than a third of the world's population in its membership. It might be the largest, but it's still a small minority among hundreds of theistic delusional paradigms.
hatrack
(59,606 posts)Not holding my breath, though.
Mosby
(16,422 posts)Including "atheist" countries like GB and France.
catbyte
(34,546 posts)lunasun
(21,646 posts)Mariana
(14,863 posts)and it hasn't been for a long time. Occasionally some Christian will squawk because they don't like that many non-Christians celebrate xmas, but they shut up fast if you suggest that if they want xmas to themselves, it should no longer be recognized as a national holiday. They aren't willing to give that up.
catbyte
(34,546 posts)but it seems like the most despicable, vile people I've had the misfortune to work with & know were the most "devout", "conservative" or "evangelical" Christians. They are holier-than-thou, self-righteous, superior, yet they were the nastiest, most dishonest folks I've ever met. If you weren't "in their club", then you didn't have the right to be treated like a human being. Awful, awful people. But, knowing human nature, something icky will replace them.
This is not to say that I haven't met lovely, wonderful people who are Christians--there are many--most, in fact. I'm talking about the hard core religious fanatics. {{{shudder}}}
Hayduke Bomgarte
(1,965 posts)And in my experience, they are, the end of White Christian America will hardly be noticeable.
Now if the pretend and phony Xtians somehow vanish, and I wish they would, that would hard to miss. I'm talking about the vast majority who start wars, starve the children and elderly, inflict ever more suffering on the sick, etc., and still manage to fool themselves and each other that they're doing Gods work. The dime a dozen ones. The Franklin Graham types and their sheeple.
bluepen
(620 posts)Might want to take another look at the demographics around the world, and recalculate the likelihood of peace (if thats all youre basing it on).
hunter
(38,353 posts)Our own oligarchs, along with their Russian allies, wish to accomplish the same here.
All those Trump voting white evangelicals who used to hate Catholic and Orthodox Christians are suddenly very friendly with the right wing of the Catholic and Orthodox churches.
It's not a coincidence.
HughBeaumont
(24,461 posts)It was a watershed momentthe beginning of a movement that would advance over the 1940s and early 1950s a new blend of conservative religion, economics and politics that one observer aptly anointed Christian libertarianism. Fifield and like-minded ministers saw Christianity and capitalism as inextricably intertwined, and argued that spreading the gospel of one required spreading the gospel of the other. The two systems had been linked before, of course, but always in terms of their shared social characteristics. Fifields innovation was his insistence that Christianity and capitalism were political soul mates, first and foremost.
Before the New Deal, the government had never loomed quite so large over business and, as a result, it had never loomed large in Americans thinking about the relationship between Christianity and capitalism. But in Fifields vision, it now cast a long and ominous shadow. He and his colleagues devoted themselves to fighting the government forces they believed were threatening capitalism and, by extension, Christianity. And their activities helped build a foundation for a new vision of America in which businessmen would no longer suffer under the rule of Roosevelt but instead thrivein a phrase they popularizedin a nation under God. In many ways, the marriage of corporate and Christian interests that has recently dominated the newsfrom the Hobby Lobby case to controversies over state-level versions of the Religious Freedom Restoration Actis not that new at all.
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If they wanted to convince clergymen to side with them, industrialists would need a subtler approach. Rather than treating ministers as a passive audience to be persuaded, Haake argued, they should involve them actively in the cause as participants. The first step would be making ministers realize that they, too, had something to fear from the growth of government. The religious leaders must be helped to discover that their callings are threatened, Haake argued, by realizing that the collectivism of the New Deal, with the glorification of the state, is really a denial of God. Once they were thus alarmed, they would readily join Spiritual Mobilization as its representatives and could then be organized more effectively into a force for change both locally and nationally.
JCanete
(5,272 posts)dominion ends, assuming it does end-(and that will be a fight since we haven't bothered to undo the top 1%'s stranglehold on power, mostly white people btw)-is in my opinion incredibly naive. We've ceded the class war, which means there will always be not just the financial incentive to divide us, but the means and economic mechanisms to do so. Get people to fight over the crumbs and pay no attention to the person with the pie in his maw...age old story