"In God We Divide", by Thomas Edsall in today's NYT
…the “most powerful simple way to understand the electorate” is as composed of “white Christians (half), white seculars (a quarter) and voters of color (a quarter).”
Citing data from Pew, he noted that white Christians favored Trump 67 to 27, while white seculars favored Clinton 63-28 and voters of color favored Clinton 75-20. In more recent polling, he said, sorting by religion provides more insight than by education:
White non-college secular men support the generic Democrat by 17 points, while white college Evangelical women support Trump by 47 points, a 64 point gap going in the opposite direction from what education and gender would predict.
In addition, he continued, “identifying yourself as Christian in America today means that you are identifying yourself with a particular set of values that systematically set you apart from those who do not.”
The substitution, he wrote,
of “non-college” for “Christian” in elite discourse is consequential and damaging to progressive prospects. Pretty much everyone loosely agrees that Republicans want America the way they think it was and are revolting against cosmopolitan modernization, including even science. But naming white non-college voters as the Republican base suggests that the source of Republican grievance is lack of education, which organizes the conversation that follows about everything else. Imagine instead, the conversation that would follow from identifying the source of Republican grievance as religious.
Religion, he continued, “is real with values and motivated institutions, while non-college is barely more than an analytical category. Christians call themselves Christians, non-college folks don’t call themselves uneducated. Christian is an identity, non-college is a label.”
Religiosity has joined issues which cluster around race, immigration, abortion, women’s rights, gay marriage, the traditional nuclear family and globalization — all reinforced by the parallel split between urban and rural America, which is playing out again in our response to the dangers posed by coronavirus.
In “Red Versus Blue,” David Hopkins accurately sums up the situation:
Perpetually vigorous competition between two closely matched parties that each maintain reliable electoral dominance over a significant, and roughly equal, proportion of the nation’s geographic territory has become a signature characteristic of American politics in the twenty- first century.
The result is a national politics in which conflict replaces resolution. Hopkins goes on:
The appearance of distinct and stable geographic alignments on the contemporary electoral map thus serves as an apt visual symbol of an era defined by the emergence of intense partisan conflict among leaders and citizens alike. With the vast majority of voters now providing consistent support to the candidates of a single party in national elections, and with Democratic and Republican politicians collectively shifting toward opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, the United States has entered a political age characterized by the dual trends of mass-level partisanship and elite- level polarization.
I think this pretty accurately explains why White Evangelicals and conservative Catholics give Christianity a bad name. It's not about education; it's about anger and resentment. It's not about hope and compassion, it's about fear and delusional thinking. The proof of it is in that 67% of White Christians approve Trump. No more evidence need be provided. At least 27% have retained their wits and some level of composure. Among them you will find the true remnant. One's politics is not an essential indicator of of faith, but it is an indicator of one's grasp of reality. And if faith isn't something that enables you to see reality more clearly and deeply, it isn't really faith. It's just run-of-the-mill ideology.
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