When you read that headline, did you immediately think I was referring to evangelical Protestants -- roughly speaking, churches like the Southern Baptists, Assemblies of God, or various non-denominational congregations? You'd be right. But you would also be wrong. Research from the Pew Center finds that white mainline Protestants and white Catholics also support Trump, though not by the margins found among evangelicals. Here's the break down:
- White evangelicals -- 78 percent
- White mainline Protestants -- 53 percent
- White Catholics -- 52 percent
Fortunately, there are a lot of other voters who are not white Christians, whose anti-GOP leanings overcome the Trump margin among white Christians, on the national level if not in all areas.
White Christians are a key segment of the electorate because they make up roughly 44% of U.S. registered voters. Roughly 7% of registered voters are Black Protestants, 5% are Hispanic Catholics, 2% are Jewish and 28% are religiously unaffiliated.
Large pluralities of these latter groups want to see the last of Trump.
Diana Butler Bass shared a new chart from Robert P. Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute which shows that evangelical numerical decline and a slight uptick among mainline Protestants is making the two groups nearly equal in size. Seems hard to believe, but PRRI is a reputable survey researcher.
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And Bass notes something else:
... Black, Asian, or Hispanic evangelicals ... vote more in line with non-evangelicals in their communities than they do with their white co-religionists.Might it not also be accurate to say that in segregated America, white Christians vote more in line with their white communities than with their co-religionists of color?
Or rather, whiteness trumps religious affiliation when it comes to political orientation.
3 comments:
I'm one of the white Christians that does NOT support Trump. It bothers me to know the ones that do. Party affiliation I think for most of them, but I'm hearing at the affordable care act has hurt some. Next comes the NRA supporters among them.
As a white atheist, I've never really figured out what makes a Christian "evangelical". What's the difference?
WD-40: Evangelicals claim to take the Bible seriously (and often literally) and to have a personal experience with Jesus as their Savior. Mainline Protestants would use similar words, but put more emphasis on a culture of worship, collective practice, and tradition, as well as Scripture.
In the United States of 70 years ago, the distinction was often one of class. The mainline was middle and upper middle; the evangelicals were working class and/or Southern. The strength of the class markers has dulled as the nation became more secular and all religion became more a choice and less an accident of birth.
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