Our changing religious landscape
Some of the Southern right wing insist Republican presidents are elected by God and Democrats by the Devil. But how did these characters wind up thinking they are the “God Party” in the first place?
In the early 1800s northern Christians began to oppose slavery on religious grounds. Southern slaveholders countered by showing that in many places in the Old Testament — when read literally, mind you —
God instructs us on how to buy, sell and punish slaves. If God tells us how to regulate slavery, He must surely approve of it, right? Probably for this reason many Southern fundamentalists began to interpret the Scriptures literally: “The Bible says what it means and means what it says.”
After the Civil War the Northern Democrats were able to accept the Southern Democrats’ segregationist policies while still commanding a sizeable share of the Northern vote. But when President Harry Truman integrated the U.S. armed services by presidential decree in 1948, this cozy arrangement began to unravel.
And after the 1954 Brown v Board Supreme Court decision overturned the South’s segregation laws, things really began to heat up. President Lyndon Johnson’s 1960s civil and voting rights legislation sparked a mass exodus of Southern Democratic senators to the GOP and the formerly Democratic “Solid South” quickly became solidly Republican.
But GOP strategists realized their party couldn’t continue to oppose civil rights and retain its Northern and Midwestern support, so they began to include raciallyneutral conservative issues such as restoral of school prayer, anti-abortion, and opposition to gay rights. But although today’s conservative-leaning Supreme Court will probably soon begin hacking away at abortion rights, church-state separation grows even stronger and gays and lesbians are gaining new rights almost daily.
Today Southern fundamentalists and evangelicals vote solidly Republican. This voting bloc includes Baptists, Southern and otherwise, Churches of Christ, Nazarenes, The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and most Pentecostals. Also included is the right-leaning LDS (Mormon) Church, Presbyterian PCA and some conservative Methodist sects. Southern denominations which still tend to lean Democratic include the various African American bodies, many Episcopalians, most Unitarians and many Jews, particularly Reformed Jews.
In their campaign speeches Democratic candidates do not emphasize their religious faith as their Republican counterparts do. This could tend to drive the religious divide even further apart. And many Americans studiously avoid discussing the fact that our country as a whole is becoming less and less religious. More younger Americans today are calling themselves “nones” when questioned about their religious preference. This may necessitate the Republican Party campaigning beyond its traditionally religious base.
The religious faith of Vice PresidentElect Kamala Harris might well embody America’s future religious picture. Raised in a home that accommodated both Christian and Hindu beliefs, she married lawyer Douglas Emhoff, a practicing Jew. Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris identify as Christians — he a Catholic and she a Baptist as was her father.
Although the number of Americans claiming no religion is growing, the majority (65%) still profess some form of Christianity. White Christians, however, are becoming a minority and by mid-century the American Caucasian race itself will be a minority.
In predicting America’s religious future Robert P. Jones, CEO and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, says “The Biden-harris administration will look a lot more like America’s future and TrumpPence a lot more like its past.”