As head of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), Robert P. Jones has abundant data at his fingertips — years of empirical research — when he tells us that white Christians are "principally responsible for Trump's rise and return to power."
Salient facts about the 2024 election as he recounts them:
#Trump #WhiteChristians #WhiteChristianNationalism #PRRI
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https://time.com/7174260/white-christianity-trump-election-essay/
""Because elections are won and lost at the margins in a deeply divided nation such as ours, most of [the post-election] analysis will rightly focus on which subgroups (like Latinos and young men) shifted most significantly away from the Democratic Party’s winning 2020 coalition. But that focus, while strategically important, will obscure the deeper peril facing our nation. Authoritarianism, when it blossoms, emerges from the deeper soil at the center."
"With the Republican presidential candidate regularly spewing racist, misogynistic, & even Nazi ideology (such as claims that immigrants are 'poisoning the blood' of the country), the most remarkable thing about this election is not which groups shifted marginally in his direction, but which groups continued to provide him with supermajority support. Namely, we must talk about how thoroughly Christian nationalism has infected mainstream white Christianity."
"According to the 2024 National Election Pool exit polls, 8 in 10 (81%) white evangelicals once again declared their allegiance to Trump, as did 60% of white Catholics and similar numbers of white non-evangelical Protestants. (Note: While there are no publicly available exit poll numbers for white non-evangelical Protestants, pre-election polling from PRRI suggests 6 in 10 once again supported Trump)."
"Most disturbingly, this time, white Christians, who once proudly called themselves 'values voters,' knew exactly who and what they were voting for. …
Nearly a century ago, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement coopted the German Evangelical Church."
"Today we are seeing similar uses of the Orthodox Christian churches in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Catholic Church in Viktor Orbán’s so-called 'illiberal democracy' in Hungary—contemporary models both Trump and white evangelical leaders have praised."
"Over the last decade, many white Christians have not just selfishly supported a dangerous, narcissistic man who promised to restore their waning influence; they have now willingly blessed the advent of a new American fascism that threatens our democratic future. They are principally responsible for Trump’s rise and return to power—and for everything that is coming for all of us in its wake."
What a shameful legacy.
