On Friday, NBC News published an opinion piece that mocked white Christians in America, saying that their anxiety over losing dominance in America has “created a nostalgia for the past that has fueled support for Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ agenda.”
Robert P. Jones, the founder of PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) and the author of “The End of White Christian America,” is about to launch his new book, titled, “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. He wrote on the NBC News website in a piece titled, “White Christian America ended in the 2010s,” “Of all the changes to identity and belonging, the century’s second decade has been particularly marked by a religious sea change. After more than two centuries of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance, the United States has moved from being a majority-white Christian nation to one with no single racial and religious majority.”
Jones writes that between 2010 and 2014, the percentage of white Christians in the general population had plunged from 53% to 47%; claiming that in 2019, that figure has dropped to 42%. He continues, “White Christian America’s attraction to Trump has little to do with his personality or character … and everything to do with something more important: their belief that ‘making America great again’ necessarily entails restoring white Christian demographic and political dominance.”
Jones cites a survey by his own group that found majorities of white Christian groups think American culture and way of life has changed for the worse since the 1950’s. He posits, “From the perspective of a healthy democratic society, one of the most alarming developments is that these trends have been compounding the political polarization in the country.”
Jones pontificates, “This demographic and cultural sorting means that our partisan conflicts are increasingly driven not just by political disagreement but by entire worldviews that are rooted in religious, racial and generational values and identities. This arrangement leaves us ill-equipped to deal with a past that cannot be resurrected and to build a new, pluralistic future together.”
Jones concludes, “Here’s hoping that the upcoming decade may find us able to accept and even embrace a future that — while different from our past — is already and inevitably well on its way.”
Jones’ insistence that white Christians wax nostalgic for a bygone era because of their desire for racial dominance ignores a basic fact: it is not a racial concern that motivates Christians to long for the 1950s or vote for a president who defends the rights of religious people, but a fervent desire for the nation to return to Biblical principles undergirding the sanctity of the family and the innocence of children while blocking the concerted attempt by the Left to destroy those principles in the name of “progress.”
The question is not, as leftists would have one believe, simply one of moving backward or forward; it is a question of forward to what and backward to what. Simply to be new and different than what came before has no intrinsic merit of its own.