Bitter Clingers Circle Wagons Around G.O.P. & Jesus

This may not end well.

A woman prays at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles during "A Night of Hope,"
an event hosted by Lakewood Church pastor Joel Osteen. | AP Photo

White Christians now make up less than half of the U.S. population, largely receding from the majorities of most demographic groups, with one notable exception: the Republican Party.

According to the latest results from Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape survey published Monday by National Journal's Next America project, just 46 percent of American adults are white Christians, down from 55 percent in 2007.

At the same time, according to the report, the share of white Christians identifying as Republican has remained steady, even equal with the share of the party that carried President Ronald Reagan to his 1984 reelection. Nearly seven in 10 white Christians — 69 percent — identify with or lean toward the GOP, while just 31 percent do the same with Democrats

Among nonwhite Christians, meanwhile, 32 percent identify with or lean toward Democrats, and just 13 percent do the same with Republicans.

In less than a decade, the gap in Christian identification between Democrats and Republicans has increased by 50 percent. According to the data presented, in 2007, 88 percent of white Republicans and 70 percent of white Democrats identified as Christian, an 18-point disparity. By 2014, 84 percent of white Republicans identified as Christian, but the share of white Democrats identifying as Christian fell by 13 points, to 57 percent, a 27-point gap.

Pew conducted the massive survey by telephone between June 4 and Sept. 30, 2014, interviewing 35,071 Americans, with an overall margin of error of plus or minus 0.6 percentage points.

Clearer recognition of the bitter clinging from National Journal, which has done some of that reading & interpreting/reporting stuff, unlike POLITICO or WEB of EVIL:

Long the dom­in­ant group in Amer­ic­an re­li­gious life, White Chris­ti­ans have fallen be­low a ma­jor­ity of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion—and they are mov­ing to the right polit­ic­ally as they re­cede.

[...]

“After 2004, when George W. Bush was reelec­ted, there was a lot of dis­cus­sion about the Demo­crats’ ‘God prob­lem,’ and the think­ing was Demo­crats needed to close the re­li­gion gap,” says Gregory Smith, as­so­ci­ate dir­ect­or of re­search at Pew. “But at the same time, we were watch­ing this group of ‘nones’—un­af­fili­ated with any re­li­gion—who were both grow­ing in the pop­u­la­tion as a whole and vot­ing very strongly Demo­crat­ic. There has been less dis­cus­sion of the Demo­crats’ re­li­gion prob­lem since then.”