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   From: js@phendrie.con   
      
   By Michelle Goldberg   
   Opinion Columnist   
      
   July 9, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET   
      
   The presidency of George W. Bush may have been the high point of the modern   
   Christian right’s influence in America. White evangelicals were the largest   
   religious faction in the country. “They had a president who claimed to be   
   one of   
   their own, he had a testimony, talked in evangelical terms,” said Robert P.   
   Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of   
   the 2016 book “The End of White Christian America.”   
      
   Back then, much of the public sided with the religious right on the key culture   
   war issue of gay marriage. “In 2004, if you had said, ‘We’re the   
   majority, we   
   oppose gay rights, we oppose marriage equality, and the majority of Americans   
   is   
   with us,’ that would have been true,” Jones told me. Youthful megachurches   
   were   
   thriving. It was common for conservatives to gloat that they were going to   
   outbreed the left.   
      
   Activists imagined a glorious future. “Home-schoolers will be inordinately   
   represented in the highest levels of leadership and power in the next   
   generation,” Ned Ryun, a former Bush speechwriter, said at a 2005 Christian   
   home-schooling convention. Ryun was the director of a group called Generation   
   Joshua, which worked to get home-schooled kids into politics. The name came   
   from   
   the Old Testament. Moses had led the chosen people out of exile, but it was his   
   successor, Joshua, who conquered the Holy Land.   
      
   But the evangelicals who thought they were about to take over America were   
   destined for disappointment. On Thursday, P.R.R.I. released startling new   
   polling data showing just how much ground the religious right has lost.   
   P.R.R.I.’s 2020 Census of American Religion, based on a survey of nearly   
   half a   
   million people, shows a precipitous decline in the share of the population   
   identifying as white evangelical, from 23 percent in 2006 to 14.5 percent last   
   year. (As a category, “white evangelicals” isn’t a perfect proxy for the   
   religious right, but the overlap is substantial.) In 2020, as in every year   
   since 2013, the largest religious group in the United States was the   
   religiously   
   unaffiliated.   
      
   One of P.R.R.I.’s most surprising findings was that in 2020, there were more   
   white mainline Protestants than white evangelicals. This doesn’t necessarily   
   mean Christians are joining mainline congregations — the survey measures   
   self-identification, not church affiliation. It is, nevertheless, a striking   
   turnabout after years when mainline Protestantism was considered moribund and   
   evangelical Christianity full of dynamism.   
      
   In addition to shrinking as a share of the population, white evangelicals were   
   also the oldest religious group in the United States, with a median age of 56.   
   “It’s not just that they are dying off, but it is that they’re losing   
   younger   
   members,” Jones told me. As the group has become older and smaller, Jones   
   said,   
   “a real visceral sense of loss of cultural dominance” has set in.   
      
   White evangelicals once saw themselves “as the owners of mainstream American   
   culture and morality and values,” said Jones. Now they are just another   
   subculture.   
      
    From this fact derives much of our country’s cultural conflict. It helps   
   explain not just the rise of Donald Trump, but also the growth of QAnon and   
   even   
   the escalating conflagration over critical race theory. “It’s hard to   
   overstate   
   the strength of this feeling, among white evangelicals in particular, of   
   America   
   being a white Christian country,” said Jones. “This sense of ownership of   
   America just runs so deep in white evangelical circles.” The feeling that   
   it’s   
   slipping away has created an atmosphere of rage, resentment and paranoia.   
   [...]   
   I was frightened by the religious right in its triumphant phase. But it turns   
   out that the movement is just as dangerous in decline. Maybe more so. It   
   didn’t   
   take long for the cocky optimism of Generation Joshua to give way to the   
   nihilism of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. If they can’t own the country,   
   they’re   
   ready to defile it.   
      
   https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/opinion/religious-right-ameri   
   a.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage   
      
   Knowing that they've lost control, white evangelicals, most of whom are arch   
   white supremacists, want to destroy the country.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)