Demographics, Democracy, and Destiny: Dr. Robert P. Jones

REV. PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH, HOST:

Doctor Robert P. Jones is founder and president at the Public Religion Research Institute, which has just released its latest Census of American Religion. He's also the author of a growing list of insightful books that draw on both his expertise as a social scientist and as a professor of religious studies. Robby, I love that Eddie Glaude, Jr. calls you “An extraordinary moral force in our country.” That's pretty good.

ROBBY JONES

It's pretty kind. Yes. Generous.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

That's pretty good. The New York Times described your best selling book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future, as full of urgency and insight. That urgency has only increased since you were on The State of Belief talking about this book last year, and you've just released the paperback edition of The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy. And I'm happy that that gives us a chance to get together again on our show. Welcome back.

ROBBY JONES

Thanks. I'm glad to be back.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

All right, can we start with the Census of American Religion? I think this is right on time, because here we are, we are in the final stretch of the endless political election nightmare that is overcoming all of us. And so it's really, actually, helpful to see, get like a snapshot of where we are as a country, religiously, and how that might play out, actually, in some of the decisions, the election decisions, but also future policy realities of our country. So what were some of the highlights, or the things that really made you stand up and say, oh, that’s interesting about The Census of American Religions from the Public Religion Research Institute?

ROBBY JONES

Well, thanks. So this is one of my favorite projects that we do. We do it, basically, every two years. It's a pretty heavy lift. So we base this on years of research. It's 40,000 interviews, fresh every year. And then we kind of go back and look at trends. And so the aggregate is about half a million interviews that we're looking at. It is the largest and most up-to-date analysis of the American religious landscape that's out there. It's a deep dive. You can look, you know, we have national level data, and it's the only place, really, that has up-to-date county-level data. So you can go all the way down to the county level.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

That's incredible.

ROBBY JONES

And look at the religious breaks for your county. So I would say just a couple things off the top: as you know, Paul, we've known each other a while. In 2016, I wrote a book called The End of White Christian America. And part of what I was looking at is using the lens of White Christians in America as one way of tracing the demographic change in the country. So back then, I was using data from 2014 in that book, actually. But already we could see some remarkable sea change.

So we looked at the beginning of, as we turn the 21st century, the country was comfortably majority White and Christian. Even as recently as 2008, the country was 54% White and Christian. When I wrote that 2016 book, that number had dropped to 47. So just in the kind of first two decades of the 21st century, we kind of moved from being a majority White Christian country to one that was no longer a majority White Christian country. And that number has continued to move. It's now 41%.

So if you kind of think about this kind of White, Anglo-saxon, Christian-dominant identity, that group is now only 41% of the country. And I think that's really notable. It explains a lot. Just that one number, I think, explains a lot about kind of White Christian backlash, the desperation, the kind of clinging to a candidate like Trump beyond all logic. And I think that's notable, and it's really all Christian groups.

One more thing I'll say here is that there's no group that has lost more members, has shrunk more as a proportion of the population over the last 20 years, than White evangelical Protestants. They've gone from being nearly a quarter of the country at the turn of the 21st century to now being 13 - That's one-three precent - of the country. They are exactly the same size as the White mainline Protestants, now, who has also been declining, but whose decline has basically leveled off. So that, I think, is notable as well, and something you might not expect from just looking at the headlines.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

Well, this is so interesting, and it makes me think of a lot of things. One thing you said, that it makes no logical sense for people to follow Trump. However, if you think of the logic of him saying, I'm your last hope…

ROBBY JONES

Oh, yeah.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

…And beyond me, there's no hope for you, specifically.

ROBBY JONES

You're not going to have a country.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

That, yeah, you're not going to have a country - that's a very logical decision to say, okay, yeah, you're right. You know, the threat is all around us, and you're the only one who's going to preserve, you know, which is a promise that he can't keep even if he were to win. And it's a grotesque promise to make to begin with, because it devalues the rest of the population.

So I think that that's actually something you've probably watched pretty closely, as someone who comes out of the more conservative Baptist tradition. You're looking around, you’re saying, okay, I see a lot of the people who are my community, or were my community, the way they are reacting in this moment - you can actually see it a little bit more, maybe up close and personal, even with your scientist hat on, than maybe a lot of the population.

ROBBY JONES

Well, I think that’s right. It's certainly personal for me. I mean, as you and many of your listeners may recall, I grew up Southern Baptist in Mississippi. I went to public school, but then I went to a Southern Baptist college, Mississippi College. I went to a Southern Baptist seminary, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. So I've drunk pretty deeply at this well.

I should just clarify, what I meant by kind of defying all logic by, you know, Trump really not fulfilling any of their professed principles that they say they're going to measure candidates by: by their character, by their values, those kinds of things. But I think you're right, there is another kind of logic to it. And that is, I was really struck that when Trump addressed the National Religious Broadcasters earlier this year as kind of one of his big campaign stops in Nashville. And so this is a group of White evangelical, these are people who run the big televangelist networks, Christian radio networks. And he was talking to them.

And what he basically said is, if you elect me, I'm going to give you power like you've never had before. He was saying, I know the numbers are declining, but if you elect me, we're going to bring back our religion, is the way he put it to that group. There's nothing more important. We're going to bring back the churchgoer. We're going to… You know, he's acknowledging the decline and just saying, I'm going to restore you, this 41% of the country - and actually, if he's talking to White evangelicals, it's only 13% of the country - I'm going to kind of give you power, right, over the 87% of the rest of the country.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

Which is kind of the definition of White Christian nationalism. He said, I'm going to fix it for you and you won't have to vote again. It was all very bizarre. And one of the ironies - you may know this better than I, I may be fudging it a little bit. It's a little anecdotal, but also, I think there was some research on it - that one of the ironies of the decline of the evangelical church is that they’ve become so politicized that young people and people who might have other views around, like, the role of LGBTQ people, for instance, they're just leaving because they're like, there's no place for me if I actually… My friends are gay or lesbian or bi or whatever, trans. And yet this church is so anti- that I'm having to choose, and I'm just going to choose my friends. I mean, this seems like. It actually seems like they're self-fulfilling a prophecy of their own demise.

ROBBY JONES

Yeah. I do think it's right to say they're in somewhat of a doom loop with young people. And to say that I'm choosing my friends, another way of saying that is, “I'm choosing love” is another kind of blunt way to say that. And I think that's what we're seeing. I'm choosing love. I'm choosing inclusion. I'm choosing equality. These are the things that I think many young people are saying, because as this group is shrinking, it's also aging. And so that does tell you that they're losing.

So I think the last numbers we looked at, the median age of evangelicals was 54, in a country where the median age is in the mid-forties. And so they're losing young people as they're shrinking. And that's exactly right. This kind of hardening, less room, more rigid. And the lines are really bright. And if you can't toe the line here, you're out. And many younger people are just saying, well, fine, I'm out.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

Yeah, yeah. It's also interesting that there were about, like, ten years there where evangelical was saying, look, we told you your liberal theology would lead to the doom of the mainline Church, and we were right. And your theology, it's all because you don't believe the right way. We're so strong. We're still here. And, you know, it actually turned out that it wasn't a question of theology, it was just a question of, like, what it means that the country is more open, and there's a lot of people who just are saying, I'm out, or I'm finding another way to express my spirituality, or I actually, you know, believe in God, but don't find what I need in the Church. You know, there's lots of ways that this changing demographic has manifested itself, but a more liberal theology was not the prime mover in it.

ROBBY JONES

Yeah, I don't think we're going to see many essays along those lines. These.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

Do you remember that, though?

ROBBY JONES

Oh, yeah, absolutely. That was why strict churches are strong and all of this.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

Yeah, I mean, it was a real moment where I was just like, really? This is what it is?

So talk to us a little bit about what you're finding as far as other religious traditions. Are the numbers rising in other traditions? Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikh, the tradition, or Jewish? Muslim? I'm curious what the census tells us about how we're becoming a more multireligious community. But it doesn't seem like those numbers are exploding the way some people might think they are.

ROBBY JONES

They're not. And again, this is all as a proportion of the population. So you have to remember that the whole population is growing. And what we're basically seeing is that the number of centers, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, you know, other non-Christian religions, is that they're basically keeping pace. So it's a little bit less than one in ten Americans who are in one of those other religious categories that are not Christians.

So in the big picture, if I kind of back up and say, okay, what are we seeing in terms of trends? Within Christianity, we're seeing the shrinking of the White, non-hispanic portion of Christianity, and with other Christian groups actually also kind of holding their own. So African-American Protestants, Latino Protestants, are actually growing a bit, as are AAPI Protestants in the country, and then the non-Christian religions groups kind of holding their own. And if there is one place that's exploding - again, this is not new news, but in our last census, we're up to 27% of the country claiming no religious affiliation at all. And among young people, it's nearly four in ten claiming no religious affiliation.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

That’s so interesting. Nearly twice as many claiming no religion as are claiming the evangelical protestant tradition.

ROBBY JONES

That's exactly right. It is, in fact, twice as many. Yeah. 13% versus 27%.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

Yeah. Really, really interesting. So what does all this mean for your understanding of the 2024 election? You've been watching the two major candidates, how they're talking about religion, who they're reaching out to - did anything come out of this that really made you think, oh, this could make a difference in the 2024 presidential election?

ROBBY JONES

Well, there's some big picture things to say that I think are striking when we kind of look at some of this data through partisan lenses. And essentially what we find is that the Republican Party, as the country is becoming more racially and religiously diverse, the Republican Party is not, essentially. I mean, they've moved very, very little. Back in 2013, three quarters of self-identified Republicans were White and Christian. Today, it's 70% White and Christian. This is in a country, remember, that it's only 41% White and Christian.

The number of Democrats has gone from about a third White and  Christian down to about a quarter White and Christian. So that, I think, just so explains the appeal of White Christian nationalism inside the Republican party and as the engine of the MAGA movement, because the party itself has essentially just become this White Christian party that's looking out for White Christian interests.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

White Christian as defined in a very particular way. You and I both know that it's a certain kind of whiteness leading the Christian, and there's lots of different ways to be White and Christian in the world. But this is a very particular understanding of White Christianity, which has lots of trappings with it. And we see those in the policy proposals, as they are, of the Republican Party and the platform.

ROBBY JONES

And this is why you'll see much more conversation in the party platform, much more conversation in Trump's campaign speeches, about immigration than you are, say, about some traditional culture war issue like a same-sex marriage or abortion. You're going to hear him talking much more about immigration because it really is about protecting this vision of a White Christian America, and appealing to people's worst fears about immigration, is one way of really stoking that fire.

But one other thing I'll say, though, about this, again, if we take a long view here, it is notable that if you, one of my favorite charts in the new report is, we looked at the racial and religious affiliation of age groups, here. And you can, again, you can just see across the age groups, the younger you go, the fewer White Christians there are in that age group. The non-White Christian group expands. The group of non-Christian religious Americans expands slightly, as well. The number of unaffiliated expands, the younger you go.

And then we took that and we plotted the kind of Democratic coalition and the Republican coalition just to see kind of where they fit in the age group cohorts. And essentially what it shows you so clearly is that the Democratic Party today, in terms of their religious and racial makeup, looks about like 18-year-old America. Right? That's who they look like. If you try to match the Republican coalition by racial and religious makeup, they look about like 70-year-old America.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

Wow. That’s wild!

ROBBY JONES

So, I mean, think about a crystal ball here and think about the future. The Republican Party is really an outlier here. I mean, they really are, the party that looks like America did in 1950.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

Hence the slogan.

One of the things that I think is so remarkable about this, and I do hope people really will dive in to the census that PRRI has done, it's really an incredible amount of work and incredible contribution. And if people want to go directly to the census, do you have a specific website for that, or should they just go to the PRRI.org?

ROBBY JONES

Yeah, I think that's the easiest, it's right on the homepage, PRRI.org. You'll see it.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

You know, county by county is incredible. And so, what does that look like? We tend to think of these big, blocky maps, but you're going, really, down to the local level. What are some revelations around religious America down at the kind of micro, neighbor-to-neighbor level?

ROBBY JONES

I'm really excited and proud of this piece. The first time we ever did this was in 2020. And it really, again, involves aggregating years and years of data, nearly half a million interviews, and then a lot of pretty sophisticated statistical analysis to get the county estimates correct, even with that many interviews.

So just a couple things. Since we're here on Interfaith Alliance, we'll talk about religious diversity. One fun measure we have is what we call the religious diversity index, that we can look down by county. And so what it measures is how diverse by race and religion every county is. And so it's a score from like zero to one. Essentially the way to understand this is if there was a county that said, okay, the entire county was made up of one religion or one religious group. Let's say like an entire county made up of White evangelical Protestants. That county would get a score of zero. But a score of one would mean that, every religious group in the county was of equal size. So there's not a dominant religious group in that country.

So on the whole, the composite score of the country is 0.6. So kind of leaning more toward the diverse side than the homogeneous side. And what's interesting for me, just kind of personal biography here, is that my home state of Mississippi is the state that has the most counties that are the least religiously diverse. About half of the counties that are on the top ten list are in Mississippi. But I currently live in Montgomery County, Maryland, which I am proud to say tops the list as the most religiously diverse county in the country. The other ones are in New York and Pennsylvania, and some on the west coast, California as well.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

But I think .6 is actually really interesting that you're saying, close to half, or maybe you're saying even more than half. do have representatives from a wide variety of religious traditions of counties in America. I find that surprising that there's that much diversity, because you think of rural counties and they're very... You think of them as being very homogeneous, but your research shows that there's actual diversity kind of all over the country, and not just in the Marylands and the New Yorks and the San Franciscos, but actually in rural counties, potentially, as well.

ROBBY JONES

Yeah, a lot of rural counties. I mean, if you look at the least diverse ones, they basically are the deep south and kind of up the Appalachian mountains, through Kentucky and West Virginia. But outside of there, yeah, even in places like Nebraska or Wisconsin or Pennsylvania or places that you think – Utah. There's a reasonable amount of diversity even in places where you think of as kind of larger rural counties.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

One of the things you've talked about recently is the growing reality of interfaith families. And I am proud of inheritor of an interfaith family. My grandparents were, I would say, an early interfaith family. And what does that mean? Like, what is your take on this? We talk about, there's also interracial couples, but interfaith couples are very interesting. And it's curious, you know, how do you, how you navigate that, and what that indicates for a broader religious demographic country. I probably have this wrong, you're going to correct me. Like, close to a fifth of America are involved in some kind of interfaith family. Is it that high or…

ROBBY JONES

Yeah, that's right. When we've asked about this - and the way we ask about it at PRRI, it is designed to kind of get at, we didn't want to measure Methodists married to Presbyterians. We want to really think about people who are really crossing bigger lines than that. And the way we've asked it in surveys is to say, like, is your partner or spouse a follower of a different religion than you? So that's the way we pass it.

And people still can interpret that, but unlikely they're going to use that to say, yeah, I'm a Methodist and they're a Baptist. So, yes, it's more likely to be across religious line, bigger religious line. So we ask it that way. It's 17%. So nearly one in five Americans who are currently, you know, married or living with a partner say their spouse or partner is a different religion than them. So that's actually quite a lot of people. One in five Americans. And that, I think that's also part of the kind of churn in the religious landscape, the continued diversification of it. It just means that people are more likely to rub shoulders with, be in schools with, be in workplaces with, people who share a different faith from them.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

Yeah, I mean, we're seeing it play out even in this election at the DNC, it was a major moment when the Second Gentleman said that Vice President Harris helped him be a better Jew, even though she is a Christian. And I think the same thing has been offered on the JD Vance side - although he said, one of those unfortunate moments where he said, even though she's not White, she's great - or something like that. I know he didn't mean it like that, but it was just like, you don't say that and then “but” - when you're talking, responding to Nick Fuentes, who's avowed, basically, a White fascist.

So I am curious, like, how do you imagine, if you were advising either of the campaigns, what would be the advice there?

ROBBY JONES

Well, again, I think this is interesting. This is the American reality. Not to mention that we had Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, who are mixed race candidates. And so that's also a reality in America. And I think that sort of this kind of blending of racial and religious identities, the more complex… This is the way that most Americans are actually navigating their lives. It doesn't look like this kind of hierarchical, patriarchal, homogeneous, white picket fence and like one race where, you know, the sort of traditional man and woman marriage who all lives in a neighborhood where all the people look like them, and all the people their kids go to school with look like them. Like, that's not the reality that most Americans are living with today, whatever mythology is sort of out there. So I think that we're just seeing it come in more public, symbolic ways that we're seeing at the top of these tickets, even on the Republican side. And the Republican side, I should say, Republicans are much less likely than Democrats to be in interfaith marriages.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

Oh, that's interesting.

ROBBY JONES

Yeah. So Democrats, it's 21% of Democrats and only 13% of Republicans who say that their partner is a different religion than them.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

There is something about, I don't want to make too much of this, but an idea of what does it mean, the purity. There's something in this White Christian nationalist idea of purity. And what does it mean to not… We've heard it from Trump, he's talked about poisoning the bloodstream, all this kind of stuff. What does he mean by pure? What is it? And I do think that there's an unfortunate, really dangerous kind of racial and religious purity that goes back. I mean, if you look at the laws against interracial marriage, those were grounded, at the time, in what people understood to be bible mandates that there was not to be interracial marriages. And they felt as strong about it as they do about anti-gay marriage today. Anyway, I just wonder if we're not dealing with some of the residuals of those kind of ideas.

ROBBY JONES

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think we see it in, like, Trump's awkward comments about Kamala Harris's race. That she suddenly turned Black. Or even his phrase that immigrants are coming to take Black jobs. Like, you know, there's these hard categories in his head, just kind of the idea that, you know, somebody could be mixed race or are in an interfaith relationship and have an interfaith family where their kids might be both religions. This explodes that worldview. And I think you're right. It's about purity. It's about bright lines, set categories.

But I think the other thing that always goes with those kinds of concepts of purity is that people have a place in the hierarchy, and they should stay in their place. And it's always White, straight men at the top of those hierarchies. And so I think that's also part of that worldview is, if you go with a kind of fluid identity. Well, how are you going to know where people fit in the hierarchy? Like, you can't.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

Right. Have you heard that someone put a beat behind Black jobs? Michelle Obama's... It's so good.

ROBBY JONES

I did love that line, though. Like one of the Black jobs is the presidency.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

It was so good. I think someone put a beat behind it and it's like, become a little bit of a, I think the kids say, bop. So, you know, you've gone through this before, but here we are. We're coming down the home stretch of 2024 election. You've just released this census. You have paperback of your great book, Hidden Roots of White Supremacy. What gives Robby Jones hope today?

ROBBY JONES

Well, I often think back to those groups of people working on the ground in Tulsa and Duluth and in the delta of Mississippi. And when I see some of these headlines and things look kind of grim, I do think, okay, yeah, but, like, there are these little pockets, right? And you see this, too, I'm sure, with work at the Interfaith Alliance, right, and places like Alabama and Texas - and not places you would expect - there are people standing up for equality, for justice, for love, for inclusion. Like all these principles, right. They're going to make our country a better place. They don't always get the headline. They don't always get like the news item, but I think it's actually happening and taking hold in ways. And I think at the end of the day, it's those local movements and communities that are getting built around these movements that are going to carry the country forward.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

Okay, one question that is always there. You've alluded to it, but it, you know, it is kind of the question when you do a census like this is what do the nones look like, the n-o-n-e-s? And what does that indicate for a country around the question of what it means to be a multireligious country? Do we include nones in that? Are they their own category? Like, what do we do? I mean, I'll say from an organizational standpoint of iInterfaith Alliance, we do try, in our messaging, to include people of diverse faiths and beliefs. And with the beliefs, you can have lots of beliefs, but not be associated with a religious tradition. And so we're trying to imagine a future for Interfaith Alliance where we intentionally - and we already do it with some organizations - what does it look like to have the nones truly be a part of the broader conversation around religion and spirituality in America?

ROBBY JONES

Well, it should be obvious. If they make up 27% of the country, that's more than one in four Americans. You can't leave people who don't claim a religious affiliation out of anything, right? I mean, they are there one in four citizens in the country. So I think that's the first thing to say. They are, in fact, bigger than most of the other religious groups, or they're sort of bigger than any of the other single religious groups that we have. Bigger than White Evangelicals, bigger than White mainline Protestants, bigger than Catholics. Even if you put both Latino Catholics and white Catholics together, they outnumber that group. So, you know, one way of saying it like, bluntly, is if we look at the religious landscape in America, those claiming no religious affiliation are the biggest piece of the pie in that pie chart. So that's, like, really important.

They're also fairly distributed around the country. Now, there are places where they are more concentrated, like in the mountain west and west coast and up in New England, they're more concentrated, but they're like all over the place. So you kind of go to even somewhere like in Madison County, Mississippi, where my parents now live, that's right outside of Jackson, it's 19% of Madison County, Mississippi, are religiously unaffiliated folks. So I think that's the first thing to say.

And then the other thing to say is this, that group are people that when we ask them what their religion is and we give them a whole list of things they can pick from, they either they say none of those, like nothing in particular, or they say they're atheists or are agnostic. That's the kind of definition of unaffiliated in the surveys. So, you know, it doesn't mean they don't have any beliefs at all. It doesn't mean that they don't pray like we do. Measures, I don't have the number off the top of my head, but, you know, a non or a non-negligible minority of them sort of say, like, they even attend religious services from time to time. Right. So they're not completely devoid of kind of religious practices or certainly not of beliefs or here, but they're just, like, not connected to the kind of institutional religions and won't and don't claim the label, like, of any of the kind of traditional religious groups that we typically measure.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

Well, it's interesting, you know, they're also nothing organized, particularly. So there's groups like, you know, the Secular Coalition and the American Atheists and the Humanists, but preeminently, they can't necessarily, like, you know, rally, you know, millions to their cause because they represent broadly the idea, but they, you know, this. I think they're trying to figure out how they can be more representative, but they're more representative of an idea than actually being able to distribute through a network of churches like some Christian. So it's a different understanding of what it means to be organized around the lack of beliefs or singular beliefs, the way that religious traditions, and specifically through congregational means or other hierarchies, they are determinedly non hierarchical.

ROBBY JONES

Yeah, that's right. And there's just not the institutional infrastructure out there in the same way there is for churches for the most obvious of reasons, as you said.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

So there's a new afterword for your book, Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future. What reflections were you able to include in the paperback that weren't in the hardcover when it came out?

ROBBY JONES

I was really happy to be able to write a short piece at the end of the paperback and it’s included in the new afterword. And what I wanted to do there is to say, okay, like, I've done this kind of heavy lifting historical work in the book, but how does that historical work connect to, really, right where we are today, the 2024 election, the kind of dynamics we're seeing on the ground? And so what I tried to do is basically connect 500 years of history to the contemporary phenomenon of White Christian nationalism. How does that show up in the current phenomenon that we're experiencing?

And one of the things I was able to do, using some PRI data, was take a look at the correlation between support for Christian nationalism and a vote for Trump at the state level. So not just at the national level, where you can see the correlations pretty strongly at the national level. The more you support Christian nationalism, the more likely you were to support Trump. But I wanted to see if that held, particularly among White Americans, all the way down to the state level. And it was quite shocking.

When I charted this out, I actually had to have them run the calculations again, because I thought, like, it was too clean a chart to be right. And so we ran them again, and sure enough, but it basically is a textbook example, we did this scatter plot where there's one dot for each state. The x axis is support for Christian nationalism, the y axis is support for Trump. So we plotted every state by how highly that state’s White citizens voted for Trump, and how much they support Christian nationalism. And it forms an almost straight line. That scatter plot is like something you'd see in a statistical textbook, showing an almost perfect correlation between two things all the way down to the state level.

So my home state of Mississippi is one of the states that has the highest support for Christian nationalism. It is also the highest support for Trump. States like Washington, Massachusetts, down on the low end, low support for Christian nationalism, low support for Trump. And so, like, just this one attribute, you can just see how powerful it is for fueling the MAGA movement. Again, not just at the national level, but it's driving White voters all the way down in every state in the country.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

What effect has Trump himself and his rhetoric and the way he's framed what he represents - how has that intersected with the consolidation and clarifying of Christian nationalism? We talk a lot about Christian nationalists’ support of Trump, but what role, is there any way to determine what role Trump himself in the way he's defined the issues, the way he's defined the stakes, has actually impacted the growth of Christian nationalism in our time?

ROBBY JONES

Well, I think what he's done is made it just more explicit. So it's important to remember that these same things that we are calling christian nationalism today, we're animating the christian right in the eighties and nineties. Right..

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

You could even argue back to 1920s and earlier, pre civil war, you know. so, yeah, I see what you're saying.

ROBBY JONES

But certainly with the modern Republican party, it begins after the Civil Rights movement. Right? So the great White flight of Christians, White Christians from the Democratic party to the Republican party happens not because of abortion. It happens because of the Civil Rights Movement. And when the Democratic party became party of civil rights, White Christians left in droves. By the time we get to Reagan, they are solidly Republicans. And they have been ever since.

That's the kind of backstory here. And it really has been this engine of, really, this kind of White Christian country. It's our country that's been taking the thrust of all of that. Now they've had this other abortion line of talking that I think has been more palatable to talk about publicly than the explicitly racist agenda. But that racist agenda has always been there. And I think Trump has just ripped the cover off of that in many ways. Right. He's flip-flopping on abortion. It's not hurting his support among White Christians who say that's the most… Like, their leaders say that's the most important issue to them.

But what is he talking about all the time? He's talking about immigration and brown people invading the country. That's what he's talking about. And that's what's really the glue that I think binds them together. And so what I think he's done is, there was a, I think it was a time, even through the Bush years, where there was a sense among conservative Christians that, okay, we're going to have to kind of come along with equality of African-Americans. We're probably going to have to come along with equality for LGBTQ people right in the country. And there was a kind of a reluctant coming along, and I think Trump has said like, oh, no, you don't. We do not have to come along here at all. And, in fact, we can resist it and take the country back. And I think that's been the real difference. And his real mark on the Republican Party has just been this kind of militant move back to this nostalgic 1950s America and really just saying, we will take the country back to that place.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

That is so interesting.

So let's talk for a second about your paperback. Congratulations. Your New York Times bestseller The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future. This is beautiful. We talked about this book in a show earlier when it first came out, and this is just a really great, like, the way you put the book together, three areas of the country that not only have terrible histories of anti-Black violence, but also anti-Native American violence, but also a concerted effort to figure out how to move forward from those historic events and move into a future that doesn't erase it, but actually is informed by it and continues to move forward. It was a great idea. And how does it hold up to your own imagination a year later?

ROBBY JONES

Well, that's a lovely summary of the book. Yeah, thanks for that. So this was a book I think I had to write to fill in the gaps in my own education, really. And I say this with a PhD in Religious Studies, a seminary degree, and there were just so many things and dots I hadn't connected and, you know, missing pieces, particularly around indigenous history. Just, it never was part of my kind of formal education. And needing to kind of connect those dots was really what this book was about.

So that still feels like one of the more important things to do there was to kind of connect the kind of racial violence that has been more at the forefront of our national conversation against African Americans, but to connect that to this longer history there. And one of the reasons for doing that is that it points to the same place where the problem is. And that problem has been among us - and I say us, we White Christians have been the source of much of the problem. Our own theology has justified the kind of genocide, removal of indigenous people. Our own theology has justified slavery. We've never really fully dealt with the implications of that. Even with our acknowledgments, I mean, I think we're only scratching the surface to realizing what that means not only for our history, but, like, for us and how our theology has kind of developed going forward.

So I'm still happy about that and feel like that's been a really important thing, just that piece of the kind of theological work. But as you said, the other piece that I think is sometimes hard - it feels, sometimes, easy to get discouraged when you see so many attacks on just telling the truth about that history, but by knowing that there are these groups on the ground…

And these are not bastions of liberalism. I mean, I looked at Oklahoma, which is the only state, I think, in both 2016 and 2020, that every county voted for Trump in the entire state. It's a state, also, that public education is under attack and Tulsa. But it's also a state that is struggling mightily and has a group of courageous people who've been working to tell the truth about the Tulsa Race Massacre, and tell the truth about, as we saw in Killers of the Flower Moon, the treatment of the Osage in Oklahoma.

Same is true for Mississippi and for Duluth, Minnesota, the three places that I talked about.

And when I think about that, these are ordinary people without a lot of resources who just said, we have to tell the truth, and we want to hand, like a less fraught community, a less divided community, a less fraught community, and a community that has healed, to the next generation. And we're going to be the bridge to do that work. I mean, that still, I think, gives me hope and kind of keeps me going when I'm feeling kind of discouraged.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

Yeah, well, it's so interesting, the mentality that's behind the kind of book censorship and the anti-CRT, which is ridiculous, because it's as if CRT, this race theory, was being taught in elementary school. It's like a graduate school idea, but the idea that teaching any history around the reality of our country somehow leads to more division and more animosity - maybe, if there's no next step. But I think what you are offering here is that, actually, that's just the first step. And then there's acknowledging some of this, and then really coming together and imagining, what does our future look like, together.

And I think that's the reason it's so discouraging when you see places like Florida, others, many other states, that are really legislating against the teaching of real history. It seems at counter purposes of what the opportunity that your book describes - which is no easy fix, but it is a way forward, as you say, to leave a legacy that makes it better for the future for all people. And I think that feels really important.

If you were to project into the future, kind of back into the census question, do you feel like these trends will hold? I know there's no crystal ball, but what do you imagine? Kind of a 2150, what do we look like? And I think the corollary question is, how have we created a body politic that will be able to make that positive for everyone?

ROBBY JONES

Well, here's what I hope. I hope that we'll look back at this Trump era as a fever that finally broke. Really, what we're seeing here is a last desperate stand by a group of fearful, conservative White Christians who are worried about living in a world that they're no longer the dominant force in. But I think that if we get past this kind of transitional period - remember, it was just 20 years ago that the country was still a majority White Christian country. So we are living through this sea change. And it's quite significant. And I think the demographers tend to tell, oh, you know, by in the year 2040, we'll be a majority non-White country. But culturally speaking, it's always been a kind of ethno-religious identity that has been the most defended thing. It's not just whiteness. It's White Christian identity that has been defended as a kind of dominant thing. That's about power. Then those two things together, that's always kind of defended the power. And so I think that's what we're living through.

I hope that we'll kind of look back and the fever will have broken. I don't think these attacks on history and textbooks will hold. I think this is a kind of like, maybe, death rattle flailing around, trying to find anything that will stick, when you can see the sun setting on this world that you saw yourself as a part of, if you're kind of White and Christian, and realizing that - a metaphor I use, sometimes, when I'm talking about this is, you know, even when White Christians thought of themselves as generous, I think they thought of themselves as kind of the masters of the table and we're graciously inviting other people to pull up a chair, right. But it's our table and we're sitting at the head, the table and kind of calling the shots and directing things. And realizing that like, no, no, no. No one's going to own the table, and that White Christians are going to pull up a chair alongside everybody else. And have no more at stake than anyone else in the country. And not just because that's the right thing to do. I mean, it is the right thing to do. It's the democratic thing to do. But, you know, they can't even pretend that the demographics are going to give them any reason to have 51% of the say, because they're going to be, you know, 30... I would say, probably, mid-century, I wouldn't doubt it. If white christians are like a third of the country, right. They're right now 41%. They, they're not going away. But, you know, they’ll be a third. So a sizable minority, an important minority, but not at all a group that should pretend, that can even have any pretense of pretending that they are the country, which I think is the line of the Christian Nationalists right now.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH

Dr. Robert P. Jones is founder and president of the Public Religion Research Institute. His books include The End of White Christian America and White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. The latest, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future, has just been published in paper that has just been published in paperback edition. And his substack is whitetoolong.net.

Robby, it is always great to talk to you, and thank you so much for being with us here on The State of Belief.

ROBBY JONES

Oh, thanks. Really lovely to be back.

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