Robert Jones: Religion, Race, and Partisanship- Understanding America's Identity Crisis

[Applause] same grace before carving a turkey at Thanksgiving Pennsylvania u.s. 1942 that was the caption underneath this photo that I received an email from the Christian Coalition of America in 2012 just a few days before Thanksgiving and just two weeks before the re-election of President Barack Obama now I found this a little bit curious at the top of the email but you know I didn't think a lot about it till I read down the page and found this kicker at the end of the email and it said this we were about to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving and God has still not withheld his blessing from this nation although we now so richly deserve such condemnation we have a lot to give thanks for but we should pray to our Heavenly Father and ask him to protect us from those enemies outside and within who would like to see America destroyed into the email now I immediately save this email because it was quite remarkable and this was long before I was working on the book but I thought what is going on right this kind of apocalyptic language after the re-election you know of a president in the country and as I begin to unpack it what I realized what's going on is that this was actually quite important to pay attention to and that for many conservative Christians in the country the demographic changes in our country and very much symbolized by her first African American president who's now going to be a two-term president signaled the end of something I began calling white Christian America this idyllic and mythical memory of white Christian and essentially white Protestant dominance in the US so I think it's that event and I began looking at the numbers in my day job at prr I I look at religion and politics numbers all the time as I began to look at the demographic changes in the country I realized that we had crossed some very significant thresholds in just the last few decades and that this kind of apocalyptic language wasn't just invented out of thin air but it was actually responding to very significant changes in the country and if we really get our heads around these changes we'll see I think some clues about why our current politics have become so visceral really and in this apocalyptic key almost any issue that we're talking about so what I want to do in just a few minutes before we sit down have a little bit of a conversation and take some questions it's just run through a few of the changes that'll give you a flavor of just how dramatically some things have changed and just how much they are really taking us to a point where we as a nation are in fact experiencing a kind of identity crisis as a once strong demographic majority is actually fading from the scene so let me just kind of walk you through it a bit first of all so that I'm not misunderstood I should be very clear about what I mean by this term white Christian America I certainly don't mean the end of all white Christian churches in the country you would have to walk very far in any you know city to see just a few blocks to see that's certainly not true I certainly don't mean the end of all white Christians I could probably take any row in this venue and kind of falsify that claim but what I do mean is the end of a cultural era this era of waspy white anglo-saxon Protestant dominance in the country where white Christians in particular did have their hands on the levers of power and very much controlled the culture and set the tone for the country one of the historians I was using before research in the book put it this way and I've always thought it's a nice pithy way of putting it so look if you were in charge of something big and important in the middle of the 20th century chances are you were white you were male you were Protestant and you were straight right that's really who was controlling the country in the middle of the in the middle of the 20th century so let me just show you a few slides here again I'll try to move through these and what you're really looking for is the patterns of change over time not so much the individual numbers I can think of these as vital signs for this cultural world of white Christian America that has been really on the decline in the last few years so first of all if I only had one chart to put I would probably use this one for those of your stats people and love numbers of charts be happy to know I have more than one chart for the rest of you just hang on will I'll take it slow and again it's the patterns that you want to look for but this is really not that far back right 2004 to the present and I've got a plot up here just two lines one is the percent of the country who identifies as white non-hispanic and Christian overall and this is any type of Christian Catholic Protestant Orthodox nondenominational you name it they identify as Christian this is the percentage of Americans over time so here's that slide here's that trend line and you can see it's a fairly precipitous drop in particular over the last decade so if we just rewind ourselves to two election cycles ago back to 2008 when Barack Obama was first running for president 54 percent of the country identified as white and Christian that number today is 43 percent so in our last election cycle is dropped to 43 percent it's 11 percentage points and just about a decade a little more than a percentage point a year that's a pretty fast drop the other issue that I think is important for taking the kind of pulse of the culture is support for same-sex marriage there's another issue where I added to you to change very very quickly we tend to not see in public opinion surveys issues to take off like this but you'll take a look at these numbers so this is the percentage of Americans who support same-sex marriage again if we just go back to Barack Obama's re-election our observed first election did only four in 10 Americans supported same-sex marriage Barack Obama himself did not support same-sex marriage in 2008 by the time we get to 2016 that number has essentially been flipped on its head from only four in ten favoring same-sex marriage to only four in ten opposing same-sex marriage in this fairly short amount of time we have numbers from some recent polling in 27 that shows that in fact has now crossed the 60% mark and is somewhere around 65% so just between last year and this year we've seen another chunk and these attitudes the main reason to put this up here just have you pause for a second is to kind of take end that if you are a conservative white Christian I this is a head-spinning amount of change right that it where you have been a part of a political movement that has been all in opposing same-sex marriage you've been accustomed to being the demographic majority in the country and all of this happens coincidentally while we have our first african-american president in the country I put that up to say like some of the upheaval that we're experiencing I think is in response to these very big cultural and demographic shifts in the country and it's maybe not that surprising that we're wrestling with some of these big changes something back up and show you some of the big numbers in the country heaps of 43 percent there's that number the big wedge there this is the basic lay of the land in terms of religious affiliation and religion and race in the country about 43 percent white Christians in the country about 1/4 non-white Christian if you take all non-christian religiously affiliated people Jews Hindus Buddhists Muslims etc and make seven percent of the country and then about a quarter of the country now claims no religious affiliation whatsoever and the thing to know about these slices here is that the the white Christian wedge is actually shrinking the non-white Christian edge is actually growing the non-christian religious group is also growing but at a very slow pace and this quarter of Americans who claimed no religious affiliation is basically exploding all right so that's the kind of trends that we're looking at in the country you can see this pretty clearly if you look at generational divisions in the country and you can think about this chart as a kind of archeological dig down through generational strata a we've got the young people on top we've got seniors down here at the bottom and I'm gonna put up first of all the percent of each generational strata that identifies as white and Christian and so you know the best thing we have is social scientists for a kind of future crystal ball is looking at generational shifts as a kind of way of thinking about what the future portends but check this out this is a percentage of each generation that identified as white and Christian so if you look at seniors here about nearly two-thirds of seniors identify as white and Christian but by the time you get down to Americans under the age of thirty which is a very large generation this millennial generation of Americans it's only about a quarter of the country who identify as white and Christians so you can see that just over the generations that are alive today the market share of each generation it's white and Christian has diminished by a factor of about two and a half just over the generations that are here existing today here's the rest of those categories and you can see the other big difference here is this big orange are right there religiously unaffiliated group that's the biggest change among the youngest Americans nearly four intention claim no religious affiliation whatsoever right compared to only about one in ten seniors there's that's the other big piece of this see change one of the way of thinking about this is to kind of look and ask well is this all due to just one segment of the white Christian population it turns out it's actually not it's so typically we divide up white Christians into evangelical Protestants the more conservative and of white Protestantism and two mainline Protestants that's a disc Italians and other more liberal Protestants and then Catholics as well and if I put up the numbers here you can see that basically every group every subgroup is experiencing some decline again I'm not I'm only going back 10 years now so this is not very far but here the other two groups but it's basically the same story right the clock white evangelicals white mainline Protestants white Catholics it's essentially all branches of the white Christian demographic that are sharing in this decline over time so what does all this mean we're going to talk about a little bit this in a minute but I want to get at least dip my toe in the water of what this means in terms of our I think cultural struggles our political struggles by just giving you two numbers from this last election cycle that I think gives some insight into what's what's happening in particular I think with the more conservative end of the white Christian worldwide evangelical Protestants were I think have been with some of the biggest puzzles in the last election cycle so at the end of the book I I talked about a I borrow very heavily from Elizabeth kubler-ross who or work who many of you may and I gave a kind of a eulogy for a white Christian America at the end of the book I begin the book with an obituary and I end the book with the eulogy and and I borrow heavily here I think this is actually quite helpful in thinking about what's going on and what I want to posit here is that what we're experiencing is again a group that has been accustomed to a kind of dominance and a kind of cultural hegemony and being both demographically and culturally in power and finding themselves slipping from that position of power and what happens when you get this sort of like end-of-life prognosis right one way of thinking about this the first thing you do you deny it right and there's a lot of that but after sort of you know you the the reports come back in and the tests come back in and okay you can't deny it any longer then you're just angry right so we're seeing I think a lot of that in our politics today I also want to say that one of the ways of understanding where a particularly white evangelicals were in this last election is this bargaining standpoint what happens at that point it's a kind of desperate move right so you see the end and you start saying things like you know what if I just get another year to live I will donate all my possessions to charity yeah well you know start serving in the soup kitchen like you sort of make all this if I can just think my daughter's wedding those kinds of things happen and what happens is any kind of maybe principles you won might have had they sort of go by the wayside to achieve the end that one is after and because it really is a kind of desperate situation one of the things I think it's an it's an interesting way of understanding what's happening here with white evangelicals in the last election cycle so what evangelical Protestants we who are known who can self Brandon really it's Values Voters right all the way back to the George W Bush election in this election cycle supported Donald Trump at 81% all right now I think that has been one of the I feel that more questions about that than anything else since the election is that what's going on that these values voters who said they cared about candidates character and all these kinds of criteria and Trump doesn't meet any of them in a way then why are they supporting in it such high I think we have a clue in this slide here so we asked a question in 2011 about candidates character and how important it was for support and the question was an agree or disagree question about what do you agree or disagree that an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in public and professional life and we asked this question first in 2011 white evangelical Protestants were the least likely group to agree with that statement right thirty percent of white evangelicals agreed with that statement we asked this question leading in just about a month before the 2016 election and white evangelicals had gone from being the least likely group here to agree with that statement to the most likely group to agree with that statement 72% now agreed that you could sort draw this line between a person's immoral private behavior and their life and and their their public performance in office so the only thing that changed here is Donald Trump at the top of the ticket right the composition of evangelicals doesn't really change that's the only real difference so I begin to think about this hard and I begin to think that one of the ways of understanding what happened in this last election is that many white Christian voters who had that kind of March turned this banner of Values Voters had really become what I would have began calling nostalgia voters right and this appeal to make America great again that last word again was the war word that did most of the work and sort of thinking about support so we do a survey of Americans every election cycle in partnership with the Brookings Institution and typically what we do is we sit around the table with EJ Dionne and Bill Galston who are our partners and the work there and we ask okay what are the big policy debates that are shaping the election how can we kind of get some questions that can cast some light on that and we sat around this table at Brookings for like an hour and just couldn't quite figure out what the big policy debates were in this last election right and we finally decided it's really not about policy at the end of the day it's a kind of referendum on a kind of vision of who we are as a country and who we should be as a country so we wrote a series of questions trying to get at that and one of the most illuminating ones one of the most predictive questions and how people voted in the last election was this question and that is we think how do you think the country has since the 1950s do you think the American Way of life and society have changed or the better or change for the worse it turns out that the country is evenly divided on this question with about half the country savings change for the better since the 1950s and about half the country saying it's changed for the worse and what I've done is I've sorted left to right kind of different groups these aren't mutually exclusive routes but a way of kind of giving you a sense of who's on which side of the equation here I'm going to put up first just the people who say things have changed mostly changed for the better you can see come up some commonalities here so Democrats overall religiously unaffiliated Americans Hispanic Catholics African Americans overall younger Americans Latinos overall and whites with a college education are the groups that basically say things have changed for the better since the 1950s here's all Americans in the middle right down the middle and here are the the the measures on the other side right if people who say that things have changed for the worse since the 1950s and what you'll see really is that it really is different white Christian groups that populate here seniors Republicans overall and what's kind of remarkable about the Democratic Party versus the Republican Party if I put the other side up you can see it they are essentially mirrored that our two parties are mirror images on this question two-thirds of Republicans say things have changed for the worse since the 1950s two-thirds of Democrats say things have changed for the better and if you think about the two candidates have already mentioned the make America great again this very backward looking to a golden era logo on the Republican side and what did Hillary Clinton have on her side this serve each with a forward pointing arrow on the other side and this kind of stronger together motif right embracing pluralism and cultural change on her side on her side of the equation so where does this leave us I think it leaves us in a not surprisingly we're all like we're all living through it in a very divided place the associate I'll close with this The Associated Press did this remarkable poll last year and they were looking at these kind of divisions and they found something very similar to this that essentially when they ask Americans whether we were losing a shared sense of American identity 7 and 10 Republicans and Democrats agreed right says one thing that we agree on as a country is that we're losing this shared sense of American identity but when they went down underneath and asked what kinds of things might hold us together or what was very important for a shared sense of American identity the two parties have very different views on this Republicans say the shared sense of Christian beliefs and values was very important for being what it meant to be an American Democrats on the other hand said no it's a mixing of cultures and people from all over the world that's what it means to be an American as you can see if there's those are two really different perhaps even mutually exclusive ways of thinking about the idea of what it means to be an American so I'll leave this with you with this last image here a different kind of table scene so this one is actually a still from a coca-cola ad that also ran in 2012 same years I received that email that you saw at the very beginning of that kind of white Christian family at prayer and this was a still from video that costs a fair amount of controversy actually ran during the Superbowl in 2012 and it was called it's beautiful and it was a montage of different kinds of people and all kinds of different everyday things but it was America the Beautiful sung in multiple languages showing multiple kind of cultural images of Americans gay people straight people you know all kinds of different people and it just at the end it just said it's beautiful and that was that was it and it caused quite a stir when it ran during the Superbowl in 2012 but I think one of the the sort of fundamental things we've been thrown back to I mean the idea of America has always been an idea I think and we're being thrown back I think to what is the content of that idea and I think one of the easy ways of thinking about this or simple ways of thinking about this is who are we right are we the black and white photo of the white Christian family a prayer that we saw on the first slide or are we sort of this group of people begging - the coat I don't know but you know are we something that looks more like this at the end of the day and I think that the two political parties right now are actually reorienting themselves in some ways away from kind of liberal to conservative attitudes and more around the very different answers to this fundamental question so I'll stop there [Applause] thank you for coming tonight Robbie thank you for that presentation and I appreciate you connecting the dots for us or at least starting to connect the dots on with a changing religious cultural landscape here and how that connects to the Washington landscape that's changed quite a bit in the last ten months what struck me in your presentation was the one of the last slides about bargaining and the the Values Voters that voted so overwhelmingly for this president and I'm curious I mean much was made of the the need this this president was going to fill at least appoint at least one Supreme Court justice if not more in the next four years and people really wanted Values Voters talked about really wanting a pro-life justice and they said that was the reason why they voted for President Trump was that true I mean based on your present day I think I think it's true but not the whole truth is what I would say about this so there's a couple one of the most crystallizing moments for me as I was puzzling over what is going on I mean I grew up in Mississippi I grew up Southern Baptists in Mississippi many ways these are my people and I was like what is happening here and I heard a radio debate between the pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas named Robert Jeffrey's who's been in the news quite a lot some of you may have seen him and Russell Moore who was the chief lobbyist for the Southern Baptist Convention he's the head of the ethics and religious liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention and Russell Moore was taking this kind of more traditional stance and saying look there's no way we can square the circle like we can't we stand for these principles we stand for these kinds of things in a candidate we can't really then support Donald Trump and he in fact went as far as to say and if that's what it begins to be an evangelical I'm going to stop calling myself an evangelicals like this very strong statement from him and then Robert Jeffries on the other hand put it I think very starkly and he was one earliest supporters of Donald Trump on the campaign trail and he said look when I look out at what's going on in the country today and how things are chained and shifting we're in such desperate times that when I think of who I want in the Oval Office is literally what he said on NPR when I think of who I want only in the Oval Office I want the meanest son of the you know what I can find and that's Donald Trump and that's why I'm supporting him and urging my church members to support him fairly remarkable statement from a pastor you know kind of tall steeple Church that's very prominent the Southern Baptist Convention has a lot of a lot of influence there so and the other thing I would say I think on this point is that if you look at white evangelicals and where they line up on many many issues that that Trump is behind it's not just that they they certainly are sort of you know much more in favor by margin about two-to-one likely to say abortion should be mostly illegal versus mostly legal that's certainly true and that issue ranks higher that it does for most Americans but it still ranks fairly low actually on their list of priorities and typically in elections it never is F up at the top and and when you look at immigration in particular anti sort of anti-muslim anti-immigrant attitudes white evangelicals actually agreed with Donald Trump all the way up and down the line on that whole platform of issues so it wasn't just this one thing I'll hold my nose and vote for Trump I mean they really were on board with the whole agenda very pretty much they were voting their values in other words but that's right generally the values that they were talking that openly a break okay well let me let me take us back to the george w bush elections where same-sex marriage played such an important role that was really that was the issue that those elections hinged on I think but now I'm wondering was it the same whether the same dynamics and at play during those elections yeah it's worth remembering that the issue of gay rights has been the animating issue of the conservative Christian campaign that had actually racial issues have been the kind of DNA of the campaign long before abortion abortion was actually added later to that agenda in fact Bradford row v Wade the Southern Baptist Convention actually put out a statement supportive of roe v wade because they were basically saying it's a Catholic issue not our thing and it wasn't till later it got added to the blue but early on there really was this this this all the way from kind of early fights in the 1970s at the local level but they were all in opposing gay rights like that was part of the DNA from the beginning and so I think it's really important to remember that piece because I think that most people to the center and left and and younger people in particular have a hard time wrapping their heads around what a nuclear event the iboga fell decision Supreme Court decision was in 2015 for conservative white Christians in the country who had spent decades and all kinds of resource hundreds of millions of dollars in decades dedicated to blocking a decision like that and then lost not only in Supreme in the Supreme Court but lost in the court of public opinion as those as those slide show and in our last poll I was mentioning that support has now jumped over up to over 60% support for the same-sex marriage we also are finding now the first in this last poll the first time we have solid majority support among young Republicans for same-sex marriage and among young evangelicals for same-sex marriage and African Americans who have been really a plurality against now are now they're not a majority for but they are now a plurality for more for than against and so we are seeing it's really across the board it's not just that Democrats and liberals that become 90 percent supportiveness really everyone has shifted so that's really a value that can be kind of removed from the table in terms of a factor that may sway the election one way together yeah I think that's right and we saw a Donald Trump I think even hinting at that at the Republican convention and you know we had a gay speaker speak at the convention now that it has been the case that there have been a number of issues where the Trump administration really has really I think gone back on many of those promises that he made during the during the campaign but I think you did at least seeing him signal toward the sea change so do you think again referring to that wonderful graphic with the bargaining and the acceptance I saw the acceptance in the corner there do you think that the last ten months in Washington will hasten the movement toward acceptance or do you think this bargaining will be something that we see in many years for many years to come yeah I think we're gonna it's a longer ride than that nobody's probably surprised by that I mean I I do in many ways think what we saw with the Trump administration was a kind of Last Stand or a kind of death rattle of a kind of movement kind of on its last last legs but what happened though it's worth noting that again that Donald Trump only won by the electoral college by 78,000 votes across three states which constant Pennsylvania in Michigan so that's point zero five percent of the 138 million votes that were cast in this election it's a very very tiny sliver and yet it kind of produced all of these all of these changes but but I I don't think we're in for a quick anything I think we're in a little kind of longer transition mode and you know there is this sort of like depression and disillusionment period that you know for kind of following this this typology out before you get to acceptance right so it doesn't go straight from bargaining to acceptance I mean they're the bargain has to fall through before you go anywhere else okay so you did a book in 2008 on progressive the progressive religious movement and the progress that it had made especially evidenced by the election of Barack Obama I'm curious in this election what happened to that movement did that progress Wayne did the progress of conservative activists just overcome that and what do you can predict will become of that movement what will we see in the years to come well I I think that the you know the progressive religious movement except there is one I'm not sure I would quite call it a movement I might call it a coalition of sorts it has a lot of challenges that the movement that the religious political movement on the right doesn't have right so the verge is like you know and when you're looking voting but you've got a kind of homogeneous group of kind of white non-hispanic fairly conservative Christians it's not that hard to get them in lockstep on a set of issues and to get them mobilized on one side of politics but for example if you look at mainline Protestants right who have been the backbone of the civil rights movement you know working with the african-american community were very forward on many of those issues but if you look at 44% of white mainline Protestants vote Republican right and so it's it's not nearly the kind of tipping point that you have and many of those in on the right and so I think it's that challenge of it's also easily mobilized through churches not only because of that split but because it's not the way that progressive religious leaders see their role right is the kind of politicizing things from the pulpit and so I think there's all kinds of built-in things that make it a little more diffuse it's certainly there and it's it's certainly I think a part of the coalition on the left it's not I think it's never going to be the leading coalition and in many ways that you see it on the right for at least as much for internal reasons as for extra it's also much more diverse right that's Muslims Buddhists and when you've got like you know Unitarians who support same-sex marriage at ninety percent plus in a coalition African Americans who are in the 40s on their support for an issue like that I mean that that presents some challenges they kind of hold that coalition together is it also the diversity of issues that that coalition wants to address I mean you know we talked about and and perhaps work we're oversimplifying it when we say abortion and same-sex marriage those are the two key issues you've added immigration to the conservative agenda but there seems to be when I ask you somebody in the progressive religious circles you know the laundry list of issues that need to be addressed is that also a maybe a barrier I think that's right although I do think that what we're witnessing now may I should clarify that a little bit because I do think this sense of what do we think about a pluralistic society right that's ethnically racially religiously diverse like is that a good thing or is that a threat I mean I think that fundamental question is going to be orienting our political discourse for some time to come so I want to switch from politics to the pews right this very moment in cago or I should say right this very moment Chicago is presumably the most segregated it ever is all week long because you churches houses of worship are so are so homogeneous and I'm curious if you think these demographic shifts that you've addressed here will that change in the years to come yeah it's it's tough I think the racial lines you know Martin Luther King jr. was famous said this number of times that we are we're at 12:30 p.m. on Sunday but he was famous for saying 11 a.m. on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America right and and that's largely still true 86% of churches today are still essentially mono racial churches even though that's that's fewer yeah there's more of them than there were in the past but it's still overwhelmingly homogeneous and we're still set socially segregated in so many ways but I went looking sort of for we're a kind of mixing was happening across racial and religious lines at they're just so few places where it's happening we have lost most of the ground that we gained up into the 1980s after the brown v board at Brown the Board of Education Act the 80s was the high mark of public school integration we've been losing ground ever since they're almost back to where we were you know not legally but because of the way social arrangements and white flight and other things have arranged and if you look at Chicago I mean Chicago is always up there with the we know as one of the most segregated cities with a kind of brutal history of redlining and real estate markets and keeping you know non-whites out of white neighborhoods and you could still just like look at it on the ground and see it there there on the ground and that legacy I think it's hard to it's hard to undo but I think we got to find some ways of kind of reaching across those lines I do think religious groups have a responsibility and actually some great potential for doing that if you just take churches for example they're still even with the decline of religiosity in America there are still more churches than there are post offices in the country right so in especially in places where you know outside of big cities those are still some of the most robust institutions standing and I think if we could find a way to have those places you know not just surest on their own races kind of history but really make some progress and reaching across those lines and there's a few examples of that happening that that's what it's going to take mm-hmm and if they did a letter-writing campaign they could bolster both institutions post offices in church you know I I want to also go I would I'm gonna put it back to politics because I forgot to ask you this one question and that is and you talked about this in the book the Tea Party that is a term that I've not really heard that much uttered that much in the past ten months what has happened to the tea party and I mean is it still as robust and people are just too busy uttering the word Trump when is what's going on with the tea party yeah you know what's interesting is that so we mention we do have study with Brookings and back in 2010 when the tea party was first really ascendant we did a study to try to figure out like okay who are these people where did they come from you know they kind of seem to come out of nowhere and what we found actually was that it was more of a rebranding of kind of more kind of on the right edge of the Republican Party rebranding people who were there picked up a few independents for the most part it was a rebranding and kind of gathering together of people on the right it was never actually libertarian we did a whole series of measures and and you were much more likely to predict someone being a member the tea party thing opposed gay marriage for example which is the exact opposite of a libertarian position on then you were a whole bunch of other things it might be more traditional libertarian and about half of them this is I think what's know half of the people who were in the Tea Party also said they considered themselves members of the Christian Right right so it would have this kind of very much an overlap and I think basically what's happened is you know we used to call it talk about the Christian Right then the Tea Party and now the Trump coalition and in many ways those are the same people just kind of traveling through different you know wearing different brands yeah okay all right so my last question before I turn it over the audience you talked about population shifts but population and political power are two very different things so I'm curious when will we see these demographic shifts directly affecting voting patterns and elections not indirectly and based on fear and insecurity about their identity but directly influencing the outcome of elections yeah so I as you might imagine so the book came out in 2016 in July the hardback came out I had well ahead of the election I don't talk about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in the book and and so after the election though I get a lot of email like oh really the end of white Christian America it's not looking like that so much and so the publisher graciously gave me eight pages in the paper back to explain it all came out this past summer but here's what's important I think to realize it and I think until I really started digging it harder it wasn't quite as clear to me but I think that the simplest way to put it is this that in the u.s. context because of the way voter turnout works the ballot box essentially acts like a time machine and it takes us back about ten years to what the demographics look like in the country about ten years ago the main reason for that is because white Christians in the country turn out to vote at higher rates than other Americans do so it means that they're over-represented always at the ballot box and since the trends are that they're declining as a proportion of the population so in this last election I mean they look like you know the electorate looks about like the population did you know back in 2006 and if you go forward it looks like our best projections are that it's going to be 2024 before we have the first election where white Christians make up less than a majority at the ballot box and as part of the electorate so we're still to presidential election cycles forward before that's going to happen sir even on it even on its own and then the one caveat here is that if we get a raft of policies that are around voter ID more restrictive voter ID laws felony just disenfranchisement gerrymandering districts all of these things that we know just fortunately effect minority voters it could extend maybe even a little bit further but just in its natural fallout it'll be it'll be two more election cycles and just to give you one small detail on this to give you an idea of just how much over-representation is there in this last election cycle in the population white evangelical voters that core of Donald Trump support only made up 17% of the population but they made up 26% of voters right because of their higher turnout rates okay thank you so much Robbie I would like to hear from the audience we have folks coming around with microphones so if you have a question for Robbie please raise your hand and they'll they'll hand you a microphone and I will leave them in charge of selecting you could you focus for a moment on immigration in particular and both illuminate some of the attitudes as they vary across these segments of American population and the trends how they have changed in the same time period that you focused on for the other issues sure great it's a great question so we have a little bit of a paradox in terms of immigration in the country if we ask about basic policy issues like what should we do with the approximately 11 million people who are in the country illegally there's actually we've been tracking this very clearly at least as 2010 the numbers have not shifted that much so no matter whether there's been a bill and you know there was a bipartisan bill there was just democratic bill and like all the ups and downs of the political process Americans attitudes did not change that much and it's usually about 6 and 10 Americans it's like super majorities of Democrats and about half of Republicans who support a path to citizenship a full path to citizenship provided people meet certain requirements very very few only about 15% of Americans support some more limited solution like a permanent legal residency status but fall short of citizenship and about one in five Americans say we should just identify and deport everyone in that category so it's a much very very minority position even among Republicans only about a third of Republicans favored the identify and deport options that's rank-and-file Republicans but the politics of it don't look like that right that's a real challenge on daca this this kind of policies around what what we do with children who are brought here by their parents really through you know no act no kind of action of their own but brought by parents illegally as a kid but who've been here living here going to high school and are now sort of serving the military going to college other kinds of things there is also fairly strong support about seven in ten Americans support kind of keeping that program going and but the politics again are kind of in the way and I think in particular this last election where you know if you watched I just remember being so struck by the Republican National Convention the Democratic National Convention and if you watch those and paid attention to kind of immigration policy they were such starkly different images of kind of who implements are how we should react as a country you know what our goals are and you even heard yeah from Stephen Miller you know questioning something is basic as the you know give me your tired give me your you know from the Statue of Liberty like that that's not really part of kind of who we are and so I think those shifts are I think really upon us and so I what we haven't quite seen it yet and we've been watching the needle move what we've seen is if you ask questions about fears and anxieties we have seen shifts there were a few people Americans as a whole have more concerns more fears more anxieties but so far it actually hasn't moved the needle that much on policy at the kind of rank-and-file level on a geographic basis I'm curious how a blue state evangelical compares to a red state evangelical if there is a difference yeah this is a great question one of the interesting things that we're finding across the board and in political science there's a lot of literature on this is that the regional differences that we have usually been accustomed to in the country are getting flattened out by partisanship right so we're seeing less regional differences on a whole range of issues what matters much more is mostly partisanship and then education levels and those kinds of things that matter more so there are certainly some differences but there is such a heavy Geographic concentration of white evangelicals in the south of the Midwest like that's really where the geographic center is much fewer on the coast and certainly a fewer in the New England there that you see some differences but they're not quite as muted the bigger differences you'll see is between college educated and non college educated evangelicals between Republican and Democratic affiliated evangelicals are still about one in five evangelicals who identify as Democrat still and so those are the bigger much bigger the regional yes my question is the woman I didn't see anything in the statistics regarding with all the solid misogyny and you're mentioning education now I hear more women than men are graduating from college and this has got to be a big factor great yeah so it certainly plays a role but anybody was looking at the exit polls I think one of the things the Democrats were waiting is for white women to implode right in terms of support for Trump and it didn't really materialize there was some pullback but there wasn't the sort of broad pullback because of the sexual assault comments and those kinds of things it just didn't materialize and I think it's a very similar thing to this is that one of the real struggles I think we you know I think if we think about a healthy democracy one of the real struggles we have to think about is how do we I think loosen up the lock hold that partisanship has on our lives right that because it's remarkable that in this election cycle again very little moved I mean there was just enough in just the right places but there we had this you know very unconventional candidate on the Republican ticket we had the first woman from a major party on the Democratic ticket and the voting patterns looked really really similar to what we would have seen we didn't see the only in fact the only places I could find it wherever you see like 20 percentage points movement away from a historical voting pattern was among Mormons right who moved about 20 percentage points away from Donald Trump mostly toward heaven McMullen right there's a third party candidate that they move toward but if you're looking for kind of values voters of fact it was really among Mormons in this last election cycle who moved away from their traditional support for Republican candidate one small little anecdote just because it's coming to mind I think is important that it's really negative partisanship that is I think the corrosive thing here it's less and less that people love their own party and more and more that they hate the other party race it so political science club is like a negative partisanship in fact one of my favorite examples of this that's easy to understand is that and some Stanford political scientists back in 1960 asked this really provocative question they said how worried would you be if your son or your daughter married someone from the opposite political party so in 1960 only 5% of Democrats and 6% of Republicans said that this were bothered them a lot they asked it again in 2012 YouGov Huffington Post asked this question again in 2012 and it had jumped to 33% of Democrats and 50% of Republicans said it would bother them a lot if their son of their daughter married someone of the opposite political party and I think the challenge there is you know what what it means is that in 1960 and if just a few decades ago you know partisanship was something we took to the ballot box with us and I think increasingly it's something we just take to bed with the graphs that you showed on religious affiliation were really amazing the difference between the older generations 50 and 65 above versus the lack of religious affiliation on the lower end I do though think that there might be a another factor involved here and that is I take it from my own personal experience if I were to answer that question even though I no longer a practicing member of my religion I would state yeah I was born into a Christian family or a Jewish family and I would report myself as that whereas I look at my son and he's got the same degree of non religious affiliation that I do and he'd be more likely to say I'm not gonna either millennial I'm not going to reply that I'm affiliated with any religion so did that come up as a factor and what you saw yeah you know we're we are I mean it is remarkable that you know as recently as 1990s in the mid 1990s only 6% like five six percent on depend on the poll you look at of Americans claim no religious affiliation right so that's six percent now it's twenty four just since the 1990s so it's a very remarkable shift and in the American context one of the things that we that's going on is it's certainly driven by young people and it's driven from young people exiting white Christian churches for the most part that's where those numbers are coming and one of these were looking at when we ask those young people what we've asked them like why did you leave you know what was going on some of it is there's like I just stopped believing the stuff like the dogma of the teachings but but when you press a little further it's usually around clashes with science right it's about evolution it's about climate change those kinds of things and they couldn't kind of get it kind of squared away with their particular search beliefs but about a third of them say that it was negative teachings about gay and lesbian people or negative treatment of gay and lesbian people that's a third of those Millennials who have left who said that was an important reason why they left and then the other thing is I think this partisan nature that many churches have taken on is also a huge turnoff for the Millennial Generation they don't really want to be in a politicized church and and the other thing Robert Putnam and wil Campbell wrote the book of American grace a few years back and they were pretty good about documenting this and they basically showed that look part of what was going on is that just as this generation was kind of coming of age churches and religion in general became synonymous with the conservative Christian right and is that sort of push off from that identification that religion as a whole means this and it was kind of at odds with a lot of the values of that generation that was actually part of the push off too so I think we're still figuring it out and still exploring it's a certainly a complex thing but the people are in that category are people who say not just that I don't go to church or not just that it's not important but they won't claim the label but when you say are you Protestant Catholic Jewish and Hindu Buddhist other they won't claim any of those labels and they say I'm nothing that's how they get into that category thank you for a wonderful presentation I wonder if you could explore the very big thread of racial equality and racial justice and all of these patterns and I wonder if you could add to that what at least I perceive as the fundamental conflict between Christian beliefs and inequality and injustice towards others and I wonder if you see that internal conflict playing out much yeah I want to take the last piece of this first one of the things I think we're also having to reckon with with these changes on the ground is the ways in which Christianity has been fairly plastic and malleable in the country and you know going so where we're having all these arguments over robert e lee and the civil war and what it was about and what does it mean and I think it's actually I think it's probably a helpful thing but one of the things that it's going to sort of throw up is this reality right that so when you say you know these things don't square with Christian teaching the next question is well which Christian teaching right there were plenty of churches in the South that we're totally fine with slavery and squared that quite comfortably with Christian teaching and what it meant to be christ-like and all of that stuff and what it meant to be biblical right all that stuff was squared away nice and neat with slavery and completely consistent and it wasn't till later right that we can say something like well slavery's against Christian teaching not so much not that long ago right and so I think it's kind of putting us back on those things and I think in particular the distance between white evangelical Protestants in the south and african-american Protestants is just dramatic it doesn't matter which question you ask if it's you know one of the ones that I think is kind of we're here in Chicago and the issue of police shootings all right is a kind of big issue and we asked this question about whether people thought that the killing of unarmed black men by police we're isolated incidents are part of a broader pattern of how police treat African Americans so about 85 percent of African Americans say it's part of a broader pattern of how police treat African Americans but only 44 percent of whites agree with that statement and only 29 percent of white evangelicals agree with that statement now you've got a 40 to 60 point chasm on something as fundamental as that I mean it tells you a lot about why we can't have a coherent conversation around around some of these issues and I think bridging those chasms is just got to be fundamentally what we have to be about going forward um could you speak a little bit about whether you're developing measures or have measures to track the sort of disdain for expertise and how that plays into all of this [Laughter] disdain for facts yeah well someone who you know is hopefully producing data in fact it is a question close to home exactly right you know so III continue to think that you know one of the best things we're doing is trying to be just transparent about how we ask questions and how we get the sample all that stuff but we are asking some questions we have so it's under embargo right now we'll be out December 5th at Brookings but we have are having some questions about just what do people think about like the media you know our reporters for example even even like granting reporters a good faith effort like are they just trying from the beginning to skew a story are they really trying to report it objectively even if they don't get there you'll be happy no we're asking this question or maybe not happy if you see the results but but but I think these kind of questions about you know yeah science these basic questions about science and what we're seeing about you know at the EPA right now with like it just has some climate scientists who are forbidden for going to a conference right just just on ideological grounds I think these are really fundamental questions they're there generationally division divided their religiously divided and it's it is this this kind of reality different reality I think it ties back to this broader theme you know who were gonna be as Americans what do we believe in what are we about and and fundamentally what do we what do we take to be true about the world and I think it is a challenge because the questions aren't just about policy anymore I think they kind of go all the way down and finding ways to talk about across those divides with media you know entities really on both sides to some extent they're the best studies I've seen you know do show that on the right it's more sort of more powerful ideological pull on the right than the left but where do we you know how do we deal with that we have all these forces aligned and that are about manipulating these differences you know for some short-term political gains I think it's a really troubled place where a band finding some ways to kind of push back on that I think it's going to be important really for the country as a whole thank you all for these really wonderful question

Channel: Chicago Humanities Festival

Views: 7,458

Rating: 4.7358489 out of 5

Keywords: chicago humanities festival, chf, humanities, chicago, festival, Robert Jones, Christian, America, Race, Society

Id: gumaYhrxO_M

Length: 54min 7sec (3247 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 14 2017