Newsweek: Evangelical Christians Time as a Major Political Force Is Coming to an End

Newsweek: Evangelical Christians Helped Elect Donald Trump, But Their Time as a Major Political Force Is Coming to an End RULES: Prove that evangelicals are worthy of the cloth that they wear. (Watch a film called "Spotlight" as it will help you with your decision even though if you were to read the bible, The god character portrayed in it is pure horrifying terror that creates suffering and pain and onbiously loves it. dsjpk5 will not be allowed to vote in the voting process. Alex Camire left the church a few months before his pastor announced from the pulpit that the election of Donald Trump was "a miracle of the Lord. "The 29-year-old Connecticut social worker had been raised in the evangelical tradition; his parents were married in it. But Camire"s faith had started to fail a decade earlier when his church deemed his mother"s alcoholism"and his parents" subsequent divorce"a sin. Later, A secular college education taught him that "the world""the community outside the church"wasn"t going to drag him into a cesspool of sex and drugs, As he"d been taught from childhood. His pastor"s outspoken support of Trump convinced him he"d made the right decision. Californian Jason Desautels similarly began to doubt his faith as a teen. In the week after the Oklahoma City bombing, His church"s minister railed against "sand people" and Muslims. "When it came out that the bomber was a white nationalist, He didn"t apologize or even say anything, " Desautels recalls. "And the adults seemed to be all fine with it. That planted the seed. " Later, As an Army infantryman in Iraq, Desautels, Now 39, Moved further from the church. "I was in the land of Father Abraham, " he says. "I had this weird spiritual moment when I realized that these families had lived in this neighborhood for longer than America had been a nation, And here we were telling them what to do. " He cut ties completely with his church after his sister came out as gay and felt she had to apologize to their parents. Blake Chastain, 35, Entered Indiana Wesleyan University the week of 9/11, With hopes of graduating from the seminary. Instead, He began to fall away from the church when he couldn"t reconcile what he was learning in Bible study with his professor"s support for the Iraq War. "Conservative Christianity, " he says, "was at odds with the teachings in the Bible. " He left and started writing and producing his own podcast. Its name: Exvangelical. All three men are on the front lines of a growing movement among millennials that is reshaping the evangelical church and the nation"s political landscape. Since the 1970s, White evangelicals have formed the backbone of the Republican base. But as younger members reject the vitriolic partisanship of the Trump era and leave the church, That base is getting smaller and older. The numbers are stark: Twenty years ago, Just 46 percent of white evangelical Protestants were older than 50; now, 62 percent are above 50. The median age of white evangelicals is 55. Only 10 percent of Americans under 30 identify as white evangelicals. The exodus of youth is so swift that demographers now predict that evangelicals will likely cease being a major political force in presidential elections by 2024. And the cracks are already showing In the 2018 midterms, Exit polls showed, White evangelicals backed Republicans by 75 to 22 percent, While the rest of the voting population favored Democrats 66 to 32 percent. But evangelicals were slightly less likely to support House Republicans in 2018 than they were to support Trump in 2016"which may have contributed to the Democrats" pickup of House seats. Trump"s support actually declined more among white evangelical men than women. The 11-point gender gap between evangelical men and women from 2016 shrank to 6 in the midterms. To be sure, Evangelical Christians have been rewarded for their support of Trump after enduring eight years wandering in Barack Obama"s political desert. They have two new conservative Supreme Court justices, And there have been nine self-professed evangelical Cabinet members, Plus a flurry of laws and executive orders clamping down on gender roles, Abortion and LGBTQ rights. But experts say this may represent the last bounty for a waning political power. Unlike their parents, The younger generation is not animated by the culture wars; many are pushing for social justice for migrants and LGBTQ people and campaigning against mass incarceration"positions more in line with the Democratic Party. The result is a shrinking conservative bloc, Something that could weaken white Christian political power"and, Consequently, A Republican Party that has staked its future on its alliance with the religious right. It"s a conundrum that the father of modern GOP conservatism, Barry Goldwater, Predicted in 1994: "Mark my word, If and when these preachers get control of the party, And they"re sure trying to do so, It"s going to be a terrible damn problem. " The End of the Alliance? The association of the religious right and the Republican Party has its roots in the 1954 Supreme Court ruling Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka, After which white Southerners began to flee public schools following forced desegregation. They opened so-called segregation academies: religious schools that were tax-exempt. When the IRS came after evangelical colleges like Bob Jones University, Which officially prohibited interracial dating, The schools were faced with losing their tax-exempt status. That would have meant financial doom. But a Republican activist named Paul Weyrich"with patronage from Western segregationist beer billionaire Joseph Coors"forged alliances with Southern religious leaders like Jerry Falwell and successfully lobbied to soften IRS enforcement. The Moral Majority was born, And, In 1980, It announced itself as a political force by helping put Ronald Reagan in the White House. Republican strategists used the issues of abortion and gay marriage to cement the union and drive right-leaning Christians into the voting booth. The relationship remained strong for decades, With evangelicals becoming a reliable bloc of GOP support. Since 2000, They have regularly made up about a quarter of voters"outperforming their much smaller percentage of the population. And, Despite prognostications from political scientists about the imminent death of the evangelical-Republican partnership, They"ve kept casting ballots. In 2016, They were a key group for Trump; the thrice-married, Foul-mouthed mogul with a history of sexual assault allegations won more than 80 percent of the evangelical vote"besting even George W. Bush, A born-again Christian who spoke openly about his faith. But demographic trends are steadily diluting their outsize clout. Researcher Robert Jones, Author of The End of White Christian America, Has tracked what he calls a "stair-steps downward trajectory of white Christian presence in the electorate. " In 1992, When Bill Clinton was elected, 73 percent of the electorate was white and Christian. By 2012, That number was 53 percent. "If current trends hold steady, 2024 will be a watershed year"the first American election in which white Christian voters do not constitute a majority of voters, " Jones, Who heads the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), Tells Newsweek. Until a decade ago, White evangelicals were the exception, Their numbers holding steady. But their ranks are now dwindling, Driven largely by the youth exodus. According to Jones, White evangelicals constituted 21 percent of the U. S. Population when Obama was elected in 2008. Eight years later, In 2016, That number dropped to 17 percent. Today, They make up 15 percent of Americans. Concerned about the shrinking numbers and the prospect of a lackluster turnout in the midterms, Trump rallied about 100 evangelical supporters in the White House this past summer. If Republicans lose control of Congress, He told them, Democrats "will overturn everything that we"ve done, And they"ll do it quickly and violently. " He pushed pastors to use the power of their pulpits to get more people to the polls. "I hate to say it, " Trump said, "if you were a stock, You"d be, Like, You"re very plateaued. " White evangelical political organizers got the message. Ralph Reed"s Faith & Freedom Coalition pledged to spend $18 million to microtarget 125 million conservative voters before the midterms. Other faith groups engaged in a get-out-the-vote drive across the country. An organization associated with former Arkansas Governor (and Baptist pastor) Mike Huckabee, Called My Faith Votes, Spent $3. 5 million aimed at getting evangelicals to the midterms polls and threw in a Facebook Live session with Duck Dynasty"s Phil Robertson for good measure. The Colorado-based Dr. James Dobson Family Institute ran a national "Pray. Engage. Vote. " initiative in the lead-up to the midterms. The result: White evangelicals made up 26 percent of voters in the November elections, With three-quarters of them casting ballots for Republican House candidates. But that performance will be increasingly difficult to replicate, Jones says. For an analogy, He uses Elisabeth K"bler-Ross"s landmark "stages of grief" experienced by the dying and their loved ones to describe what"s happening to evangelicals and American politics. First comes denial, Then anger, Followed by bargaining, Depression and acceptance. "We are past denial. People see the writing on the wall in terms of demographic change. And that is also why we see immigration taking over and becoming the flagship issue. That and a wall symbolize the resistance to this demographic change, " Jones says. "I think we are somewhere between anger and bargaining. And in many ways, This shotgun marriage between Trump and white evangelicals happened under some duress and is a desperate bargain that you make at the end of life. That is what we"re really seeing here. (The entire article could not fit within the 10, 000 character