The End of White Christian America: A Conversation with E. J. Dionne and Robert P. Jones

[MUSIC PLAYING] Good evening, everyone. Good evening. And welcome. I'm David Hempton, Dean of the Divinity School, and I'm really delighted to welcome you to campus this evening for a discussion of the important changes occurring in US religion, and the impact they're having on our politics, our culture, and on civil society. Last year, I spoke in Europe and Asia on a topic that was much on the minds of citizens there, and frankly, also here in the Northeast United States. Namely, Evangelical Christian support for Donald Trump. When I did those talks, I drew partly on the research of Dr. Robert P. Jones, one of our guests this evening. In 2011, the Public Religion Research Institute, PRRI, the organization headed by Dr. Jones, asked Americans, quote, whether a political leader who committed an immoral act in his or her private life could nonetheless behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public life. At that time, as Jones has written, only 30% of white Evangelical Protestants agreed with this statement. This was not a surprise. White Evangelicals had for years been the most likely group to say that a candidate's personal morality bore heavily on their performance in public office. PRRI asked the same question again in 2016, with the presidential campaign in full swing. This time, 72% of white Evangelicals, that is as against the earlier figure of 30%, said that they believe the candidate can build a kind of moral wall between his private and public life. That sentiment carried into the election that November, when around 81% of self-designated white Evangelicals, which is a complicated category, voted for Donald Trump, the most weighted vote of any American religious constituency, and a big factor in his election. It was, as Dr. Jones chronicled in his book, The End of White Christian America, which is where we had that title for tonight plagiarized-- it was as he chronicled in his book-- [LAUGHTER] --a shocking reversal, one driven by a sense among white Christians that their way of life was at stake, that America's best days were behind it, and that the 2016 election was the last chance to stop the country's inexorable decline. But while the country may or may not have been in decline, it's clear from data collected by Dr. Jones and the Pew Research Center that both the white majority and formal affiliation with Christian denominations were in decline and are in decline. These trends go far beyond the phenomenon of Donald Trump's election and presidency. They help shape our politics at all levels, including the surge in support for nativist and right-wing movements. Not only in the United States, but also across Europe. According to our other distinguished guests this evening, The Washington Post journalist and distinguished political analyst, E.J. Dionne, this surge is a product of a constellation of factors that include globalization and technological innovation, growing wealth inequalities, migration, cosmopolitanism, and the decay of traditional cultural values. As a result, the narratives on the right and the left, reinforced by the rise of information outlets that affirm, rather than challenge, the beliefs of their audiences-- you can watch this any night-- are now almost impervious to countervailing information. People get their information tracks from their preconceived positions. Few write more cogently or insightfully about these factors than our two guests tonight. And E.J. Dionne, as the co-author of the recent book One Nation After Trump, this book, takes heart in the activism inspired by the current political movement, and offers a hopeful vision that's often lacking in discussions like these. Sadly, even on university campuses. This would be a good moment to silence cell phones. [LAUGHTER] It's a nice ring, though. [LAUGHTER] It is a nice ring. Yeah, so do get your hands on this book if you get a chance, as well. These two books are terrific reads. And then this one has both a great guide to explaining the election result, but an even better prescription for where we might go from here, which is more unusual. So it is well worth reading. So as someone, myself, who studies history, religion, and politics, I'm very anxious to hear what our guests have to say this evening, and perhaps to ask them a question or two. We're really delighted you have made time in your schedules to be with us. Thank you so much for traveling up to Boston. So without further ado, please join me in giving a very warm welcome to our two very distinguished guests, E.J. Dionne and Robert P. Jones. [APPLAUSE] Thank you. [APPLAUSE] I want to begin just by saying what a joy it is to be back here at the Harvard Divinity School. I taught a class here last semester called Religion in America's Political Conscience and at the Ballot Box. And it didn't strike me until after I named the course that I had separated the conscience from the ballot box, although that might be revealing. And I just want to say it is particularly a joy to have some of my wonderful students here tonight. My brilliant TA, Axel [? Tokach. ?] Thank you, Axel, for coming. And I understand there is a rabbi Joseph Telushkin in the room. Are you here, Rabbi Telushkin He may be here. He is a brilliant rabbi. He is also the father of my brilliant advisee, who's a student here, Shira Telushkin Some of you may know Shira. And I'm really honored to be here with my friend, Robbie Jones. Robbie and I, we have done work together now since 2010 on the whole-- on a variety of aspects of American politics, including back in 2010, on the overlap of the Tea Party and the religious right. And we had a lot of fun with that study, because a lot of people thought that the Tea Party was a separate libertarian wing of conservatism. When, in fact, what we discovered is that a majority of Tea Partiers also thought of themselves as part of the religious right, and about 3/4 of Tea Partiers had views that were-- on social and religious questions that were essentially indistinguishable from the religious right. But Robbie has been a real pioneer in this area for a long time, even though he's very young. And what I want to do is just invite Robbie-- I'm going to go sit down, because Robbie does many things well, but I think Robbie is by far the best PowerPointer I have ever met in my life. And I could just sit and watch Robbie PowerPoints for hours. It won't be for hours, but this book is very, very important. And after Robbie's finished, I am going to read a section in the book about Billy Graham, who, as people most people here know, died this morning. Is that correct? Or was it last-- it was this morning, I think, at 8:00. [INAUDIBLE] And Robbie has some very insightful things to say about Billy Graham. But also, his death is a sort of a bittersweet reminder of the era that Robbie writes about, and that, in some ways, is passing away. And so we're going to start with his PowerPoint. We're going to talk a bit about Billy Graham's role, and then we will take it from there. But you are about to see a real treat. [LAUGHTER] Oh, I always hate when the bar gets set that high. [LAUGHTER] OK, but thank you so much, Dean Hempton and Harvard Divinity School-- Oh, I j-- could I say one thing? Oh. Go ahead, yes. I love David Hempton. And what I was thinking as he was speaking is that if Robbie Jones had written his book about David Hempton, the book would be called The Joy and Wisdom of Irish Christianity in America. [LAUGHTER] Right. Yes, a little less somber than this title up here. Well, I'm going to give you just a little bit-- I want to have a lot of time for E.J. and I to talk. It's really a great joy to be here with E.J. We've worked together now for almost a decade, and our offices are just down Massachusetts Avenue in Washington D.C. from each other, within walking distance. So it's fun to be here in Boston. It's just right across the table, instead of down the street from one another. So I'm going to start with just this photo here that you've been staring at a little bit, maybe subconsciously, as we've been sitting here, before I show you some numbers. Because I think it sets the table fairly well. [LAUGHTER] So I received this in 2012, just after Barack Obama's re-election bid. So between the election and Thanksgiving, I received this photo. And just under the photo, it said "Christian family at prayer. Pennsylvania, 1942." And so I haven't doctored it. It was black and white in the email that I received it from. And I kind of saw it and I was curious, and I looked to see who had sent it. And it was sent out by the Christian Coalition of America, which is a conservative Christian organization that was part of the Christian Right movement in the '08s and '90s. And they sent this out. And I said, oh, that's curious. I'll read on down. And then I came across this language in the email, and it said this. It said, we're soon to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the First Thanksgiving, and God has still not withheld his blessings upon this nation, although we now so richly deserve his condemnation. Let us pray to our Heavenly Father to protect us from those enemies outside and within who want to see America destroyed." So this is the message that we get just days after the re-election of our first African American President to the presidency. And it occurred to me that this apocalyptic language was telling something. So I immediately save this. I said, OK, this is-- I really need to think about this some more, and kind of hung onto it and had been thinking about it. But I think this sense of-- we heard a lot of it in the 2016 election too, but it has a longer history. This kind of apocalyptic ring that the America that we know and love is over. And I think one of the things going is like, why this photo, right? So if you look at it, what is it? It's a white family at prayer. You'll notice there's a father at the head of the table, right? So it's a kind of patriarchal, hierarchical image of family, and they're all kind of bowing their heads. And it was really standing in that email for "America," right? White Protestant America equals America. And I think that's what's going on, and a lot of our debates, I think, are really over that. Is this the image of who America is and should be? Or is it not? And that really-- that fundamental question, I think, is a lot of what we're wrangling over. So I want to show you some numbers about how much things are changing, and how I think how that has set the stage for the anxiety, the fear, the anger that is so animating our politics both at the national, and even all the way down to the local level. So first, I'll just-- we're going to throw this term around a lot, so I thought I would unpack it, just to make sure we're not misunderstood. This term "White Christian America" is a term that I just coined, because I needed a way to talk about an era, and the sense of dominance. And it really is a word that refers to the dominance of white Protestant America that really held a lock on cultural and political power for most of the country's life. And so when I'm-- using that term, it really is this sense of this kind of cultural and political dominance of a world that was built mostly by white Protestant America. So I'm going to give you a bunch of stats here, but in case people are not big numbers people, you could think of them as vital signs. We're going to look at the chart of white Christian America and see how its help is doing. If I had only one chart to show you, and I'm going to-- I know E.J. will be relived. I'm going to show you a few more than one. But it would probably be this one, that would give you just in one chart, a sense of the demographic and cultural changes that we've experienced in very recent history. So I've got the Obama presidency in t-- these are years across the bottom. I've got that kind of grayed out in this box so you can see the kinds of changes that happen just during the last decade, and really, largely across President Obama's term in office. So this first line up here is the percent of Americans who identify as white and Christian in the country. Now, this is any type of Christian. Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Non-denominational, you name it. They identify as white, non-Hispanic, and Christian. These numbers capture that. And you can see, if we just go back to the beginning of Barack Obama's presidency, there's been a fairly dramatic drop in the number of white Christians in the country. When Barack Obama entered office, the country was safely a majority white Christian country. 54% of the country identified as white and Christian. By the time Obama leaves office and we get to the 2016 election, that number has dropped to 43%. So that's 11 percentage points across eight years' time. It's more than a percentage point a year. It's a pretty-- it's a very steady and very precipitous drop. So that's one thing. Just demographically speaking, the country has crossed from being this majority white Christian country to a minority white Christian country. And then here is another line that's kind of just a bellwether cultural issue. This is support for same-sex marriage in the general population across the same time period. And one of things you'll see is, again, if we go back and use the beginning of Barack Obama's presidency as a marker, only 4 in 10 Americans supported same sex marriage back in 2008. Barack Obama himself did not publicly support same-sex marriage in 2008. But by the time Obama gets out of office, that has been flipped on its head. It's 6 in 10 supporting same-sex marriage, only 4 in 10 opposing it. And our last numbers from 2017 actually showed that number jumped again in 2017 to 66. So it's now 2/3 of the country that supports same-sex marriage. And so if you are a conservative white Christian, these numbers, just these two, are-- constitute a kind of sense of cultural vertigo, I think. Where you've gone from a country that you recognize in a country that you sort of feel like you can lay claim to being in the mainstream, and even being the dominant cultural force, to one where that is no longer true. And it happens in a very, very short amount of time. So let me unpack this just a little bit more. Here is if I do big boxes of religious affiliation, the pie chart of what American religious affiliation looks like today. That's that same number. 43% of the country, in blue here, is identifying as white and Christian. This 24% box is those identify as non-white and Christian, so mostly African American and Latino Protestants in the country. The 7% is those who claim some other religious tradition. Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhists, et cetera. And the 24%, that big block of orange up there, are Americans who claim no religious affiliation at all today. About a quarter of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated in the country. So that's a snapshot of where we are today. One way of seeing how dramatic these changes have been is just to look at the generations who are alive today, and what the generational cohorts look like. So you can think of this chart-- I like to think about this as a kind of archaeological dig down through generational strata. So we've got the young people on top, and we've got seniors down here on the bottom. And we're going to put up-- the first number we're going to put up is just the percent within each generational cohort that identifies as white and Christian. I think you'll immediately see the generational change and how quick it's happening. Just the generations that are alive today. When you go down to seniors, 2/3 of seniors identify as white and Christian. If we go to youngest Americans, age 18 to 29, that number is only 25%. It's more than twice-- more than a factor of two between seniors and young people. And you can also see that it's actually a fairly linear generational stair-step here. You can take a ruler pretty much and draw a straight line. So it's very, very consistent. The younger you are, the less white, the less Christian you are. The older you are, the more white, the more Christian you are. And if I put up the other divisions on that same sort, you can see the patterns emerging. And the biggest thing is the bookend on the other side, the religiously unaffiliated in the country. If you go to seniors, only about 1 in 10 seniors claims no religious affiliation whatsoever. But if you look at young people today, it's nearly 4 in 10 who claim no religious affiliation, 38% today. So again, it's a factor of four on that measure here. A little more than three-- not quite four. A little more than three on that measure. But very, very dramatic changes. You can also see the green there, which is non-white Christians in the country. And among young people, for example, there as many-- or there's actually slightly more non-white Christians than there are white Christians in the youngest cohort of Americans. Whereas, among seniors, there's nowhere near that kind of parity. So that's the kind of quick change that we're seeing in the country today. And just to kind of-- I haven't said a lot about Catholics, but I want to put them up here too. This is a phenomenon-- we're sitting at that Harvard Divinity School, broadly speaking, a part of the mainline Protestant tradition and more liberal Protestant end of the spectrum. And for a long time, the narrative has been that the more liberal end of the Protestant world has been where all the decline has happened, and that white Evangelical, more conservative churches, are thriving. That has largely been true until the last 10 years. And then in the last decade, well we're actually seeing is slightly steeper declines among white Evangelical denominations then we're even seeing among white mainline denominations. But the overall story is that if you're white and Christian, whether you're Evangelical, mainline, or Catholic, the trends are the same. Again, this is not a very long-- this is only a 10-year window here, and you can basically just see the patterns are the same among every white Christian subgroup in the country. But the new thing here is really this decline among white Evangelical groups from 18%-- sorry, from 23% down to 17%. That's genuinely new in the country. They have been sort of stable or even growing probably the last 10 years. So I'm going to stop there, and we can kind of come back to this other part. But I think that lays the land-- gives you the lay of the land in terms of just the demographic and religious change that has really hit us in the last few decades, but very much so in the last even 10 years. I think that explains a little bit about why this feels like a fight to the death among some quarters, particularly the conservative and the white Christian world. Wasn't that awesome? I love his PowerPoints. [APPLAUSE] Before I turn to Billy Graham, I wanted to ask you to take apart the white and the Christian part. Because I think that there were a lot of ways in which your stark title could be read by people. And I think these charts make clear that there were two things going on here simultaneously, but in a way, they are quite different things. On the one hand, the country is getting more diverse, and so those numbers, simply on non-white Christians by generation, shows demographic change. But the rise of the religiously unaffiliated among the-- particularly among the young, is in some ways, I think, the biggest religious story in the country. When you have nearly 40% of the under-30s being religiously unaffiliated, that's not-- by the way, young people always less religious. Because this cohort of young people is far more unaffiliated than any of the earlier cohorts. I mean, this is a real change over time. Can you talk about those two? Now, if you're sitting there as a conservative white Christian, both changes may alarm you in different ways, but they are quite distinct. Could you talk about those two separately? Yeah. So one of the things that really got me on to writing the book in the first place was the sense that we had this narrative out there that the Census Department has been giving for quite some time that by 2050, the country-- the original projections that caused shock waves were when the Census put out a press release that said, our current projections show that by 2050, the country will for the first time be majority non-white. And it caused a lot of headlines. Since then, that number's been revised down to 2042 as the demographic changes have been accelerating a little. But that's just race and ethnicity that has to do with birth and death rates and immigration patterns. And if you put all that together, that's what we get. But it occurred to me that the alarm bells that I was hearing, I think, were not fully explained by people looking that far out on the horizon and thinking, OK, well in 2042, something is going to happen I don't like. But there was something already happening in the country. And it's when I think we put these two things together-- so you have this engine that is racial and ethnic decline, that we're getting steady reports from the Census Bureau. But I think what really turbocharges the cultural changes is this, really, exodus of young people from traditional religious affiliation. And so it's a kind of-- here's the engine. You get this kind of turbocharged effect, though, I think, from the religious affiliation. Because most of the kids were actually raised in churches, and then left. Now, they leave mostly before they're 20, so they do leave quite early. But they were still-- most of them today were still raised religious, leave by the time they're 20. And by all measures that we have, very few of them look like they're coming back. And as E.J. said, even if we had-- every generation was slightly more unaffiliated in their 20s than they are later in life, as they get kids, and a mortgage, and settle down. But even if we get a kind of traditional coming-back to religion, this will still be, by far, the most religiously unaffiliated generation that we've ever seen, by a factor of three. Yeah. The other piece that I'd love you to discuss is the change in the nature of Christianity. And you're from Mississippi, and know this story better than most folks, that the changing nature of Christianity itself-- as Latinos-- in the case of both Catholics and Protestants, Evangelicals, especially. And African Americans and Latinos, in the case of Protestants, primarily, become a much bigger part of the cohort of believers, which is certainly, I think, having over time some real effect on the Roman Catholic church. Where the Catholic numbers as you show would be much worse in terms of disaffiliation without Latino immigration. And African Americans, even though there are a lot of non-affiliated young African Americans, have tended to stay more affiliated than white people. What does this do to the nature of Christianity in the country? Yeah, well the Catholic church, I think, is really fascinating because there is-- this ethic change is happening all under the umbrella of the same denomination. So you're not-- what happens in the Protestant world is typically you have these parallel denominational tracts where the African American denominations are kind of over here in their own denominations of churches, and Latino denominations over here. There's still not today-- about 86% of our churches are essentially mono-racial churches today. There's still not a lot of multi-racial congregations in the country, particularly the Protestant world. But what's happening in the Catholic world is really interesting, that we're-- like in the southwest now, there are more non-white Catholics than white Catholics in the southwest already today. And we're looking at now-- it used to be-- as recently as the 1990s, the ratio of white to non-white Catholics was 10 to 1. And today it's about 60-40, and we're headed toward parity. To give you an idea of what the white Catholic exodus looks like, 12% of Americans today are former Catholics. And most of the are white-- Second or third largest denomination, if they were a denomination. --a denomination. Right, yeah. [INAUDIBLE] They're a smaller group than former Catholics. Yeah. A friend of mine is in a parish, a Catholic parish that has become very Latino. And a friend of his was complaining about the shift in the ethnic makeup of the parish. And he said, what do you mean? Where's the life? Our people have funerals. Their people have baptisms. [LAUGHTER] And he was for the change in the church. Let me read what Robbie wrote about Billy Graham, which is really-- it's particularly-- it's quite powerful. He talks about Billy Graham at mid-century having an open-handed, inclusive style that really went against the very defensive tendencies in the Evangelical world after the Scopes Trial, the failure of Prohibition. Although his wild success might suggest otherwise, Reverend Graham entered the national stage at a deeply uncertain time for Evangelicals. In the 1950s, mainline Protestantism was the unchallenged public face of white Christian America. But the young Billy Graham almost single-handedly reconfigured Evangelicalism into a force with the power to shape the national consciousness. The most prominent example of Graham's influence was his historic crusade in, of all places, that's a good Mississippian's line, New York City. [LAUGHTER] The Big Apple was not only the sophisticated cultural and financial center of the country, but it also has a headquarters of the mainline Protestant National Council of Churches and its flagship educational Institution Union Theological Seminary. This is amazing. For 110 days in the hot summer of 1957, Graham drew crowds averaging about 18,000 people per night to Madison Square Garden. After the first night's success, the New York Times devoted nearly three full pages of coverage to the event, even printing Graham's service-- sermon word-for-word. ABC News broadcast 14 Sunday night services, Saturday night services, from The Garden, reaching an estimated audience of 96 million viewers. When he preached at Yankee Stadium, Graham set an attendance record of over 100,000, and more than 20,000 people were turned away. Then you go on, and here's where I want you to pick up the story and relate it to the theme of the book. But by the 1980s, Billy Graham's welcoming and largely apolitical appeal was overtaken by a movement built around partisan politics and apocalyptic rhetoric, led in the 1980s by figures such as the Reverend Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. As the elder Graham aged and health concerns began to limit his public appearances, his son Franklin, whose temperament and goals resonated more with the religious right than with his father, stepped increasingly into the spotlight. It would be difficult to overstate the differences between father and son. Talk about Billy Graham if you would Yeah. I mean, I think it is that I think Franklin and Billy Graham do represent two different eras in white Evangelicals' life in the country. And it's interesting that Billy Graham is this kind of rare moment where white Evangelicals did kind of come into their own, felt fairly secure in the country, and it wasn't a defensive posture. There was a lot of fire and brimstone. There was this deep invitation to come be part of their Christian life. He was one of the first people to desegregate services, refused to hold rallies in the South where they were segregated. Asked Martin Luther King Jr. to come and offer an opening prayer at some of his crusades in the 1960s. So this is a very different kind of posture as well, and was sort of, I think, universally loved by Democratic and Republican presidents alike, who held council with all the way through. Although he did try to defeat John F. Kennedy in 1966. Yes, that's true. That was kind of Protestant-Catholic-- yeah. Yeah, and that-- for the Protestants. Our friend, Sean Casey, has written a wonderful book called The Making of the First Catholic President, 1960, where he documented some of that. So it's just and aside. I wanted to-- Yes, fair enough. Yes. But it's a differ-- it was a very different-- The Massachusetts Catholic I am, I couldn't not-- I had to. [LAUGHTER] Couldn't let that go. Keep me honest on Catholic [INAUDIBLE].. Yeah. But it's a very different posture for him. So a little aside, I don't know if I-- so I worked for Billy Graham in the summer of my high school senior year. [LAUGHTER] And so I actually met him, because I got a-- I grew up Southern Baptist in the South in Jackson, Mississippi. And I got a call right from my senior year asking if I wanted to go work for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association for three weeks in Amsterdam. Whoa. [LAUGHTER] I thought sure, right? So I got overnighted a plane ticket and a reservation at the Amsterdam Hilton. Just just barely turned 18, and I spent three weeks Amsterdam. What else did you do an Amsterdam? [LAUGHTER] Yeah. We'll leave what happens in Amsterdam in Amsterdam. But I remember being struck even then. I mean I'd seen him on TV and stuff. But being struck even then at this sense of-- and here I was in Amsterdam. Not exactly the Evangelical capital of the world. But he packed the place out night after night. And his message was not a kind of condemning the sinful city. It wasn't any of that stuff. I mean, it was this very open, warm invitation. I remember being very struck by that even as a very young kid. And then we have, I think, Franklin Graham who was very public in this last election, his support for Donald Trump, and very critical of President Obama as well. Very critical of the Black Lives Matter movement, and very much just kind of in lockstep with the Christian Right Movement, which has a very-- a harder edge to it. It's defensive. It's embattled. And I think we do have in Billy Graham's death today a kind of passing of an era, of a very different kind of posture when Evangelicalism, I think, was much more sure-footed, and much more sure of itself, I think, in a way that today, it's very defensive, and I think a little anxious. Could I-- I'm just curious. This is-- I've known Robbie for a long time. I never knew this side of him, the Amsterdam-Graham side. Yeah. You went to semi-- you went to Baptist Seminary. Can you talk about just the influence he and his style had on you personally? Yeah. So I grew up Southern Baptist. I did a Mathematics and Computer Science degree at a Baptist College in Mississippi, then I went to-- being the good Baptist boy that I was, went to a Southern Baptist Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. So at the time, Southwestern was the, quote unquote, "moderate" seminary that, while the SBC was in the turmoil of this sort of denominational takeover that was connected to the political Christian Right Movement. So this was-- my last semester at seminary, actually, was-- I literally watched the transition from what felt like this kind of non-defensive and open-handed kind of Evangelicalism that Billy Graham had been modeling to this more hyper-political, partisan, and kind of hard-edged thing. Where my last semester seminary, while we-- the students were all gathered in Chapel, the trustees met in secret, fired the president, locked the doors. Locked his doors with his personal effects inside, and escorted him off campus with armed guards. That was while the student body was sitting in Chapel. And I remember thinking, like, OK, yeah, this-- I'm seeing this very-- you couldn't be more stark than that juxtaposed right together. And then after that, the seminary changed direction. A number of professors left. Some were fired. Some were passed over for tenure. So the whole face of the institution change that. And could you talk a bit about something you and I have talked about a lot, which is how politics, in a way, has come trump religion among a lot of people? Alan Wolfe, who taught at BC and ran the Boisi Center there for many years, really caught me up short one day, and he was absolutely right when he said, you know, religion isn't really important to politics. It's that politics is becoming important to religion. People don't argue about the Nicene Creed. They don't argue about the virginity of Mary. They don't argue about religious questions. They argue about social and cultural questions linked to politics. And that when you think about the Trump more than over Hillary, 81% to 16%, as I recall, Trump got the highest percentage, higher than George W. Bush, of the white Evangelical vote of anybody since we've been recording it. This really does suggest politics trumping religion. And that finding that David quoted is probably maybe the most quoted finding in PRRI's history. Yeah. Where before Trump, the personal life of a politician really, really mattered. After Trump, the personal life of a politician really, really didn't matter. And just to put a line under it, the change in that number was much starker among white Evangelicals than any other group in the country. Can you talk about that, and then maybe show one more-- it's my favorite slide, if you've got it, which is the end of the white Christian political strategy? I don't think I've got that on up, but I can talk about it. Oh. But you can describe it, yeah. Yeah. So just to kind of put that number-- I think it literally has been the most-quoted number we've ever put out. And what we did, just to kind of remind you-- Dean Hempton laid it out pretty well, but just to remind you, we asked in 2011 this question about, can someone behave immorally in their private life and still behave morally and perform their duties in their public life? The number in 2011 for white Evangelicals was 30% agreeing with that statement, that someone could do that. By the time we get to the last election cycle, it's 72%. So it's a 42% percentage point swing. You just don't really see that kind of swing in numbers like that. So when you do see that, you know that something's really going on. But we have a-- I mean, what's interesting about it is if you look back at the voting patterns, really, the last four or five election cycles, what is remarkable-- I think, what really goes to this point about how important political affiliation become for religious identity is that you hardly see any movement, no matter who the candidates are. Right? So you can just go back election cycle after election cycle. So white Evangelicals, for example, vote 8 in 10 for Republican presidential candidates, no matter who they are. Now, think about this. Mitt Romney, Mormon candidate. Donald Trump. John McCain. George W Bush. Now, these are really different candidates, right? And the needle hardly moves. So what really matters is who the Republican Party put forward. To be fair, it's true the other side as well. So the Democratic candidates looking very different, and the numbers don't move. The most consistent voting group in the country, though, that is dead on the nose, are white mainline Protestants, who vote about 40-- who vote exactly in the last three election cycles, 44% for democratic candidates. 44, 44, 44. It doesn't move at all. If you look at the chart, it looks like a satanic number. It's like 666, you know? I mean, it's 44, 44, 44. But the real realignment-- again, it's a racial story here, too. The real-- Yes. I mean, you've pointed this out in your previous book very eloquently, that it really is this shift in the Civil Rights Movement, where the Democratic Party became associated as the party of Civil Rights. And that spurred this kind of white-- a great book is called The Rise of the Republican South by, I love this, it's two twin brothers, Merle and Earl Black, who are both political scientists. One at Emory, and one at Rice in the South. And there was great books. And what they called the "Great White Switch" that really happened between the Civil Rights Movement, and it really caps with Reagan. By Reagan, there was this real seat change in Southern white party affiliation, and along with that went white Evangelical party affiliation. It was really part of that same-- part of that same swing. And so ever since then, we have seen this 80%, 8 in 10 support for Republican candidates, no matter who they are in the country. And it's just kind of a mark of our politics now. We saw the same thing with the Roy Moore election in Alabama as well. White Evangelicals, again, with a very unorthodox candidate for a group that's kind of branded themselves as values voters. And based on what we saw in Alabama, it was that 78%, I think, of white Evangelicals in Alabama voted for Roy Moore, which is right in line with their typical voting for Republican candidates at the state level. Let me ask you and press you on that, because I think you make an important point there, that-- I've struggled with this myself, that we've started talking about white Evangelical Christians as a voting block with the rise of the moral majority at the end of the '70s and in 1980. But in fact, the people we are talking about, the very same people really made their journey to the Right and to the Republican Party because of Civil Rights. Mhm. And even some of the issues connected to the Religious Right were actually racially tinged, such as the IRS cutting off tax benefits to white Christian schools that were essentially being used as segregation academies. And interestingly, Jimmy Carter got the rage, but that that was actually started in the Nixon administration, the move against those schools. And so sometimes, I've asked myself, did we put a religious overlay on something that was actually simply racial, or was there a distinctive religious aspect that entered into it in 1980? And this doesn't deny that these voters are and think of themselves as very religious, but nonetheless, these trends, as you say, began long before anybody was talking about either of the Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition. Yeah. I've been doing a lot of thinking about this lately too. Like I said, I grew up in the South. My family from five generations back is from Macon, Georgia, but I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. But what I think has been interesting to me is-- as someone who grew up in that environment, there's a story that you get told from the inside of these churches that has nothing to do with race. Absolutely nothing. Despite the fact-- so one key point here, I grew up in the Southern Baptist Convention. I did not know that the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845 because of a pull-out of the Southern churches who wanted to support sending missionaries who were slave owners. And there was a rift between the Northern Baptists and the Southern Baptists in 1845. The Southerners said, we're going to-- we really do think it's fully consistent with Christian values to-- for a missionary to own slaves, and really pulled out and formed their own denomination. I didn't know that was the history of my own denomination till I went to seminary and took a Baptist History class when I was like 21. So that's how anesthetized that narrative is. And I think that one of the things that's also coming out is trying to re-understand that history, I think, is really important. It's a task that some churches are taking on, but I think it's also important that that invisibility itself was a powerful racial tool in the South, so that it actually became-- There's this great book called Sanctuaries of Segregation that's about Jackson, about my hometown, in 1963, 1964. And it really was this combination of the governor, the mayor, and the central pastors of the Methodist and Baptist churches that were all aligned to keep not only the public facilities segregated, but first and foremost, the churches segregated. Because they saw-- if the churches-- if segregation fell at the church level, that would be the domino that knocked everything else down. So it was actually quite important that-- socially, that the-- and for cultural power, that the white Christian churches remain segregated. So I think this has been a racial story all the way down that just isn't told very well. Let me-- I want to invite David to come in here. I just want you to sort of give a word, a verbal picture, of that chart I like so much. Because-- just so you know, the reason I like this chart is because it really showed how radically different the Obama coalition was, and really still, the Democratic coalition is now, from the Republican coalition. If you sort of crossed race and religion, It's a very different-- So it's basically a version of this chart. Yeah. But what I did in the other chart is I overlaid the Obama and Romney coalitions, and kind of fit them into where they would fit in the generation cohort as a way of kind of explaining where the two political parties were, in terms of race, religion, and generation. And what it basically showed was that in 2012, that the Obama coalition looked about like 30-year-old America, in terms of its racial and religious break. The Romney coalition looked about like 70-year-old America in terms of its racial and religious composition. And what we're seeing now, even if we just-- and that was vote. But even if we look at party affiliation today, the Republican Party 10 years ago was 80%, 81%, white and Christian. Today, the Republican Party is 71% white and Christian. 10 years ago, the Democratic Party was 50% white and Christian. Today, it's 30% white and Christian. So we're now looking at the two political parties who are increasingly being polarized by race and religion, so that we're on a trajectory where we'll end up with, basically, a kind of white, Christian nationalist party, and then everyone else over here. And that's something I'm actually genuinely worried, is that drift that we're seeing in party affiliation in the country. And what that means is that only one party is creating a multi-racial, multi-religious coalition, which may create incentives for the other party to create certain forms of division. That's A. Yep. But B, it creates enormous coalition management problems inside the Democratic Party, because a big part of the shift is in the rise of the seculars, of the non-affiliated. And so-- I mean, I think you saw it visibly in the Hillary Clinton campaign, where that campaign was very torn about how to present her religiously. Because here was this very religious Methodist woman for whom Methodism, who, one understands, was discouraged to some degree by her campaign from talking about that because the more secular vote was-- turning out, the younger, more secular vote was critical, they thought, to her success. Could you elaborate on that? Yeah. I mean, the other thing I'd point out is that-- I think this creates problems for-- because we only have two political parties, it creates problems for both, actually. Yeah. Because the other piece of this is that it creates incentives for the Democratic Party to be home to everyone except white Christian voters, and that, I think, also is a really unhealthy dynamic. Because all of a sudden, white Christian voters become the enemy. Like, they're the other guys. They're not in our tribe. And I think this kind of tribalism thing is a real danger, I think, for our politics today. David, I wanted to give you the first set of questions. I thought I had a night off. Oh, I thought you-- [LAUGHTER] I thought you wanted to come in. I heard you saying that you wanted to come in. No, I will be happy to give you a night off. There are a couple of things I would [INAUDIBLE].. So we had a presentation here a couple of months ago by a young scholar at Calhoun College who, as well as putting a race slant on theirs, put a strong gender slant on it as well. Arguing that, really from the Vietnam War Era onwards, there was a distinct creation of a kind of Evangelical masculinity that came around through patriotism, support of the military, support of patriarchal values in the family, support for the police, and so on down the line. And being also quite resistant to feminism and pressure from that. So it's another, as well as the other pressures on pushing this constituency further to the right, she made a pretty compelling case, even through the popular literature of the Evangelical constituencies, of how this kind of constructed masculinity became also a part. And that would be true, right, through a range of things. Maybe even over guns as well. I don't know. Mhm. And maybe the second thing I'd ask you to comment on is it seems to me that the Evangelical constituencies I know are kind of against you liberal elites of all kinds. Whether it's activist judges or the liberal media, the Ivy League universities, Hollywood, a whole bunch of things that they feel are a concentrated attack on their values. From just a liberal a elite, broadly conceived. So those are two things, maybe, to add to the mix a little bit, that I'd be interested to hear your views on. OK, great. Thanks. You can jump in here too, [INAUDIBLE].. I'll take a stab at the gender one. That first image that I showed with the family prayer I don't think is coincidental, that it had the most prominent figure in that photo is the patriarch sitting at the head of the table. We have some antique furnishings in our house. Some you may have this too. We have a dining room table from the 1940s in our house, and it seats-- 1, 2, 3-- six. And there's only one chair that has arms. [LAUGHTER] And it was literally built into our furniture in the 1940s and 1950s, this sense of where-- and that's called the captain's chair, right and that's where the father sits at the head. It only fits at the head of the table. It won't even fit around the side. It has to be on one end or the other. And there's a chair at the other end too but, it doesn't have arms. It just this one. And so I think it's literally built into the fabric of our culture and our architecture. I mean, it was there. And so I think that's been a part of it. And the other thing I guess I would sketch is it's part of a bigger kind of hierarchical world view, where gender is kind of a very clear conception. It's black and white. There's man, there's women. Each know their place. There's parents and there's children. There is this real ordered, hierarchical world. And I think it's the breakdown of that-- and it's whites over blacks. It's very clear. Everyone knew their place in the pecking order. And I think it's the dissolution of that sense of space. And particularly, if you're on the top of that pyramid, you feel that very decisively when it starts to crumble. And I think that's part of what's going on, and so that's why the gender pieces have to be part of it, I think, in the construction here. And then the other piece-- was remind me the-- [INAUDIBLE] Yeah. I mean, that's certainly been there. It's-- I mean, I've certainly had people from my-- just to make it from a personal example, the way it works is that your local church will-- in the Baptist world, licenses you to the ministry on your way to seminary. It's kind of an endorsement from your local congregation as you're heading off to seminary. And there's a reception, and that sort of thing. And I've certainly had at least two people come by and give me the "Don't let seminary ruin you" speech. There was kind of that sense of things, like, don't lose your faith at seminary. It turns out I lost my denomination at seminary-- [LAUGHTER] --with the way things fell out. But I think there is-- that has been there. And I think it has been this kind of embattled South. And again, it has a kind of racial tinge to it, right? Everything from the War of Northern Aggression instead of the Civil War, to Confederate flags everywhere, to Daughters of the American Revolution putting up monuments here there and yonder about the Civil War. All those are markers of a world kind of gone by, I think. And that's why I think this-- I really Trump's cam-- we haven't really talked about this explicitly, but I do think that Trump's campaign slogan, he's going to make America great "again." Right? It was that last piece that had more power than anything else. Yeah. And on the homestretch of the election cycle, I mean, he was really leaning on that. I mean, he was literally saying, I'm your last chance, folks. If you don't vote for me this election cycle, you will never see a Republican like me in your gen-- in your lifetime. And he was kind of just naming the demographic changes. Like, I'm your bulwark against the change. Mhm. Yeah, I think there's a paradox on women in this area. On the one hand, if you overlaid women into some of these charts, especially women have been tilting more Democratic than men since 1980. That's really when the gender gap started, opening up with Reagan's election. In the country now, the gender gap under Trump is truly astonishing. And so that if you actually added women to these pictures, they would-- men would fall out into all these-- or a much bigger piece of the Republican coalition. On the other hand, women are also the most religious people in-- or more religious, on the whole, than men. They're more likely to be believers. They're more likely to belong to churches and synagogues, and especially churches, though. And they often take leadership roles. So not necessarily always the formal head, but they play a very prominent part. One of the-- Theda Skocpal here at Harvard is doing a wonderful study with two colleagues, Vanessa Williamson, and-- I've forgotten the other colleague involved in this. And they are looking at eight counties in-- I believe it's Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Trump counties in Trump states. And it's two Trump counties in each state. One more rural, one more exurban, suburban. Here's an interesting fact out of their study. They have found that in those eight Trump counties, there-- these are pro-Trump counties, they have found 10 anit-Trump groups that got organized. Two interesting facts about the leadership of these groups. One, every single one of them is either a lead or co-led by a woman, and many of these women come out of the mainline churches. Many of them have mainline church backgrounds. And obviously, these are predominantly white areas that voted for Trump. And so on the one hand, you see a picture that-- of a past that had religion overlaid with patriarchy. On the other hand, you have very religious people who are-- very religious people, being disproportionately women, many of them in leadership roles, and many of them out of mainline Protestantism. And just one story from our class. We had a wonderful Unitarian minister in our class from a par-- his church was in Dallas. And it takes guts to be a Unitarian in Dallas. [LAUGHTER] And he said that after Trump's election, his church just filled up because it was known as an activist church. And I couldn't resist looking at our students and saying, God works in mysterious ways. The purpose of Trump's election is to turn America into a nation of Unitarians. [LAUGHTER] Go ahead. Could I-- can I respond just to-- well, just two more and then I will give up. One is, I did ask Theda Skocpol and those those counties whether they-- the non-college educated women who split for Trump like 62%, I think? Wasn't it something like that? Whether there was any shift there in support for Trump. In other words, whether this was essentially college-educated women who were organizing against Trump, or whether there was any movement in that other constituency. And she said she didn't really know the answer to that question. She hadn't really gotten to it. But that's an interesting-- Yeah. The second thing, and I'll finish with this and take my night off, is really just to switch over to the Democratic side. And so I did read somewhere in the reflections on the campaign that the Democrats were nervous about talking about religion. And one reason for that is that a lot of the young staffers on the campaign came from metropolitan areas and were simply inured to that language, and weren't comfortable with it. And she wasn't particularly comfortable with it so it. So I've just got-- so my question about that is, given your demographics, would it be smart for the Democratic Party now to stay away from those topics, with the assurance that things are moving in that direction with the younger generation? Or does the Democratic Party need to find a voice of how to talk about these issues, the way that Hillary fai-- in my view, wasn't able to do about her Methodist roots and upbringing? So if you were a Democratic strategist, which of those two options do you think would make the most sense? All right, so you're going to get me in trouble with this question. I don't know. Do you want to take a run at that first, or do you want me to-- I have a strong view on this, but I've always-- I kind of want to do it first, because curious. All right, all right, All right. I'll go. All right, we'll see-- My view won't change, so-- [LAUGHTER] No matter how brilliant you are. Yeah. So here's what's interesting. If I gave this presentation in England about the percentage of unaffiliated people in the country, the British people would be thinking, where did all those church people come from? Because we're talking about 24% of the country being unaffiliated. That means that 3/4 of the country is affiliated in some way or another. And even among young people, we're talking about 4 in 10 being unaffiliated. That means that 6 in 10 are affiliated in some way. Now, it's a dramatic sea change for the US context, as we have always been kind of the exception to the Western developed world in terms of religiosity. And so this is new for us. But I think-- I'm of the mind, the parties certainly have to hone their messages and speak to their base. But again, from my money, I think that it's a dangerous game to play, I think, if a political party decides, we're going to so tailor it to our base that we're not going to speak a language that still most of the country understands, and that is meaningful for most of the country. Even most young people, still. And I think it's about how it's done. I think the kind of wearing it on your sleeve and sort of slapping the-- and this has actually, I think, been something Democrats have been guilty of, is because they're uncomfortable with it, what they tend to do is sort of slap Matthew 25 as a bumper sticker on whatever the policy briefing is that they're going in for. And somehow, that makes it a kind of faith-based kind of grounding on it. But I think something that's more organic-- and I think Hillary Clinton could have pulled this off. Because I've been in smaller settings and heard her tell her story. It's not awkward. It's not-- doesn't feel contrived, and I think she could've pulled it off. And I think if it feels like it comes from the heart and it's not about-- it's more about who I am, and what energizes me and grounds me as a candidate, I think that's something that's not going to be that off-putting to people. Even for people who have a kind of deep suspicion of religion writ large. That's my take. Yeah. Three points. One, I can't resist just this notion of this rising nuns under-- people under 30. In a sense, the under-30 generation is becoming European. Because we've always made a big distinction between churchgoing Americans versus non-churchgoing. Particularly Western Europeans, but now pretty much Europeans in general. Peter Burr, the great sociologist of religion, he used to joke that elites were more secular, and the mass of Americans were more religious. And he said that India is the most religious country in the world, Sweden the least religious. And America is a country of Indians governed by Swedes, he said. [LAUGHTER] This [INAUDIBLE] quip. What? Remember his Harvard quip? he's like-- That we often mistake-- that academics tend to mistake the Harvard Faculty Club for the country as a whole. [INAUDIBLE] [LAUGHTER] And so I just think that is an interesting development. Yeah. But point 2 is I personally think it was a disastrous error on the part of the Democratic campaign not to encourage Clinton to speak about Methodism and its role in her life. And I think we have a lot of examples in our history, but one in particular where a public figure could speak very clearly to secular people while often speaking in religious terms. And that's Martin Luther King. And Martin Luther King's rhetoric was a brilliant fusion of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution on the one side, and Isaiah, Micah, Amos, Matthew 25, and a lot of other parts of it on the other. And I think that what's happened is-- and I think this is very dangerous for religion. In the last two days, I've run into two people who-- two women, who said, I own actually quite beautiful crosses that I used to wear, and I don't want to wear them anymore. Because if I wear them, people automatically associate me with the Religious Right. And it is the association of religion with certain kinds of right-wing ideas, and particularly among young people, and particularly among gay and lesbian people, that turns off the younger generation. And I think there was fear in the Clinton campaign, and particularly among the more secular young, that they would be turned off by this. And also, that there's a lot of anger among younger people, again, particularly gays and lesbians, toward very conservative Christians, who they perceive as inimical to who they are. But I don't see in this country, given what Robbie said about the 75%, not to talk to religious people was a mistake. And it was, finally, in a way, the most authentic piece of Hillary Clinton. Anyone who's ever heard her talk about the role of Methodism and why it created this commitment in her to social justice-- it's very believable, because as best I can tell, it's actually true. And that's a really helpful in politics. Yeah. So I-- and that-- besides which, we have this electoral college. And if you want to carry Michigan and Pennsylvania and Ohio and Wisconsin, I don't think you can just say, we can do it on the secular coalition alone. I'm not for it. I wish we didn't have an electoral college, but we do. Who wants to-- please. You're right near the mic. OK, thank you. My question, it's really about Billy Graham, but I have to set out a couple historical things that haven't come up. In the 1920s, there was a rise of a nativist populism, and the KKK, funded by some wealthy Southern Baptists, really made a push to come into Southern New England. And my family is from Connecticut, and my grandfather made a stand, a public stand that was memorable in my family, about that. God bless him. While that went on-- [INAUDIBLE]? I said, god bless him. Yeah, yeah. For us that's true. That went on for five, eight years, and perhaps in the end, you could say it was really wiped out by The Depression and then the World War. At the end of World War II, the Churches of the World, the World Council of Churches, anyway, really confronted the German churches, Lutheran and Catholic, and said, you did nothing. You let all of these fascists sit in the pews and feel loved by God, and you did nothing. And that's totally unacceptable. And American mainline denominations took that to heart. And in my own college graduate school era of the '60s, boy, everything was full of that story. In the '50s, just when this was really ramping up, Billy Graham stood up and said, hey, here I am. I'll give you all the cheap grace you want. Come on down to me. You don't have to do any of this moral stuff. And he cheap-graced his way to millions of bucks, and I would say, really set up Franklin Graham to take over and take it one step further. So I'm having a little trouble today with all the warm things being said about Billy on the radio. But my family never liked what he was doing, I do think he saw-- he's a good salesman, and he saw that he could sell what the others were no longer trying to sell. Comment on that? Go ahead. No, you go. You work for the rabbi. I am actually looking up something on my little phone here. Yeah, so it's interesting. The one thing-- the thing I would say that-- I resonate with in what you're saying is that there's a version-- a kind of abstract version of this personal relationship with Jesus that runs deeply through Evangelical life and through Billy Graham's speaking. That that's what's most important, is that you get your naked self right with God through Jesus. It's this very one-on-one personal thing. What tends to be missing from that is the connection to social action and social justice. Now, it's interesting to him-- he's a complex figure, because he really-- for the time, I mean, he was very clearly trying to de-- he refused to hold rallies in some places that were try-- say, you can only come with segregated audiences. He's like, I'm not going to come. Are we going to have it or not? He was-- at the time, King, it's worth remembering, was a controversial figure even in the mainline churches in the 1960s. Even in the African American denominations, King-- in many of them, King was a controversial person. And Graham reached out, had him do the opening thing. So I-- it's interesting that he doing that kind of stuff. But at the same time, i think one of the other ways I've been thinking about how Evangelicalism sort of hid its racial history is through this very personal view of Jesus that doesn't connect to social action. So you can be personally right with God-- and you can see this over and over in Southern sermons from the '60s, and before the Christian Right got politically active. The trope was, that's politics, this is religion, and the two don't have anything to do with each other. But you can only really say that if you're at the top of the heap, and the status quo looks good to you, right? Then that makes a lot of sense. But that disconnect, I would say, that's what resonates to me that as maybe the weak point, I think, in what got reinforced. At the same time, he was working to desegregate things, propping up a theological view that didn't have a lot of teeth to it in terms of racial justice. [INAUDIBLE] talking about the [INAUDIBLE].. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yep. No, I appreciate your question. First of all, I like the way you linked what you said with the first part. Because, of course, cheap-gracing it, you are channeling Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was in the part of the German church that stood up to Hitler. And that was his phrase. What I was looking up is Reinhold Niebuhr was a great critic of Billy Graham, and it was precisely on this point. And in a way, Graham could be said to have popularized the reaction to the social gospel among fundamentalists a long time before. And so on the one hand, it was a more open, less-angry form of-- that Evangelicalism was a less-angry form of fundamentalism, and this was a less-angry form of Evangelicalism. So in that sense, the warm Billy Graham is a real story. On the other hand, at the root of that is a very, very conservative view of religion that did not have this social challenge in it, and that Graham, in the end, really was quite conservative. He was a very close friend and ally of Richard Nixon's, for example. And it was not a social justice faith at all. [INAUDIBLE] has to [INAUDIBLE]. Yeah, yeah. Although in the '50s, that was a fairly broad [INAUDIBLE].. [INAUDIBLE]-- Yes. --[INAUDIBLE]. It was a major part of his platform. Yeah, so your point is correct. I had a choice of writing a column on him this morning and I chose-- I let my colleagues do it. Because my feelings about him are complicated, the way yours are. Because I accept what Robbie says, but I also think that those are two sides of the Graham story that we just have to accept. Who wants to-- who-- oh, the gentleman back there, we'll come to you. Yeah. Thank you guys both for coming. One thing you said during the talk was, quote, "Nothing inside Southern Baptist churches in Macon, Georgia, has anything to do with race." And so I actually have an interesting story. My grandfather, his parents were Syrian-Turkish immigrants. They moved in 1909 to Macon, Georgia. So my grandfather was born the last of nine Jewish kids in a big family in Macon, Georgia. And when I asked my grandfather about what it was like growing up in Macon, Georgia, he said, well, Andrew, after dark, there were no Jews, dogs, or blacks allowed on the street. And so as a Jewish kid looking up to my grandfather, the idea that race never existed inside of whatever happened inside of Southern Baptist churches sounds-- doesn't sound too right to me. And I also think that tonight we've talked a lot about white Christianity, but we haven't really-- here at the Divinity School, we often wrestle with questions of justice when it comes to God. And if we think about this long arc of Christian decline that we've outlined tonight, we also recognize the same historical period represents tremendous increases in things like mass incarceration, destruction-- I mean, white wealth over those periods, compared to minority wealth, has been astronomical. So we see the consolidation of white control over society, and we know that 53% of white women voted for Trump. So I guess my question to you guys is how does your approach take into the racial catastrophes? Over 3 million incarcerated folk today, increasing. Deportations. How does that not stem out of those same white spaces from the past? The rise of white culture? Let me take the thing about-- what I said about the inside of white Christian churches. I want to make sure I'm not misunderstood. I wasn't saying that narrative was true. I was saying it was being told. And so that, I think, is what's remarkable, is that I could grow up-- and I went to church five times a week growing up. Like, I was there Sunday morning, Sunday night, Monday night visitation, Tuesday night Bible study, Wednesday night prayer meeting. That was my schedule growing up, so I was there all the time. And so I wouldn't have missed it if it was there. And it just wasn't there. I mean, there wasn't a narrative at all, because-- all white. There was-- and it just, it wasn't ever a part. Even when we were talking about our own history, we had like Baptist training union on Sunday afternoons, and that was the time when you'd talk about the denomination. And it just wasn't there really. Not all the way back, it wasn't there. About the '60s, none of it. I was there. So I'm saying that there's a literally whitewashed narrative being told inside churches that, I think, hid the racial history of the domination. And I think that was a huge problem, and is an ongoing huge problem for-- and what's great, Macon, Georgia is a great example. There are two First Baptist churches in Macon, Georgia. They sit about 50 yards apart downtown. One of them is African American, one of them is white. They used to be one church. They split during the Civil War when it became too tense for slave owners and slaves to be in church together. And so they gave permission for the African American slaves to go build their own church before they were emancipated, and then after the Civil War and the Emancipation, they continued their own church. Those churches have sat for 150 years on two corners of Macon, Georgia. Until the last five years, they finally get two young pastors who kind of looked at each other and went, what are we doing? We're sitting here-- and they started doing some joint things between the two churches. But that's like the last five years that has happened. It's a sort of long, long story. And your point about the Jewish community, I think, is really important, and it's part of this narrative. Yeah, in the 1920s, huge anti-Semitic stuff going on. And it's really important to remember, the KKK was a white Protestant organization. It was shot through with Protestant Christianity. It was anti-Catholic, it was anti-Jewish, and it was anti-black. And that is its history, and it was propped up by white Protestant churches all through the South where it really had its stronghold. So I think remembering that is really important. We're hearing echoes of it even today in Charlottesville. We heard not just stuff around race, and pride, and the Confederate flag, and that's a-- but they were chanting "Jew will not replace us" in Charlottesville. So it's still hovering there with us, even though attitudes have largely changed in the general public. And the rise of the KKK in the '20s that you referenced-- and it was really powerful in some states in the North, particularly-- they basically took over Indiana for a while. On top of being anti-black, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, it was deeply anti-immigrant. And it's worth remembering that the '20s were when the toughest immigration law was passed by Congress. It was a kind of a backlash, not at all unlike the backlash reflected in the Trump campaign. I will-- before we close, I want to tell a very personal Southern Jewish story. But I'm going to wait till-- to close with it, because it's actually a-- it's a warm American story about the lines of hatred always being unexpected. But I wanted to just go to a couple more questions. The gentlemen here. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, here's the mic. Thank you. It's not clear to me a couple of statistical points. And then I have a larger question. Did a majority of white Christians vote for Donald Trump? Yes, yes. Yeah. I was afraid of that answer. Yes. And the spike in-- or the big shift in the statistic that you've stressed most, about how under Obama, white Christianity shifted from a majority of the population to a 43% minority in eight years, I suspect that that-- that I'll get a "yes" to this statistical question too, that that was probably the fastest shift of that kind in American history. Yeah, you can s-- Robbie's suggesting another "yes"? I believe that's true. Yeah. I mean, it has been dropping, really, since the '70s. But this 11-- more than a percentage point a year is definitely more [INAUDIBLE]-- But more of that comes from the rise of religious disaffiliation than from racial change. Yeah. That's why I was trying at the beginning to-- in other words, you've had a very precipitous drop in religious affiliation among younger Americans. And so some of that is racial change and immigra-- because of immigration. But more of it is from religious disaffiliation. Yeah. The other point that I didn't talk about, but that is interesting, we're talking a lot about white Evangelicals. One of the reasons why we're seeing their drop is actually that fertility rates among white Evangelicals have gone down. And that's mostly because there has been an uptick in Evangelical women getting college degrees over the last generation. And so we always know that's a corollary. So that's all these kind of interesting-- in the mix that has lowered-- that has made family sizes smaller. And then with the-- you get smaller family size, disaffiliation of young people, the whole group starts aging and declining. And that's part of the story here. So there are-- and this was my third and final question. So clearly, there are a number of drivers of this 10% drop under Obama that has made us-- that has brought about the title of your book, The End of White Christian America. Well, you-- and of course, you've just given us, both of you, a number of the drivers. Which of these driving factors do you think was the most important? And I'll yield. Yeah. Well, I think we-- as E.J. suggested, we've seen this kind of steady and predictable racial and ethnic drop that's underneath everything. And I don't have the chart here, but if I showed you the curve of-- over time, the trends over time, the percentage of Americans who claim no religious affiliation, it starts in the 1990s. And it's single digits in 19-- like 6%, 7% in the 1990s. It just starts upticking a little bit into the 2000s, and in the last decade, it just looks like a lot of rhythmic uptick. It just takes off. And so it is kind of turbocharge across the last decade kind of thing. And we're seeing it. It ticks up like every year. I mean, it really is a measurable phenomenon. [INAUDIBLE] Yeah. And just on your point, you might ask the question, well, if these numbers moved in that direction under Obama, how in the world did Donald Trump win the election if those numbers are going this way? And the answer to the question is, older people turn out at higher rates than younger people, is the single most important factor. And there was a slight downtick in African American turnout from the Obama election. But it's really that a lot of these numbers are driven by young people who under vote, compared to old people. And so there was-- there may be one or two elections left maybe in this coalition. Even that is questionable, but it has to do with voter turnout. And if Trump turbochargers young people's turnout, then this coalition is fundamentally-- basically finished, I think it's fair to say. Although everybody's been saying it's finished for a long time, and they've been wrong. So it's worth-- sorry. Can I just put one fine point on this real quick? Just to kind of spell this out, though, white Evangelicals make up 17% of the population. So they've declined down to 17% of the population. In the Trump election, they made up 26% of voters. 26% of the what? Of voters. So at the ballot box, they are 9 percentage points overrepresented at the ballot box because of higher turnout rates, relative to other people in the population. Our best projections are it's going to be 2024 before the voting population looks like the actual population looks like already. That's a good way to put it. Yeah I was going to say, the role of black women in the Alabama special election for the Senate. Yes. I mean, that turned it against the Evangelicals candidate. Right. It was African Americans and it was young people, that the line that you draw across that vote is age 45. 45 and under voted 61% for Doug Jones. Over 65 voted overwhelmingly for Roy Moore. And then you had very effective organizing within the African American community that produced a significant turnout. It's always been true in Southern politics that if you get a good African American turnout and a white vote of around, depending on the state, the share, it only has to be around 30% of the white vote in Alabama and Mississippi. But usually for the Democrats-- and it usually doesn't reach that. And that's why they keep losing elections. But Jones had the two-fer of a really good African American turnout, combined with that share of the white vote that rose, particularly because of younger people. But I think it was African American women in Alabama, if I'm not mistaken. It was historic that they turned out at rates un-- we've never seen. They outvoted African American men, and they outvoted white men and women, in terms of the rate of turnout in the election. Although African American women tend to always turn out at higher rates than men. That's true for quite a while. But you're right-- It was higher than whites. Yeah. What? It was higher than whites in the Alabama election. Oh. Thank you. I said-- No, go ahead. Thank you so much for the talk. This is really inspiring and very interesting. I want to shift to-- I mean, Rob, in the book, you talk about-- or one of the very interesting things in the book is that you talk about you use three institutions, basically, to think through this decline, or end, of white Christian America. And I want to go back to this particular idea. Most of the discussion was obviously about the demographic change, but I want to ask, how do you see the changes in the institution? And by that, I don't mean formal institution. But I mean the institution of white Christianity and politics. And this takes us to David's comment about the presence or lack thereof of a particular presentation of religion in politics in, say, the Clinton campaign, or in Democratic campaigns. And I want to ask, are we looking at the absence of religion in politics? Or are we looking at the absence and the dismantling, if you will, of a particular mode of engagement between religion and politics that we probably can characterize it as white Christian American institution? And in this same line, in a way, are we looking at a different kind of identification between religion and politics, between religion and race, that transcends since what you described as this kind of invincibility invisibility of the question of race in the traditional white Christian narrative, towards a mode that identifies the lines between the individual and the public in a different way? And in this same vein, just one last point. In relation to AG's comment about MLK and his role, or his narrative, or his ability to merge political and religious discourse, I wonder if, again, we're looking at just a different language. That the calling on religious symbols here is not one that comes from a particular mode of power or privilege, but one that comes from a prophetic narrative that is part of the traditional-- the tradition of African American prophetic religious expression. And that probably, this is really the difference here. That we're looking at the disappearance of a particular mode of institution. So I want to hear what you think about how this demographic change maps on the institution of white Christianity in politics and beyond that. Thank you. All right. I'll take a piece of that. So thank you for bringing up the institutions, though, because I-- this is like nose counting up here, and I think the institutions matter. So I've been, for the next project, reading a lot about South, and Calvin Trillin, who's a great journalist writing in the Civil Rights Era . There's a collection of his essays out in book form, and the title of the book is-- the lead essay, or the lead article that takes the title of the book is called Jackson 1964. And one of the things that struck me in that book is that he talked about the civil rights workers that were on the ground in Mississippi throughout the delta, and then kind of headquartered in Jackson. That often, their key media strategy was to get the attention of the National Council of Churches. And that if they could get the attention of the National Council of Churches, they then saw that as a conduit to Congress, a conduit to The New York Times, a conduit to The Washington Post, and they could get national media attention. That was the conduit through. I don't know anyone today who thinks-- that's their media strategy, is to get the National Council of Churches on board. It's just that that institution has really changed. When that was founded-- I have an account of the cornerstone of the big-- maybe you've probably been to the God Box Building, and it kind of-- it's actually dubbed "The God Box", that was at the time called the closest thing to a Protestant Vatican the world would ever see when it was founded. The cornerstone was laid by President Eisenhower, and when it was opened, there were 30,000 people that turned out for the opening of this building. And it was kind of this great gathering of the mainline Protestant denominations in the building, and it was this real sense of power that it was going to be this gathering and reinforcing and guiding power in a single direction. It very quickly sort of never quite fulfilled that purpose, but it's notable today. It's still there, the National Council of Churches, but they've abandoned the building. They've now moved to DC, and they're sharing, actually, the Methodist building on Capitol Hill, which has its own similar story. As the largest Methodist building, and the only religious building on Capitol Hill, it sits right between The Capitol and the Supreme Court Building. If you look out one, you see the Supreme Court. When it was founded, they were raising money for it, the Methodist Women dubbed it a Protestant sentinel on Capitol Hill. Right? It was right there to kind of keep an eye on things. They even built apartments so that members of Congress could live there and share a cafeteria, and they could rub shoulders with them on a daily basis and kind of influence policy. And you know, those buildings are still there and doing important work. But they don't have the kind of stature or influence that they had in the 1960s. And I think that mode of, yeah, we got this big Protestant, behemoth institution that everybody has to stand up and pay attention to. That era is also, I think, gone. I was thinking there will soon be Koch brothers condos-- [LAUGHTER] --in DC, God help us. Just two quick points. One is I think there has been a tension throughout American history between prophetic religion and what you could call the alternative. Liturgically, you could call it law-based. And the African-American church has always partaken of the prophetic. And I've always found that you can-- if you're talking about talking to a Christian, you know which side they are on by whether they quote Micah, Isaiah, and Amos or Leviticus. And whether they-- [LAUGHTER] --quote-- whether they quote the social passages of the New Testament or the conversion passages of the New Testament. And I think you saw that in the fight over slavery. You saw that over social justice issues in the progressive era in the '30s. I mean, you saw it in the Civil Rights years. I think that's a deep tension that's always running through American religion. The second is a set of cycles where religious questions are, more or less, central to American politics. And we get accustomed to one and are shocked when there is a change. And if you just go from 1928 to 1932, 1928 was an election saturated with religion, both because Al Smith was the first Catholic candidate for President, and because prohibition-- and whether to continue it-- was the central question. And all of a sudden, a funny thing happens on the way to 1932, which is the Great Depression. And there's a great exchange between Jim Farley and the Democrats, who were really torn by these questions, and particularly prohibition. And some Democrat in Missouri wrote Jim Farley and said, I don't understand why wet Democrats-- you know, pro-- anti-prohibition-- fight with dry Democrats, when neither of them can afford the price of a drink. [LAUGHTER] And suddenly, we went through a long period where public religion was not as present. And then everyone was stunned when the Christian Coalition came along. But really, it was just a return to that earlier pattern. Are you Rabbi Telushkin? I am. I want to welcome you. Before you came, I welcomed you, not only as a learned scholar, but as the father of one of my very favorite students here, my advisee, Shira, who is brilliant. So thank you. I'm honored. So let's get the rabbi a mike. Do we have-- is it-- where-- ah, thank you. Oh, I'm sorry. I saw the-- can you hold on? Let me-- I don't want to be gender discriminatory here, but I was just so happy to see Shira's dad here that I-- go ahead. So this is, I guess, a measurement question and a broader question. Within your category of white Christian, I'm wondering if you've looked at voting patterns and attitudes within or between different levels of religiosity. Yes. Because I know, after the election, I saw some evidence that suggested that white evangelicals who attended church weekly, or more frequently, were less likely to vote for Trump than evangelicals who just kind of superficially identified as religious, but didn't necessarily-- that didn't manifest in any behavioral measures. And so I'm wondering, if that's the case, how much work religion is doing here, versus just some sort of white, conservative ideology that has become linked to religion. I'll just say one thing quickly, and turn it to Robbie. What you just said, I think, was true in the primaries than in the general election. In the primaries, the genuinely religious evangelicals were shifting-- voting mostly for Ted Cruz. And the self-identified evangelicals who didn't necessarily go to church were much more likely to go to Trump. And you're absolutely right that, in the second group, saying you're evangelical is a kind of cultural marker more than it is a deep religious commitment. Whereas the Cruz evangelicals really were the religious evangelicals, which is why Cruz beat Trump in Iowa, and part of why Cruz beat Trump in Wisconsin. So you're right. In the general, I think-- as a general rule, higher rates of church attendance produce higher Republican voting, though I think some of that is overlaid with age. Because age also produces higher Republican voting. So it's notable that we see this pattern repeated with Romney, as well. Romney's favorability rating before he became the Republican nominee among white evangelicals was in the 30s. We measured a month after he became the Republican nominee. It was up, nearly at 70%. So we see these same kinds of patterns. And it's about partisan alignment, right? Once the candidate becomes the Republican Party nominee, evangelicals basically align their views. It's a miracle. [LAUGHTER] Church-going or not church-going, they align their views with the Republican party's nominee, and that's what we saw in that character question. The favorability numbers looked that way. If there's one group, though-- I do want to-- this is a great point to insert this point. If there's one group that looked different in the Trump election, it was Mormons. Yeah. It's the only group that significantly looked different than-- now, they had Evan McMullan on the ballot. So in places like Utah, that drained off votes. But it was the only group that really did move away from their typical support for Republican candidates in the last election cycle. And if you look at some of the more outspoken critics of Trump, you'll see many of them are Mormon. You'll see this kind of pattern. I keep thinking I want to write something about the real values voters. Right. And I think there's something going on in the Mormon community about a sense of having been an oppressed religious minority once upon a time in our history. And so even though there's obviously a very, very strong conservative streak among Mormon voters, there is still this sense of the danger of mistreating religious minorities. By the way, I'm totally persuaded Romney didn't win the Republican nomination the first time because he was Mormon. And that's why Mike Huckabee-- that's one of the central reasons why Mike Huckabee overwhelmed him in Iowa, which really helped derail his election. And there is no question that, the first time around, his Mormonism, I think, was very harmful with this constituency. Yeah, Rabbi, welcome. Thank you. And you could imagine, to my wife, Deborah, and myself, the greatest honor is being identified as Shira's parents. Oh, thank you. So thank you. [LAUGHTER] It occurred to me that the issue, I think, with Billy Graham was he just was trying to spread goodwill and over-- and went-- and de-politicized. Because it's interesting. He was not only a disappointment in that way to liberals. George Will wrote one of the most devastating columns against Graham when Graham visited Russia, and gave a speech in a church telling everybody in the church, your job is to be good workers for the state. It so demoralized the Christians who were there. There weren't even that many Christians there because the KGB had filled it up with a lot of their people. So I think it was an overemphasis on steering away from the political. Also, the comment about Graham vis-a-vis Kennedy as a Catholic, I think we also recognize that an anti-Catholic position was very widespread still in 1960. Norman Vincent Peale, who was certainly not a particularly conservative Christian, opposed Kennedy because he was a Catholic, which led to one of Adlai Stevenson's great lines, "I find Paul appealing and Peale appalling." [LAUGHTER] And even-- I love that line. And one of the very significant events affecting African-American voters in that election was when Martin Luther King was arrested. Kennedy intervened. Nixon, whether because he personally didn't care or making what he thought was a smart political decision, didn't intervene. And King's father announced that he was now supporting Kennedy-- He switched. He switched, leading Kennedy to remark to some of his friends-- he didn't say it publicly-- imagine, Martin Luther King's father, a bigot. But then he added, but then again, we all have fathers. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. And one other request, if anybody can help me on this. I'm serving as an advisor to a Jewish Museum, and one of the things we're working on is, what has been the impact of Judaism on the world? I remember once reading somewhere-- and I have not been able to find documentary evidence-- that obviously, slave owners wanted their slaves to be Christians, but that they were-- I remember reading this. I haven't seen evidence of it. That they actually had Bibles printed up for slaves, in which the Bible was printed, but the Book of Exodus was left out. Yeah. Oh, OK. I've heard that, yes. I want to get that on display somewhere. I've heard that, as well. And what's fascinating is how deeply important the book of Exodus is in every African-American church, and how central it is African-American preaching, for obvious reasons. I mean, "let my people go." But yes. I'm going to try to remember where I have found this because there were very-- the first slave owners tried to keep the slaves illiterate, and actually didn't want them reading the whole Bible because the Bible is very dangerous. And there was often a tradition of one slave, at least, becoming literate. And the original African-American churches were in the woods, and they were-- and the slaves were very conscious of those parts of scripture that pointed to the freedom. And so I think, in some cases, they were limited Bibles. But in a lot of cases, the effort was to keep the slaves illiterate so that they would only hear the parts, say, of Saint Paul, that said slaves, obey your masters, and that sort of thing. Which was the part that influenced Billy Graham when he spoke in Moscow-- in Russia. Spoke in Russia, yeah. Thank you. One quick point on this. It's worth noting that in the 1940s-- I think it was 1947-- "The Christian Century," which was the liberal publication arm of the Protestant world-- published a 14-part series worrying about Catholics in the country, and whether-- and it ended up being a book by the editor of "The Christian Century" called, "Can Protestantism Save America?" So there was deep, deep worries across-- not just in the conservative end of the Protestant world, but in the liberal end of the Protestant world. Well, it was said that-- In the '50s? --anti-Catholicism was-- 1947, I think. --anti-Catholicism was the anti-Semitism of the liberals. And what's fascinating about anti-Catholicism is it had two completely different strains-- a right-wing strain in Conservative Protestantism, and a left-wing strain that saw the Vatican-- and you could find some old stuff in Vatican documents, pre-Vatican II that was pretty chilling to liberals. There was the famous Catholic catechism that had the question, what is liberalism? Answer, liberalism is a sin. [LAUGHTER] And it was Spanish. "Liberalismo es pecado." And so Paul Blanchard was socialist, who wrote "American Freedom and Catholic Power." So that there were these twin engines of anti-Catholicism in the United States. We have to close, is that right? I want to tell my southern Jewish story, if I may, because we've been very serious here. And I always find this an upbeat story about, it just depends on what the lines of division are in a community. There was a gentleman who was a second father to me after my dad died. His name was Bert Yaffe. He grew up in Sparta, Georgia. His dad ran the only general store in Sparta, Georgia. There was a great tradition of southern Jews running the one store. When Bert was a teenager-- and the big split among whites in southern towns was Baptist, Methodist. And they couldn't stand each other. So when Bert was 16, he wanted to go out with a Methodist girl. And in order to do that, her parents made my friend join the Epworth League. Bert, from the only Jewish family in Sparta, Georgia, proceeded to get elected President of the local Epworth League. Later, he and the Methodist girl broke up and he wanted to go out with a Baptist girl. And as Bert told the story, they didn't give a damn that I was Jewish. What they couldn't stand is that I had been President of the Epworth League. [LAUGHTER] I want to thank you all very, very much for being here. [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC PLAYING]

Channel: Harvard Divinity School

Views: 197,437

Rating: 4.4407988 out of 5

Keywords: Whiteness, Christianity, America, E.J. Dionne, Robert P. Jones, Politics, Social values, HDS, United States

Id: gRqTYX6IwAY

Length: 104min 50sec (6290 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 22 2018