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Playing the Long Game in the Culture Wars
In the end, strongly religious people will win the culture war because they have babies and those babies do not grow up to be atheists. Between 70% and 75% percent of the children of Evangelicals do not leave the faith when they grow up. With an average birthrate of 2.5 kids per woman, that means that Evangelicals will be a growing segment of the white vote over the coming decades and will gain modestly over all, even assuming the kind of immigration foreseen in the comprehensive immigration reform bills of the last decade or so. Moreover, evangelicals are effective in evangelism, getting nearly 11% of their members from adult conversions, and the retention rate for conversions is very high. So, going into the future, Evangelicals grow and do not shrink. Right now, American’s elementary schools are filled with far more religious people than they had with the Millennial generation. If demography is destiny, as the Democrats say, liberals are in a for a rude surprise starting around 2030.
Who else is benefiting? Mormons gain very little from evangelism but they have lots of children and have incredibly high retention rates. In the early 20th century, Mormons were just 40% of the population in Utah. Now, it is 58%. Over the next decade or so, Mormons will make the purple states of Colorado and Nevada a bit more red. This is all form Mormons having a lot of children who stay Mormon.
Who is losing the demographics game? Mainline protestant churches. They are having fewer children and their retention rate for their children is only 50%. All the groups that grow from evangelism — especially the secular “nones” (who grow more from evangelism then any other group in the United States) and Evangelicals — take from Mainline Protestants, liberal Catholics, and immigrants. That’s one reason why so many evangelical leaders like open or nearly open borders. So, when you hear about social conservatives getting older, what they are talking about is the Jimmy Carter voter who always thought the idea of Same Sex marriage was icky is getting older and dying.
The secular Millennials are still a growing part of the population, and the Nones will continue to grow over the next couple of decades, but will top out around 17% of the population before declining. By 2030, we will most likely be a majority pro-life country with a growing evangelical population — 30% or so — with a cohort of young voters who are religious and grew-up in homes where they felt as if their parents were under siege from secular culture.
What I want to know is how does the Republican party need to prepare for this while remaining electorally effective now? Some good things will start to happen for us in twelve years or so, but we need to win right now too.
I think that the Republican party would be wise to not jettison social issues but continue to make social conservatives feel welcome. Make as much progress as they can in the states on winning cultural war battles and make religious freedom a hallmark and litmus test in the party much like abortion and gun rights are now. Hone our attacks over the next three or four election cycles on economic issues, limited government causes, and liberty issues while cultivating a farm team of religions conservatives. By doing this ahead of the demographic shift, we position ourselves to reap huge dividends politically in the future.
I think we also will get a chance to break open the African American vote due to the Democrats secular overreach. As African Americans start to feel marginalized in the Democrat party — and see their ministers called intolerant and driven away from politics — Republicans may have a chance of making common cause with African Americans on social issues and religious freedom issues. At the very least, we’ll have that opportunity long before we get a chance to change their minds on economic issues. In the long term, we have a lot of reason for hope on the culture war.
Eric Kaufman’s book Shall the Religious Inherent the Earth inspired this post. I highly recommend this book. You can read more about it here, here, and here
Published in Culture, Religion & Philosophy
Doing it by amendment seems to be a guaranteed way to fail, even if the amendment were to be ratified. And I would like it to succeed.
All the amendments in the world won’t help when government is as big as ours. This issue a budget problem, and that’s where people need to direct their energies if they expect to retain any parental rights..
Hello Jim Kearney! You wrote about my Amazon review:
A couple of years ago, in a five-star Amazon review, a reviewer, another (?) Brian with a religious right perspective, predicts “mass immigration from South America being a huge boon to evangelical churches” and “a new more religious age dawning” with “the Jewish vote and money becoming more and more dominated by socially conservative religious Jews.” Two years along, how are those predictions looking?
They are looking great! Evangelism among Hispanic immigrants legal and illegal is going well and contributes over all to the growth of the evangelical church (broadly understood). The mainstay Jewish liberals are getting older and older and they have few kids more socially conservative Jews are a growing segment of the population. Seems right on. Also you already see signs of the predicted growing pro-life sentiment among the young. The Pro-position is the one conservative “social issue” that is not losing ground at the this the peak of the secular tide.
I think you over state you case a bit when you say to Eric Kaufman “Hey those kids you were talking about being in pre-school and first grade are now fifth graders why haven’t we seen a big political shift in America yet?! Your predictions must be all wrong.”
The test here is to see if over the next eight years the trend in the young people being increasingly pro-life holds up. That is the canary in the coal mine here.
I agree with you demography does not work like magic and produced well foreseen and easily predicable results. What it does do though is better reveal our opportunities. There is nothing inherent in the Evangelical church that makes them support limited government, low tax rates and our classically liberal constitution.
All kinds of things can happen churches can give up their witness toward tradition marriage and abortion and the like, the Republican party can become hostile to social conservatives and drive them away. Democrats who are only interested in power could offer big government with a more socially conservative agenda and this demographic move I am talking about could then rebound to the Democrats. Making today’s evangelicals the next mainline protestants. Who knows for sure?
The points I think are important is there is no real reason to think that Conservative Christians are getting old and will disappear. We are in a bad spot of what I think is maximum Democrat advantage on social issues but this time period will be relatively short. The Republicans need to think in longer terms if they what to maximize their opportunities for the future. The story for demographic growth for conservative Christians and other faiths is a stronger and more likely even then the story that we will all get old and die off and the progressives will feast (spiritually) on our young.
Brian – Everyone is getting old. I certainly hope all conservatives, including Christians, will continue to be active voters in generations to come. I do think that technology and science may reduce belief in the more supernatural, and literal forms of fundamentalism, but not in the teaching of Jesus. How that teaching is interpreted is going to be a big issue for conservatives. Just watch the liberal spin when the Pope visits.
Doctrinal points about same sex marriage and procreative choice are not endearing the young to the political agenda of Christian conservatives. Focusing on other issues of agreement — and there are so many — will bolster conservatives in the immediate years to come.
Reticulator — yes, all political issues are social issues, because, as George Costanza once put it emphatically, “we live in a society!” I use the term here as shorthand for the combination of issues including women’s procreative choices (the politics of abortion and birth control); euthanasia; same sex relationships and rights in the political sphere; and other sexual rights and sexual privacy concerns vis-a-vis government.
For clarity purposes, I do not use the term here in reference to legalized gambling, drugs, capital punishment, taxpayer support for single parent households and other social welfare programs, etc., although it is reasonable to link these issues in debate.
Hello Jim Kearney in post #33. Let me be crystal clear at no time was I making the case that any member, race or creed in the Human race had stopped aging! The Left claim that there are no young evangelicals of any consequence and people that hold evangelical beliefs are uniformly old and dying is what I think is wrong.
You are very generous in hoping that Evangelicals stick around and keep voting for Republicans but since you seem to be offering them to follow the strategy of following the main line protestants in abandoned traditional Biblical teachings the goodwill you offer with one hand you seemd to be taking away with the other.
Pro-abortion positions are not a winning issue with the young. To give up the pro-life cause now makes no sense of any sort. As far as I know there are no viable politics about birth control. No one is against them. No party seeks to ban them. Some good and decent people don’t want to be forced to pay for some “birth control” that can lead to abortions but that is a solid liberty issue. Unless of course you believe that refusing to pay for some one’s birth control is that same as desiring to ban birth control. I hope that is not your position.
I think that the point of the my post and this thread is about how we need to focus on other issues right now but that we also need to prepare for the future by not pushing away a potential source of future strength for short term gain now.
I love working with my friends and allies on areas of mutual agreement and concern. However when my friend suggest I become more like the dying main line churches and abandon the core of faith by calling the killing of babies ok and abandon the Biblical and reality definition of marriage then I have to just call that bad advice.
Looking a bit into the future I think the case for modest growth by evangelical protestants and rather robust growth for Mormons is a more compelling then any story line of decline. I think the Republican party should keep that in mind and not miss an opportunity to steal a march on overconfident liberals who think they are marching with the inevitable tide of history.
Another wrinkle to add to the confusing collection already cited is the difference between atheists and nones. The former are militant and seek control over political institutions (and thus have influence disproportionate to their low numbers) and the latter are pretty apathetic. Isn’t it true that most atheists were raised in religious homes? And aren’t most nones basically 2nd or 3rd generation atheists?
My point is that the rise of the nones is the final symptom of the collapse of mainline religion. And also that all those busy evangelicals will continue to supply us with atheists as well as (in greater numbers) believers.
Demographic predictions (aka, “math”) is hard.
In sixty years we’ve gone from “the age of the nuns” to the “rise of the nones.”
Math is hard especially with Demographic numbers. However Demographics more hard science and less about guess work when you are describing who is giving birth to who. In this way demography can tell you where the opportunities are. Liberals, right now, do not have very many kids while conservative religious types are still having a lot of kids.
To not see the opportunity in that you have to believe that retention rates in conservative religious households will collapse but that is not very likely since that has been the prediction for 300 years and it has yet to bear fruit.
Most of the “nones” are from mainline Protestant households and liberal Catholic households. Atheist hail from the same place third generation atheists are rare because child bearing atheist households are rare.
The big, big source of the liberal wave we are in now were from politically liberal, religious serious households of the mainline denominations. These house holds are disappearing. There is no real liberal demographic having babies (African American could be an exception but they are ravaged by abortion) now and their main source of strength is from immigration.
It is also important that if trends continue even remotely as they are now the “nones” will never be more than 17% of the population and then they start to shrink while conservative Christians maintain their size or more likely experience modest growth. One more unknown is that we don’t have good data right now on whether or not “nones” and “atheists” will have high retention rates for their kids. If they don’t that may seriously curtail their growth in the future.
That returns me to my point that the Republican must really think about the future and not just the here and now so they can have a chance at gaining real long term political advantage. Republican are in many ways the party of married folks that bodes well for our future and ill for the liberals.
One thing I worry about: hints that the evangelical movement is toying with liberalism. It’s early days, but it seems like certain leaders are, as they would probably put it, assuming the social responsibility that the mainlines no longer can carry. Thus, various lefty (mildly lefty) noises are made about “compassionate” government programs or global warming. I suspect there will always be a demand for relaxed versions of religion, and the ecosystem will do what it must to supply it, via people like Tony Campolo, Ron Sider, and Philip Yancey.
(Here’s more on this subject in a book that covers Evangelical liberalism and also the trend-cycle debate I posted about the other day.)
On a broader note, I’d be interested to know what starts a Christian movement to decline into liberalism. Is it theological liberalism? Is it the mixing of religion and politics? Something else?
It may be that liberalism is simply the easiest path to take unless actively guarded against. In the LDS tradition, we’ve had several leaders who have taken strong stands against socialism and similar ills, which probably explains why we Mormons are so conservative. Heber J Grant instituted our current welfare program, which emphasizes thrift, service, and industry in order to receive help. Ezra Taft Benson, who was secretary of Agriculture in the Eisenhower administration, was very opposed to the interventionism of the US government during the great depression. Spencer W Kimball was a very outspoken anti-communist. All these men were very well loved Presidents of the Church and certainly left a conservative streak on the general membership.
-E
That makes sense; the separation of church and state is a relatively new concept, historically. Religious freedom is a very American ideal, even though there are many examples of mixing the two in local politics (for examples see Puritans, Amish, Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, etc.). However, those seem categorically different from the early Christian Abolition/Temperance/Progressive movements that wanted sweeping, national changes. Is that were some of the seeds of their future liberalization were planted? After all, it seems that mainline Protestant Churches were very involved in all those movements.
-E
Well from reading of history the abolition movement and temperance movement were primarily civil society orientated. Ending slavery needed the government to ban the practice of course but the effort was a grass roots where the people were asserting their sovereignty over the government. To put a finer point on the government saw slavery as a property rights issue and involved itself in that way. The law was not seen as providing an arbiter of moral opinion. The moral question was fought out in the civil society as it should have been. It is like the modern issue of abortion few people see the government as pronouncing abortion as good in fact it was forced to recognize abortion.
Ok later on the Progressive Christians started to see the government as an instrument of good, “If we ban alcohol people will start to be better. People aren’t really bad it is the demon rum that makes them bad.” A good novel to read on this is “What would Jesus Do?” The original book set in the 1890s. You read it and and it kind of sweeps you up and you are cheering at the end “Ban alcohol! Ban alcohol!” Then on sober reflection you realize what a bad idea that is.
So at the moment that mainline Christian progressives began to think that Government could make people better that is when they started to lose their way. Only God makes people better not government. It is interesting the fundamentalist Christians, a tiny minority back then, started to vote against FDR because they correctly saw government replacing Jesus and they wanted to stand against that.
You really see that in a Hilary Clinton by the way. She started out as a Mainline Protestant progressive in the 60s and through her career you can see how she send that identity because God was redundant when Government has the power to remake people into their better selves. The early 60s is really when the mainline protestants started imploding but the seeds for that implosion were set in the early 20th century and the Christian Progressive movement.
Isn’t the allure of leftism in all cases the lust for power? The process occurs in steps:
Admittedly, that only answers part of your question. You mentioned liberalism, not socialism. Why is the maintenance of orthodoxy incompatible with statism? (Or is it? Is Mike Huckabee an example of a Big Government Fundamentalist?) I’d guess that statists, being primarily focused on power, are naturally unprincipled, annoyed by people who are not.
I think part of it at least is that Government is the god that betrays. Government makes promises like a god but in the end does not deliver. As the people blur in their minds the purposes of religion and the purposes of government their faith fades as things don’t work out as expected. It is interesting to note that the secularists don’t then blame government for failing but turn on religion and reject that claiming it was religion all along that held them back….