Donald Trump, a 77-year-old Bible salesman from Palm Beach, Florida, has emerged as the nation’s most prominent Christian leader. Trump is running for president as a divinely chosen champion of White Christians, promising to sanctify their grievances, destroy their perceived enemies, bolster their social status, and grant them the power to impose an anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQ, White-centric Christian nationalism from coast to coast. That Trump doesn’t attend church and has obviously never read the book that he hawks for $59.99, seems of interest exclusively to his political opponents.
What might catch the attention of some evangelical conservatives, however, is that Trump’s ostentatious embrace of White Christian militantism coincides with a precipitous decline in religious affiliation in the US. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, one-quarter of Americans in 2023 said they were religiously unaffiliated. “Unaffiliated” is the only religious category experiencing growth. In a single decade, from 2013 to 2023, the percentage of Americans saying that religion is the most important thing, or among the most important things, in their life plummeted to 53% from 72%.
Theres plenty of reasons people are done with organized religion, Trump is merely one of those reasons.
Yeah I’d say he’s more a symptom of the overall issues driving people away from churches.
I am as anti Trump as the next guy, I think anyone that wants to follow that political ideology has lost their minds … but I was thinking the same thing about the reasons why people are moving away from religion … It was happening anyway … “correlation does not imply causation”
It’s just a continuation of the John Birch society and their ilk, whether they realize it or no
I doubt Trump is even a major one. It’s probably a much bigger factor that baby boomers are dying off and boomers are much more religious than GenX, Millenials, or Gen Z.
So you’re saying that the biggest factor in people leaving religion is people leaving religion?
Less people leaving and more too many people not really signing on in the first place, at least not beyond possibly being forced to attend as kids. Combine that with the baby boomers being an unusually large generation (hence the name) and in the process of dying off, and…
Short version - anything even kinda popular among boomers that isn’t ubiquitous among the following generations is going to decline due to the sheer number of boomers and religion is experiencing a genuine decline in rate of uptake in addition to that effect.
In other words, Trump isn’t causing people to leave religion so much much as people aren’t really leaving religion so much as not really joining up in earnest while the existing flock slowly dies off.
The mixing of politics and religion is one of the big reasons.
For me, the way churches and church people have treated the pandemic was absolutely disgusting. They preach about loving each other, but showed a complete lack of empathy towards vulnerable people by continuing to hold services despite the risks involved. Also, most people in church were either wearing masks under their chin, some not wearing one at all. I got covid from church.
Working in a restaurant shows how disgusting Christans are. The Sunday brunch/lunch crowd are rude, impatient, dirty, and tip poorly. They come from a place where they’re ostensibly being told to love everyone and then forget everything before they get in their car.
They continued to hold services because theyre a business first and foremost, and shuttering the business temporarily meant shuttering forever.
Yeah I’d probably still be catholic if they were cool with queer people and women.