It isn't just Republicans who have screwed the pooch by alienating young adults. Evangelicals have also seen their ranks dramatically reduced over the last decade, mostly because they young no longer have patience for their rejection of science and theology of hate.
Large-scale polls conducted over the last 10 years by PRRI indicate that white evangelicals as a percentage of Americans have been on a downward trend for at least a decade, as they steadily decline as a percent of the population. In 2006, they accounted for 23 percent of those surveyed, but as of 2017, they represented just 15.3 percent of the population.Evangelicals’ fervent support of Trump is not universally shared by a crucial, and rapidly evaporating, subset of the white evangelicals—their children—who are leaving the faith in droves over its anti-LGBT and anti-science positions.
Only 35 percent of white evangelicals are under the age of 50, compared with 54 percent of the population, according to the PRRI. And they are bleeding youth: Only 8 percent of white evangelicals are under the age of 30, compared with 21 percent of the American population.From Newsweek.
If Evangelical Christians continue to loose adherents at the rate that they have over the last decade, by 2030, they will represent less than 10% of the U.S. population.
The article goes on to note that Evangelical "insistence on a God-given patriarchal system" is also alienating and that support for Donald Trump was a last straw for many younger adults who had clung to the religious movement until then.
The article concludes with a LOL footnote:
Correction: An earlier version of this article mistakenly said Donald Trump's alleged yearlong affair after the birth of his son with Melania Trump was with an adult film actress; it was with a former Playboy bunny.As we say in the law, "a distinction without a difference.
It is also worth noting that White Evangelical Protestantism is strongest in U.S. states whose economies are the weakest. The culture associated with this faith is economically maladjusted to the contemporary economy. It came into being in symbiosis with slavery supported plantation farming in the South, which called for a set of norms that are dysfunctional in a post-agricultural, post-slavery modern economy.
3 comments:
American's have a unique interpretation of the word "evangelical" in the much the same manner as they have for "liberal".
In continental Europe "Evangelical" means "Protestant". It was Luther's preferred term. In the rest of the Anglophone world it refers largely to mainline interdenominational practices that find their roots in 17th century Pietism, "Low Church" Anglicanism and Methodism.
The American clerisy however, use it as an negative epithet to denote syncretistic Christian-Americanism (e.g. Southern Baptists, etc) popular with the hated hoi polloi. The American media now often misuse the term for any culturally conservative Christian denomination, even if they are decidedly not Evangelical.
Anyway, the Anglo (minus the US elite) definition is currently the fastest growing religious movement on the planet; growing at twice the rate of Islam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism#Evangelical
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism#Global_statistics
Evangelical Christianity (by the American terminology, every word has multiple senses so there is really no avoiding using a word that has another sense in another context), is shrinking in the U.S. and in the places where it is growing in the developed world, the base numbers are so small and the overall trend is so secular,that it doesn't really make sense to talk about percentage growth.
There is a substantial movement of nominal Roman Catholics in Latin America converting from Catholicism to what would be described in American terms as Evangelical Christianity and most specifically, predominantly as Pentecostals, even though the Protestants remain a decided minority in those places.
Christianity of a variety of types has roughly peaked out in South Korea, the most Christian country in Asia (with some possible exception border cases in the Caucuses and Oceania).
Christianity of almost all types has been particularly attractive for members of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in India as a way to escape a caste based worldview in lieu of a more egalitarian one, and in historically animist parts of Africa where Christianity has proved valuable as a tool to organize otherwise inert and atomistic communities towards organized self-help.
In Russia, Evangelical Christianity has grown from very low based numbers since it was banned, but unlike the renewed and thriving historical Russian Orthodox church, it is still sputtering. In China, it is not quite banned and is growing rapidly, but in the face of an environment where 98% of the population adheres to the official atheistic state ideology while covertly adhering to some traditional Chinese folk religion and Buddhist concepts, this doesn't have much societal impact and may not be a meaningful trend.
Karen McDougal was not a "bunny".
She was a Playmate.
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