Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

InfamousBrad t1_iyc8ufj wrote

Reply to comment by LudicrousSpeedGoJr in For The First Time, Less Than Half Of UK's Population Is Christian: Report by khushraho

Not necessarily. Assuming current trends continue, in about 30 years, Americans with no religious affiliation will outnumber Christians, and in a little over 50 years, they will become the actual majority.

Furthermore, the "Gilead" denominations (white evangelical, white Catholic) are the ones experiencing the fastest rate of decline, because they are having record-low success evangelizing non-Christians and because record-low percentages of white evangelical and white Catholic parents are forcing their children to go to church.

31

moses420bush t1_iyca44o wrote

Incoming global recession and the zombie economy finally collapsing after the 2008 crisis means lower living standards which leads to more support of right wing authoritarian groups like the american christian right.

America already lost abortion rights, the Christian right already have some power and it may continue to grow.

7

InfamousBrad t1_iycaqdk wrote

What you're seeing is the last gasp of the boomer generation. Someone forwarded me a column the other day, by an evangelical lobbyist who'd seen the cross-tabs on the 2022 mid-terms, lamenting the fact that the millenial and "zoomer" generations are "completely lost to us," permanently alienated. (He blamed the schools, unsurprisingly.)

What you're chalking up as victories for them are more like desperation plays. They're willing to stretch for any short-term gain, however unpopular or unsustainable, because they know they've got maybe 4-6 years before they're so small they're not even useful to the Republicans any more, and then their movement is over.

18

moses420bush t1_iyceku5 wrote

Yeah that's a good answer, its nice to look on the brighter side. I'm still worried about "desperation plays" with the system the way that it is now. A handful of people with enough power have the ability to change law against the popular opinion, changes that may take years to repeal.

I'm also not sure you can say there won't be a new Christian right forming and taking over from the old, there are many reasons why people turn to more extreme politics and those reasons are increasing throughout the west. If certain laws are put in place now which change the world and perceptions of the next generation its not too hard to see a more difficult few decades coming.

6

InfamousBrad t1_iyf1bow wrote

I'm not going to blow smoke up your ass and say that I know that you're wrong, but that doesn't seem to me to be the way that it's gone in the past, at least not here in America. This last decade feels a lot like the 1850s to me, or the 1930s. And remember that evangelical fundamentalism was founded as a reaction to what came after the rubble stopped bouncing in 1865 and then again in 1945. Both of those disasters left the public with an intense distrust of ideologues and partisans, and Christianity changed both times to become more social-gospel and less partisan, people flocked out of the mainstream churches, and into either secularism or mainline denominations.

After the chaos of the last 60 years, I think we're due for decades of the American people remembering what ideological purity and hyper-partisanship cost us or almost cost us and reacting against that, not burrowing deeper into it. At least, that's what I expect.

2