The Statistic That Explains the Trump Presidency

A new report from the Public Religion Research Institute contains the following remarkable tidbit: “Fewer than one in three (29%) Democrats today are white Christian, compared to half (50%) one decade earlier.”

Part of this decline reflects growing religious and ethnic diversity in America as a whole: White Christians make up 43 percent of the population, down from 57 percent in 2006. It’s conventional wisdom by now that ethnic diversity has contributed to white anxiety and resentment, and ultimately the election of a figure whose most potent political tool is trafficking in that resentment.

But PRRI’s partisan breakdowns, and the addition of data on religious identification, add color to that picture. Even as white Christian identification in the Democratic Party has collapsed, the GOP numbers only ticked down to 73 percent (from 81 percent in 2006). It may be that as the nation grew more diverse overall, rising ethnocultural anxiety prompted white Christians to seek a political vehicle for their identitarian grievances. The Democratic Party, increasingly responsive to its own diverse coalition of identity groups, could not play that role; the Republican party is.

If a white person told you he identified as a Christian during the first term of George W. Bush’s presidency, you wouldn’t be able to predict with much accuracy which party he or she belonged to. A majority of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party would have been made up by people matching that description. Today, you could predict with a high degree of accuracy that that person is a Republican. These data show more clearly than any others to date the way America’s former ethnocultural majority is expressing itself politically like an identity group.

Trump’s demagogic presidency, as well as the Democrats’ increasing absolutism on social and religious issues (a cause and consequence of their white Christian crackup), is likely to widen this divide further. And that means politics could get even uglier in the coming years.

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