I came across a comment in the Guardian (h/t Barry) which discusses the demographic shift in religious belief in the U.S. and predicts long term doom for the Republicans. It’s entitled “Godless Millennials Could End the Political Power of the Religious Right.” The column notes the prospects for short term success for the Republicans but predicts long term problems because the short term success in deep red states ought to be even greater. I’ve seen the doom of one political party or another predicted too often to put much stock in it. In political circles, short term success is the only kind of success there is. The voting public doesn’t seem to have a sufficiently long term memory for political parties to build up (or cost themselves) a lot of equity. (Pundits seem to be even more immune from long term accountability for good or poor prognostications.) In the past, I’ve seen predictions of a permanent Republican majority. More recently, I’ve seen predictions that will put Democrats in the majority based on demographic shifts that are always just around the corner.
Normally, those demographic predictions are based on race — e.g. Latinos vote for Democrats more often. The Guardian comment discusses religious belief. Its premise is that Americans, particularly millennials are becoming more godless.
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 Republican base of white evangelical Christians is shrinking – and in some traditional conservative 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.
It may well be that the religious right loses its clout. However, the two party system being what it is, I would expect that if that happens, the Republicans will attempt to shift somewhat to stake out territory that gives them something close to a 51% stake in the electorate. (Power being what it is, political factions tend to want to be large enough to retain power but small enough that they share it as little as necessary.)
With that long lead up, what captured my interest is the premise. If America is becoming less religious — and I don’t pretend to know if the premise is sound — why now? The column suggests something like a backlash against the religious right’s treatment of gays and lesbians. Millennials regard bad treatment of those groups as an anachronism and hostile rhetoric against them as unacceptable. People who feel this way leave their various churches and, with such departures, the antipathy of the remainder toward gays and lesbians is higher as a percentage, and the rhetoric grows more extreme; causing a vicious cycle.
I’m more inclined to see aversion to rhetoric about the sinfulness of gays and lesbians as more of a symptom than a cause. I mean, why now? Certainly the public acceptance of gays and lesbians has grown dramatically. But why the sudden shift? I’m going to go with the Internet as a force multiplier accelerating the acceptance of the gay community. As I understand it, more people came out publicly as gay in the 70s and increasingly thereafter. This forced friends and acquaintances to deal with homosexuality as being something experienced by real people, including friends and relatives, and not as some kind of cartoonish abstraction that’s easy to hate. The Internet made it easier for people to come out and more likely that straight people would come into contact with gay people in every day life. The Internet does this by reducing isolation as an influencer of human behavior. By learning that other people think like you, it becomes easier to express your opinions and stand behind your beliefs. You learn that you’re not crazy and you’re not alone. You’re more likely to speak up and stand up for yourself.
When communities were formed almost exclusively by physical proximity, it was much harder to communicate and much harder to learn whether you were alone or whether your beliefs were shared by at least some others. When communities were formed by geography, it was much easier for powerful minorities to control the conversation and create the illusion of social norms and enforce that vision by, in effect, dividing and conquering.
I think I’ve mentioned a passage before from Howard Bloom’s “Global Brain.” He discusses a study by a guy named Schanck of a New York town in the 30s. It seems to have been populated by people who were nominally Baptists and the community was dominated by a minister’s daughter. Publicly almost all of them would declare the sinfulness of things like cards, liquor, and tobacco. Privately many of them would engage in those things.
How completely the anointed had commandeered collective perception became apparent when Schanck asked the closet dissenters how other people in the community felt about face cards, liquor, a smoke, and levity. Hoodwinked by suppression, each knew without a doubt that he was the sole transgressor in a saintly sea. He and he alone could not control his demons of depravity. None had the faintest inkling that he was part of a silenced near-majority.
Here was an arch lesson in the games subcultures play. reality is a mass hallucination. We gauge what’s real according to what others say. And others, like us, rein in their words, caving in to timidity. Thanks to conformity enforcement and to cowardice, a little power goes a long, long way.”
My suspicion, based in no small part – I must confess – on projection of my own experience, is that people aren’t just suddenly reacting to gays. Rather, I expect that a lot of people have long been dubious about the socially conservative behavioral components of religion — antipathy to, for example, gays, dancing, sex, gambling, alcohol. To one degree or another, probably based a lot on their geographic community, that large minority or even majority were perhaps too timid to speak up because they thought they were more isolated in their opinion than was actually the case. This might go not just for those behavioral components but also for a skepticism of religion itself. I grew up Presbyterian and in a family that wasn’t especially ardent about its religion, and I have never been shy about sharing my opinions. But even I felt a strong social conditioning against speaking out about my non-belief. The Internet (along with living in a geographic area with a wide range of beliefs and a non-trivial number of non-believers) has reduced that inhibition by bringing me into contact with others of similar thinking.
So, I wonder if that’s what’s really going on with the millennials. From day one, they grow up immersed in the Internet and exposed to the wide range of beliefs of the millions (are we at billions yet?) of people online. Social conformity based on isolation has to be reduced. (Social conformity based on a howling, mostly anonymous mob might be a thing, however.) What this means for politics is anyone’s guess, however. Prognostications are usually wrong.
I won’t try to speak to what’s going on with millennials or the impact of the internet (although I think may be huge, I don’t think anyone really has a clue as to its long term effect on society). But I do have a few opinions! I think the loss of influence of the religious right is a real phenomenon, and the right’s treatment of LGBT people is a big factor.
I’ll be 60 next year. When I was in high school “no one” was gay. Gays were people you read about in the paper or saw on TV. They were flamboyant and very different from “real people”. In college I met maybe one or two people who were out, and them only through a couple of very liberal liberal arts courses that aimed to expose us to different ways of thinking. Of course in retrospect, I can look back at people I knew and say “of COURSE he (or she) was gay (or lesbian)! But at the time, I had no clue.
My older kids are in their early 30’s. When they were in school the impact of the gay rights movement had been felt, and many more young people where coming out. They had friends who were openly gay or lesbian. And unlike with racial issues, whether or not people are gay cuts completely across class and color lines. For my kids and for millennials being gay is just who some of their friends are.
So when many younger people see the religious right demonizing LGBT people I think it registers instantly as bigotry. Add to that the hypocrisy of a few prominent religious and right wing figures being caught in same sex scandals (Larry Craig, Ted Haggard and so on) and you have a recipe for instant loss of church credibility. The Catholic Church’s struggle with priest pedophilia doesn’t help the image of religion either.
But I don’t think that bad news for religion heralds a crash for the Republican Party. You can already see the more experienced pols backing away from gay bashing measures as fast as they can. I think that if you want to see the Republican future you just have to look across the ocean at Western Europe. Church going is much, much lower there than it is here, but the parties on the right are still factors. They’ve simply shifted their fire away from gay rights and other “religious” issues and focused on fiscal issues or (continued) to bash other minorities. A few R’s will crash and burn, but most Republicans will adjust and go on playing the endless power game.
Thank you, Mr. Masson for writing and sharing this thoughtful essay. I awoke this morning in a very sad state of mind over the whole political and social picture facing the country. You, along with Jay’s comment have helped me to just slow down, put things into a bit of perspective, and be able to not let all this get me down!
I’ll just share my first thoughts about the “coming demise” (haha) of the Republican party. It just ain’t gonna happen.
The party will change its stripes once again, and in another 10 or 15 years be looking back on the days of Lee Atwater, the Koch Bros., and Karl Rove as a time when ‘some bad guys’ took it over for awhile (remember when the KKK ran things in the Twenties?), and there will be more Republicans who are “nones” than Democrats — at least here in Indiana.
I believe this because of my late mother. She voted Republican because her father had voted Republican, believing the Democrats were the party of war, booze, and the welfare state. As the Republicans shifted into being the party of war, booze, and the welfare state, she was unable to accept that her father’s virtuous Republicans were now everything she hated about the Democrats, and just kept voting against her own beliefs because her father had. Silly, I know, but it proved to me that the way we vote and the make-up of our parties really, deep down, has nothing to do with our own interests — or beliefs. So, I really do believe the only places the Republicans will be going are to gerrymandering map and then is back to Indianapolis, to continue to run things.
I do think that the younger generation who goes to church will perhaps show more grace towards their fellow man via government.
Best I can tell right now, some in the Religious Right use government to try to induce more people to use church services.
As people lose food stamps because they’ve been on them too long and can’t find work to feed their families, church pantries will see more people in the door.
Church daycares will be the only option that some people can afford because they don’t have to follow the rules other daycares have to.
If this is their best way to get people to come to church, then they’re in trouble.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. So, for instance, abortion. I’d like to see less abortions. Some ways I’d like to see less abortions include the government picking up the costs of the unborn child and mother who is offering a child for adoption. I’d like to see IUD’s made available and their use promoted so that young women can break the cycle of unplanned motherhood.
Yet what do I heard from the social conservatives? “Don’t have sex outside marriage”, no sex education, don’t want to pay for IUD’s, and rules trying to shut down abortion clinics. “Just don’t have sex” hasn’t worked for centuries, and to Doug’s point, this is one of those behaviors that people probably thought they were the “only” people doing in secret.
Yet, the behavior of the social conservatives – their need for people to feel the consequence of their sin – we end up with more people on welfare, more people in prison, and higher taxes for everyone, because I’m pretty sure the cost of an IUD is much lower than the cost of raising a child. But at least we are all feeling the consequences of sin, I suppose.
Just some thoughts after attending church this morning.
1. I’m a little skeptical of the Internet Theory of Gay Acceptance, since I don’t think that the timing works out. When I was in college in the early 80’s, I knew several gay people who were out, having known none in HS. Acceptance increased a lot over the next decade; by law school in the early/mid 90’s, I knew a lot of gays who were out and completely comfortable with it, as well as a few older gays who were out and kind of confused by the acceptance.
I think that TV, more than the Internet, helped increase acceptance, as there were several hit shows in the 90’s/2000’s featuring openly gay characters. But I think the real turning point was just that people knew more and more gays personally.
2. Both the Republican and the Democratic party have reinvented themselves several times over the course of their existence – the D’s probably more than the R’s, in fact. So I don’t think that demographic changes will lead to any long term decline in the Republican party.
But I do think that they will lead to an improved Republican party (like it or not); Eisenhower’s republican party was different in many ways from today’s party (even though there are a goodly number of Eisenhower republican). A return to these roots would lead to a greatly improved party (as well as a significant challenge for D’s).
I don’t see such a transformation happening any time soon, but it does seem demographically inevitable.
The beginnings of gay acceptance were there – because some brave souls were being very vocal and thereby breaking down the isolation, but I think the Internet was a huge force amplifier. That’s just my sense of it though. I certainly don’t have any concrete evidence.
Great post, and good conversation. I tend to agree with the premise of the Guardian article–with a caveat that several commenters hinted at: I don’t think that the ebbing of religious right fervor will doom the GOP; however, I DO think it will doom the current iteration of the party. If Republicans want to win elections (and of course, they do), the party will retreat from the extremism that has increasingly characterized it since the 80s. This country desperately needs two sane political parties; I’d love to see the return of the party of Hudnut and Lugar and reasoned debate about genuine public policies.
I think LGBT issues and, in a more historical sense, the push for the full inclusion of women in the leadership of many denominations, is *a* reason but not *the* reason America sees declines in affiliation and attendance. If it were solely a problem of inclusiveness and equity, those churches who are either demonstrably *more* if not yet fully inclusive (Episcopal, Presbyterian Church of the USA, now Lutherans/ELCA) would see fewer declines. In the alternative, those churches *refusing* to bend to societal changes (Catholics, Southern Baptists) would be seeing explosive growth. (A few smaller denominations are, but that’s also of questionable impact as the numbers are so small.) I think people aren’t joiners anymore. Fewer people go to church for social connection anymore; fewer people become Masons and Rotarians for social connection; fewer people join adult sports leagues. People have so many other ways to make connections and form community, and it’s hard to say if what if any impact this will have on politics.
Emily makes a good point about joiners. Churches are interesting because they constitute such a large segment of our social network, and are complex for a number of reasons. If church membership declines, it’s not just for one reason, and there are a number of folks who have studied this phenomenon, both from the inside and out. The recent studies by the Southern Baptists show that some of the folks doing these studies do not have a clue about what is happening.
There are a number of reasons why people do or don’t join churches, not just for reasons of belief. We know, for example, that many young people attend church but are not inclined to formally “join” the church, a phenomenon that drives denominations crazy, because churches are often assessed by denominations for the number of members. It’s conceivable that a church could have 100 people in attendance but only 20 members.
All of the above notwithstanding, it’s most interesting to see that many no longer join churches for social reasons, and as the numbers of many conservative churches decline–and that is where right wing politicians can depend on their support– it will be interesting to see what happens once that support level drops to less than 25%. The base is eroding, so what will tomorrow’s ambitious politicians do when they can’t depend on broad-based right wing support, and the support they depend on becomes more isolated, concentrated and less influential? As the base becomes less “Christian” (in a right wing political sense), will the politicians follow suit? When Rokita visits the local churches in his base (as he probably does) the number of gray heads is probably a little disconcerting. Will the Rokitas of this world change their spots, as politicians do, or go the way of the passenger pigeon?
I suspect (and this is just me talking) that churches will decline at both ends of the religious (right/left) spectrum, and the knowledgeable folks are now saying that a different group will take hold, probably more progressive, yet committed which will not be such a bad thing. More Christian and less politically ideological.
The Republican Party adjustment to less conservative religious support can already be seen. Just look at this time line:
• In March of 2013, John Boehner said, on ABC news: “I believe that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, It’s — it’s what I grew up with. It’s what I believe. It’s what my church teaches me. And — I can’t imagine that position would ever change.”
• On June 26, 2013, the Supreme Court killed the Federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) with Justice Kennedy’s opinion in United States vs. Windsor. That same opinion (and oddly enough, also Justice Scalia’s dissent) has been cited by Federal judges and several of the US Circuit Courts of Appeals in rulings that have struck down state prohibitions on Gay marriage in some 30 (it’s hard to keep track) states as of today.
• In December of 2013, Boehner told Politico that Republicans should not only “be a little more sensitive” when running against women candidates, but they should also support openly gay individuals who are seeking higher office.
• On October 5, 2014 “The Hill” reported of Boehner that: “The Ohio Republican is heading to California this week, where he’ll raise cash for openly gay Republican candidate Carl DeMaio in defiance of several conservative groups.”
I’m sure that the most conservative Tea Party Republicans are very upset with Boehner over this, as are their conservative religious supporters. But Boehner didn’t get to be speaker by ignoring which way the political winds are blowing. Other Republicans will follow suite and the party as a whole will eventually shift.
Jay
Well, the Republicans have three loud groups right now – big business, Tea Party, social conservatives. I’m figuring one of the three will wither with time, I’m not sure which.
My big concern is not the usual conservative line, but some of the radical stuff actually being proposed, based on screwy myths, misinformation and ideology that will not serve the common good. This morning, in the Princeton newspaper, there was an article (not a letter to the editor) by someone who declared that Social Security is “non Christian”. Just looney stuff by people who are so into their one-dimensional perceptions, they are not even with us, even though they walk among us. I’m hoping for some proposals that are at least sane and to avoid disastrous policies and laws that will introduce us into what it means to be a third world country.
Doesn’t the Bible talk about supporting widows and orphans? Isn’t that what Social Security does? How un-Christian. BTW, in the very early 1950’s SS was what kept my grandmother and grandfather under a roof. And they had worked all their lives, just no pensions involved.
We know that the Bible specifically addresses widows and orphans, and that there is more discussion about the poor than any other topic, but these guys would rather flavor their understanding of scripture with with their silliness. Eliminating Social Security would be the most effective way to bring about a socialist government than anything I know, along with a few lynchings of some prominent radical “conservative” folks. Come think of it, maybe not such a bad idea.
FYI—Harvard University Institute of Politics just published a report that states that:
“A new national poll of America’s 18- to 29- year-olds by Harvard’s Institute of Politics (IOP), located at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, finds slightly more than half (51%) of young Americans who say they will “definitely be voting” in November prefer a Republican-run Congress with 47 percent favoring Democrat control – a significant departure from IOP polling findings before the last midterm elections (Sept. 2010 – 55%: prefer Democrat control; 43%: prefer Republican control).”
http://www.iop.harvard.edu/october-29-2014-fall-2014-survey?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=hero&utm_campaign=Fall2014Survey
And, moments later, Pew released its findings about Hispanics continuing to move to the left. I get that a single poll which bucks dozens of others and has the word “Harvard”: get the Right all a-twitter, but I’m not too convinced.
Since this cropped back up in my FB feed for some reason…
I think there might not be a democracy for them to take over. The thought that it is “necessary” to live in a democracy is on the decline. You might say we are approaching a point where an opportunistic authoritarian (or some oligarchs backing said person) could rejigger things to not need to worry about their demographic becaming “irrelevant” in the future.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CyglWFjXcAAXT1n.jpg:large