The last stand of the American Christians

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/07/2024 (465 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The past week has been a roller-coaster ride for Donald Trump.

First he’s the target of an assassination attempt. However, that makes him God’s Chosen One because he survived, and it looks like the presidency is in the bag because current U.S. President Joe Biden can’t even finish his sentences. But then Biden quits, and suddenly Trump is the old white guy, up against an opponent who’s 20 years younger.

Religion has played a big part in Trump’s rise, although he is not religious himself. That’s why he told the crowd at the Republican National Convention that “I stand before you only by the grace of Almighty God.”

Trump was claiming that God is on his side because he must win the “Christian” vote. The Republican Party used to be a fairly broad church, but these days its core support comes from a particular brand of American Christians who are very visible but not as numerous as they seem.

These Protestant “evangelical” Christians have taken to calling themselves Christian nationalists and they can be counted on to vote Republican no matter what. However, there are only enough of them to put Trump back in the White House if a lot of other Americans don’t vote at all.

In effect, the Republicans have now become the local version of the Party of God. The numbers tell the tale: 87 per cent of Americans who identified as Republicans in a survey last year said they believe in God. Only 66 per cent of Democratic voters did.

This does not necessarily imply that evangelical Republicans really think Donald Trump is one of their own. They know that he has been married three times, boasts about groping women and was convicted by a jury of sexually abusing and defaming journalist E. Jean Carroll.

Trump is famously “transactional” in both his personal life and his political behaviour. (The old-fashioned word for this is “unprincipled.”) However, evangelical Christians are quite capable of being transactional too: they’ll get on Trump’s bus if it’s going in the direction they want.

There’s no grounds for complaint about Trump pretending to pray and his audience pretending to believe that he really means it. It’s no shabbier than a lot of other political deals. But it probably won’t be enough now that Trump doesn’t have a tragically diminished opponent like Biden, because American Christianity is in retreat.

Almost every country or region used to have its own version of religious belief, and if that’s where you were born that was what you believed. After all, everybody else around you seemed to believe it, so it must be true.

But then came mass education and mass media, and people became aware of the wider world around them. There are half a dozen big religions and lots of smaller ones. At best, only one of them can be right. Maybe none of them are. And why should it be the one my grandparents believed?

For most of the West, and also for most of East Asia, the old beliefs are no longer “normal.” There are still many believers, and most people are happy to continue the traditional religious rites of passage such as marriages and funerals. Likewise the ancient seasonal festivals such as Christmas and Chinese New Year. But the religious core has evaporated.

In Britain, Sweden and Australia, only around 30 per cent of the population see themselves as religious. In Japan, South Korea and China, only about 15 per cent do. Moreover, the trend line is downward in every case.

In the midst of this, the United States has seemed the great exception: a developed country in which religion still dominates in public life. But it’s really more of a grand illusion because the rot (if that’s what it is) set in quite a while ago.

In 2001, a Gallup poll reported that 90 per cent of Americans believed in God. In another poll taken last year, only 74 per cent did. That’s a drop of almost exactly one per cent per year, which is what you might call an inexorable trend.

It’s inexorable because it is driven almost entirely by generational turnover. Older Americans are not losing their faith; their children are just not buying into it. The 2023 version of the same poll revealed that among 18-to-34-year-old Americans, only 59 per cent believe in God.

The U.S. is a lot less different than it thinks it is. The heartland will remain true to the old ways for a while longer, but most Americans live within a few hours drive of the east or west coasts and that puts them in the modern time zone.

Trump cannot rely on the Christian vote alone to bring him victory. If younger Americans vote in large number, his fake religiosity is political poison.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.