PRRI's Census of American Religion; Authoritarianism; Election subversion

 This month the Public Religion Research Institute release its 2023 Census of American Religion, the most comprehensive such study we get. It's an incredible resource, and you can get down to the level of your own county (or any other) through the website. 

What'd we learn from this work? It really matters how you slice the American public. Like many pollsters, PRRI breaks White Christians into three basic groups: Mainline Protestants, Evangelical Protestants, and Roman Catholics. (Orthodox Christians and LDS believers are not bunched by race.) These findings jump out at me.

• Broken down this way, the largest religious affiliation is "None" (27%).
  
• Only 41 percent of Americans today identify as White Christians in this model. (This includes Orthodox and LDS.) In 2006 that number was 60 percent.
  
• Catholics, Evangelicals, and Mainliners have roughly the same numbers now. Evangelicals have been in rapid decline, while Mainliners are really old but holding steady.
• Non-White Christians are basically holding steady or growing due to immigration. 
• Black and Hispanic Americans are the most religious in terms of affiliation.

There's a political skew too. Democrats are far more religiously diverse than Republicans, who track as old and Christian. According to PRRI founder Robert Jones, Republicans map on to religion like 70 year-old Americans, while Democrats map onto 18 year-olds. 

Authoritarianism and Religion

PRRI also released "One Leader Under God: The Connection Between Authoritarianism and Christian  

Over 43 percent of Americans score high on their Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale (RWAS). 

Based on the reading I've done, I'll offer a few observations here.

• Authoritarian sentiment grows under two predictable conditions: rapid social change and marked economic inequality. The United States is a model candidate in those respects.
  
• This explains why Donald Trump has a firm baseline of support. His followers like the very things his opponents hate. They will not leave him. Even when Trump lies and terrorizes a city like Springfield, OH, they like it. Even when he blames Jews for his potential loss, they like it.
  
• Christians are more likely than not to have high RWAS scores. Black Christians are 44 percent likely. Non-Christians are unlikely (26% of nones, 27% of Jews).
  

Trunp's followers only trust a very few sources of news, and Trump is #1. That means they may not even know when he's particularly terrible.

Christian nationalism and New Apostolic Reformation beliefs correlate strongly to authoritarian attitudes. Also, NAR beliefs have spread broadly.

• "Two-thirds of Republicans (65%) agree that “the final battle between good and evil is upon us, and Christians should stand firm with the full armor of God,” compared with 39% of independents, and 32% of Democrats. More than eight in ten Christian nationalists (84%) hold this apocalyptic position, as do 70% of Americans with high RWAS scores and 61% of those with high CRAS scores."
• "Just one in four Americans (25%) believe that 'God wants Christians to take control of the "‘7 mountains’" of society,” including 39% of Republicans, 18% of independents, and 17% of Democrats, while fewer than two in ten Americans (17%) believe that America was chosen by God to be a new promised land for European Christians (30% of Republicans, 15% of independents, and 8% of Democrats)." That promised land for European Christians gets at both Christian nationalism and racism.
• "Most Americans reject patriarchal views that defend traditional gender roles; however, Republicans and Christian nationalists are more likely than others to support these views."
• "Republicans are more likely than independents and Democrats to agree that patriots may have to resort to violence (27%, 15%, and 8%, respectively); Americans need to ensure the rightful leader takes office, even with violence (24%, 15%, and 10%, respectively); and that armed citizens are needed as poll watchers (24%, 10%, and 10%, respectively). Republicans with favorable views of Trump are more likely to agree with all three statements (32%, 27%, and 28%, respectively)."

That's where we are, friends.  

Miscellaneous

1. The racism is intentional. And they're doubling down. J. D. Vance today on Haitians in Springfield, Ohio: "I'm still gonna call them an illegal alien." (But they have legal documentation.)

2. Election subversion is already underway. In 2020 it was haphaard. Now it is planned and organized. 

• Texas has eliminated 500,000 voters from the rolls.
• The Nebraska legislature is considering changing their electoral college contribution just because it's possible that 1 electoral college vote, based in Omaha, could win the election for Harris. 
• Georgia's Board of Elections, dominated by three election deniers, is changing the rules so that every ballot is counted by hand. (Hint: what the GOP wants to do is slow down the count so that states can fail the deadine and have their electoral college votes contested.) 
• More than 10,000 voting locations in red state Black/Latino neighborhoods have been closed. 
• Right now NAR leaders are urging followers to register as poll watchers and election workers. 

(Those first four bullet points were gleaned from Qarim Rashid.) 

3. Possibly good election news for Democrats--but horrible news altogether: North Carolina GOP gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson has a full-blown scandal on his hands. The uber-"Christian" candidate has an online record of referring to himself as a "black Nazi," defending slavery, and sharing his proclivity for kinky online sex. Oopsie. We don't know how this will turn out, but it can't be good for Donald Trump.

In the Blood: Political Violence, Trump, and the American Right

This week Donald Trump shared a video that included the image of Joe Biden hog tied in the bed of a pickup truck. He has also posted photographs of the daughter of the judge presiding over his criminal case in New York--a direct death threat. When Paul Pelosi was attacked with a hammer and nearly killed, Trump joked about it. Somehow we seem to shrug off these attacks on public order.

It's been about 2-1/2 years since I used this blog space, and I'm surprised to see that the most recent post here involved political violence in Trumpism. That post noted that violent threats against members of Congress had increased tenfold between Trump's election and the 2021 election. For his part, Trump frequently posts imagery depicting violence against his opponents.

Over the past 10-15 years, the Republican Party and its media allies have embraced political violence in ways that have brought us to this place. We already have political violence in the United States. We have always had political violence in this country. But we haven't seen a presidential candidate/former president promote domestic terrorism. The wave is surging. Just last week we had violent threats directed toward public library workers, Lancaster Pride volunteers, and newspaper employees here in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. But the radicalization in the Republican ecosystem has been growing for quite a long time. And the current wave of violence has a pattern, according to Lancaster's local paper:

First, an issue straddling cultural and political divides is brought to the public’s attention, sometimes by a politician or community leader. Then, activists use social media to highlight the controversy, employing falsehoods, exaggerations and wild theories to heighten the tension. As support and opposition reach a fever pitch, protests are planned, culminating in a threat of violence.

I first noticed this pattern on the fringes of the extreme right in the wake of the 1993 raid of a Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. The Branch Davidians were heavily armed, and federal authorities had received reports of sexual abuse against minors within their compound. Four federal agents died in a protracted siege of the compound, while 82 Branch Davidians, many of them children, died as a result of the siege and the fire that broke out after authorities launched tear gas into the compound. 

Although later investigations showed that the Branch Davidians themselves either started the fire or fueled it, controversy followed the disaster. The Branch Davidian events fell among a series of armed standoffs between civilians and various authorities, including the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff (3 fatalities) and one involving the Montana Freemen militia in 1996 (no fatalities). But the most telling indication of rising sentiment among the far right was the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, in which Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols killed 168 persons and wounded many more. McVeigh and Nichols intentionally executed the attack on the second anniversary of the Branch Davidian fire. Both were White supremacists who cited Ruby Ridge and Waco as justification for their anti-government activism. 

Clearly something was happening in the militia friendly far right. How much that kind of activism relates to the National Rifle Association's increasing radicalization, I do not know. What had once been a marksmanship and gun safety organization morphed into a profoundly corrupt lobbying wing for the gun industry. I wonder, but don't know, how much of the NRA's transformation aimed to support antidemocratic politics on the right wing.

During the 2010s, however, we saw something new. Republican politicians, bolstered by media like Fox News, responded to Black Lives Matter protests by passing laws making it legally and physically dangerous to participate in public protests. For example, some states passed laws absolving drivers of liability for hitting and injuring protesters on public streets--and continue to do so. How does one interpret such laws as anything other than a license to hurt and kill people who protest?

But at the same time Republicans were restricting the right to assemble, they were also supporting the violent activities of Cliven Bundy, his family, and his associates. In 2014 the Nevada rancher staged an armed standoff after decades of refusing to pay grazing fees on federal land. Fox News, which was quick to label Black Lives Matter protests as criminals, made a hero out of Bundy. Bill O'Reilly described him as "probably ... a hero in many people's eyes because he's standing up against this colossus," meaning the federal government.

In other words, Republicans were making heroes out of people confront federal authorities with weapons. This process was part of a larger development on conservative radio going back to the Clinton presidency, in which hosts invoked the specter of federal agents as "jack-booted thugs." Bundy participated in another standoff in Oregon that led to one death, nearly 30 indictments, and 16 convictions. Apparently armed right wingers are heroes, while unarmed civil protesters are "militants" and "anarchists."

When Donald Trump suggests that his followers could "get tough" against Democrats, he is capitalizing precisely upon this growing embrace of violence on America's right. It was there when "good people" included racists and antisemites in Charlottesville, when "Liberate Michigan" provoked a kidnapping and likely murder plot against that state's governor, and when "will be wild" led his followers to attack police and seek to kill government leaders at the Capitol.

As ordinary citizens, we must kindly confront our Trumpist and apathetic neighbors with this violence. They either aren't alarmed, don't take it seriously, or don't really know. It won't change many minds, but it will help many people think.