Dr. Robert P. Jones on What White Christians Have Wrought in American Politics

This episode of Faithful Politics takes a deep dive into the impact of white Christian nationalism on American democracy with Robert P. Jones, president of PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute). Host Will Wright and Jones analyze the pivotal role white Christians played in the 2024 election, drawing from Jones’s Time Magazine article, “What White Christians Have Wrought,” and his latest book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future. The conversation traces the historical and cultural forces that have shaped white Christian political allegiance, explores the divide between religious and racial groups in voting behavior, and examines how Trump’s continued support reflects deeper systemic challenges. This episode provides a candid look at the intersection of faith, politics, and social identity, highlighting what’s at stake for the future of pluralistic democracy.

• What White Christians Have Wrought: https://time.com/7174260/white-christianity-trump-election-essay/
• Why Christian Democrats Are Seen as the “Wrong Kind” of Christian: https://open.substack.com/pub/faithfulpolitics/p/why-christian-democrats-are-seen?r=1bt7sx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
• The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: and the Path to a Shared American Future: https://a.co/d/3jLsPfQ

Robert P. Jones is the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). He is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future (published September 5, 2023), as well as White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which won a 2021 American Book Award. He is also the author of

Transcript

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Hey, welcome back, Faithful Politics listeners and watchers, if you're watching on a YouTube channel. I'm your political host, Wright, your faithful host, Pastor Josh Bertram can't be here today as he is being a good parent today. But with us, have with us Robbie Jones. He is the president and co-founder of PRRI, which is the Public Religion Research Institute and a leading scholar and commentator on religion and politics. He also writes regularly on politics, culture. and religion for the Atlantic time and religion news service. And we are so happy to have him back with us. So welcome back to the show, Robbie. thanks Will, glad to be here. Yeah, you know, I was really looking forward to having this conversation post-election. The first person we spoke to after the election was Sam Perry. he, I don't know if he made us feel better about the results, but he definitely put it in context. I think that having you on is probably going to help fill out a little bit more of the context of what happened at the most recent election. So I want to... I want to kind of jump right into it and talk a little bit about this article you wrote for Time Magazine called What White Christians Have Wrought. But before we dig into it, help us put this into its proper context about white Christians. why is white Christians kind of the focus of this work, your article, and so on? Yeah. Well, maybe I'll back up just a little bit before I get to that question. And I do want to offer a caution about over reading this election. I think, you know, we have just you know, there's so many people, including me, right, whose day jobs are to analyze, do the postmortems, do the autopsies, analyze every single detail of, you know, the election and try to pick it apart. What happened? Why do we see this? Why do we see that? And that's all like important. Like I said, that is part of my day job at PRI is to do that work. At the same time, I do want to just say upfront, like this election was so close, like the last several major presidential elections we've had, they are all razor thin margins. You know, and so kind of, think remembering that, like, you know, Trump did win the popular vote. And I should just say, like, I also want to celebrate that we are at a place where the election results are not contested. The losers are not saying it was not a free and fair election. The losers are saying we lost. And like that is so important in a democracy for the losers to say, yeah, we lost, right? And so I think we're hearing that. We're not seeing the Democratic Party all across the country saying, no, this was illegitimate. And, you know, we're not seeing that. And so that is something to celebrate. in a democracy, the losers are admitting that they lost. Now, so we're talking about how much did they lose? So it turns out, know, Trump, I think our latest numbers are showing, and we should say that it won't be till January to all the dust settles. We get all the official numbers from every state, the secretaries of state of every, but you know, we know the main contours, but it looks like Trump actually did fall short of 51%. So that's important to remember, right? So this was not a mandate election. This was a squeaker of an election falling short of 51%. So didn't get a majority, right? Self fell just shy of a majority, but he did get more votes than Kamala Harris did, right? And it was enough in the swing States more importantly, the way our electoral college works. But even there, like the other piece of context I want to give is even there, you know, if you gave someone a magic wand and said, here are 233,000 votes. rearrange them however you want on the electoral map, we could have President Kamala Harris. That's the margin in the swing states, right? Even though it looks, you look at those maps, it looks like it was a sweep of the swing states. That's absolutely true. But all of that red on those state maps, mask how tight even those state level, you know, wins were. So in those, those swing states, it really was only 233,000 votes that put him over the, the, and in a country this large, that's amazingly small. margin. The last piece of context I'll get for I get to the White Christian piece is that one of the I think most telling charts I saw actually had nothing to do with the US vote. And it was the Financial Times that put out of all places that put out a chart. And they went back like the last 20 years, looking at the parties in power, and how they fared in each election cycle. And what's notable about 2024 is that because we're coming off of this high inflation cycle, the last few years that had, know, inflation's come down, but prices have not. Many people are hurting economically. And that, it's not just the U S thing. This is a global phenomenon. So turns out that in 2024, every country, every developed country that had a major election, the party in power lost. And most of the time they lost by a lot. And in fact, the margin in the US was smaller than the margin in any other developed country of the party in power losing. So there was just this economic headwind blowing around the world that I think was also just a piece of the puzzle that's hard to, that certainly plays a role. There was a headwind that the party in power Kamal Harris was kind of running against in this election. Having said all of that. The reason why I wrote that piece in Time Magazine called What White Christians Have Wrought is because I was worried that we would miss the forest for the trees and all the kind of minutiae of the, you know, so we're looking at this 4 % here and 2 % there and like, really parsing it very finely. And again, I'm not poo-pooing that work. It's important work to do to really understand how it worked. But the big picture here is The only way that we're even still talking about Donald Trump in 2024 is because of the consistent and unwavering support that white Christian voters have given him ever since Super Tuesday in 2016. Right? So that has been the story. And if there had been any significant movement, right, among white Christians from March of 2016 all the way through today, We would not be talking about Donald Trump today. Yeah, I am curious if like it was was 2016 kind of a turning point for for white Christians. I mean, was it sort of the character of Donald Trump that, you know, that that was really appealing to white Christians? I mean, like, give us some background about like, like, how how do white Christians generally vote in most elections and what was so different about 2016? Yeah. Well, I mean, the other is speaking of the forest for the trees. I mean, the other glaring factor in our politics is how the two political parties have sorted themselves in terms of race and religion. So even let's just kind of get away from the Trump era. Just keep we can go back even further. But if we ask like, how do we get the kind of composition of the political parties that we have today? And unfortunately, in the US, and I do think it's unfortunate that we only have two political parties, right? We only have this kind of binary setup. And it means that people sort themselves onto side A and side B. Right. And there's a particular way in which that has happened. It's not random. It's not liberal conservative, actually, in the U.S. I mean, we think about it that way. And there's some truth to that. But but overwhelmingly, the two parties today have sorted themselves by race and religion. Those are the strongest divider. So today, for example, the country we've talked about this before, but the country is today 41 % white and Christian, right? So if we take all white Christian groups together, Protestant, Catholic, non-denominational, every Orthodox, everyone who's white, non-Hispanic and Christian, that's 41 % of the country. Now that is, just to give you some context, that is down. And that's the change. We were still a majority white Christian country in 2008, as recently as 2008. And it was 54 % in 2008, it's 41 % today. So that tells you where the trends have been going. But here's the thing, the Republican Party today is 70 % white and Christian. Let's kind let that sink in for a minute, right? So the country is 41 % white and Christian. The Republican Party is 70 % white and Christian. The Democratic Party today is about 25 % white and Christian, right? So there is this massive gulf between our two political parties just in terms of their racial and ethnic identity. So once you understand that, like all the kind of divisions are not that surprising, right? And why the divisions are the way they are. But then the historical question is, well, why is that? Like, how do we get here that the party sorted themselves that way? Well, there's really only one defensible answer to that question. And, you know, spoiler alert, it's not abortion and it's not LGBTQ rights. The one issue that gets us there is the Civil Rights Movement of 1964 and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. And to make this kind of really personal, so I'm from the South, right? I grew up in Mississippi. All my extended family, though, is from Georgia. So if you ask me, well, how did your grandparents vote? Well, back in Georgia, where all my grandparents make in Georgia, Bibb County, Georgia, where all my grandparents, you know, and actually. My family goes back there 200 years. So if you said, how did your family from the Civil War to 1980 vote, they were all Democrats, right? They were white Christian Democrats. And the reason they were Democrats is because the Democrat party at that time was the party defending the Confederacy, right? And defending Jim Crow. and defending all the kinds of oppressive policies against African Americans, voter suppression, lynching, all that stuff was like, that was the party that defended that worldview. And they only switched to being out of that party when the Democratic Party became, there was a real sea change in the Democratic Party in the 60s, became the party defending civil rights for African Americans. They were the party that passed. the civil rights acts in 64 and 65. And once that happened, there was a great white Christian flight from the democratic party to the Republican party that solidifies with Reagan in 1980. And it is no exaggeration that from 1980 on, you can describe every presidential election we've had by saying essentially the way the religious landscape looks in America is that white Christians vote for Republican candidates, no matter who they are. And Christians of color, non-Christian religious groups like Jews and Muslims and Hindus, the religiously unaffiliated, essentially everybody else votes for Democratic Party candidates. And it was no different in this election. know, if you, everybody knows white evangelicals voted eight and 10 for Trump and have every time he's been on the ballot, despite everything. But what people forget is that the non-evangelical white Protestants voted majority for Trump, six and 10. Trump, white Catholics voted six and 10 for Trump. Right. And so there is this kind of divide and essentially even he put all white Catholics together, it's two thirds of all white Christians, sorry, white Christians, I should say two thirds of all white Christians voted for Trump, two thirds of Christians of color voted for Harris. Right. And so there's just this massive, massive divide that we're, that we're still living with today. Trump kind of walked onto that stage that was set by that long, long history. And he's been very skilled at exploiting those racial fault lines. Yeah, that's really well said and I can't recommend your book on this topic enough. The hidden roots of... my latest book is The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, where I trace all this history out. Actually, it goes all the way back to before the founding of the country. And it's called The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Paths to a Shared American Future. Yeah, because I remember and I can't remember if you put this in your book, but the significance of the Jimmy Carter presidency, where I mean, here was this like evangelical Democrat from Georgia that actually like was was against abortion even, but didn't have the the large evangelical support. that you would imagine. Could you just talk just a little bit briefly about that for a moment? Well, you know, it's important to know where the breaking point was and why Carter was such a disappointment to white evangelical voters on the whole and why they abandoned him for Reagan. And the biggest answer is that he was for pluralism in the country and he wasn't for a kind of white Christian dominated democracy. so the breaking point, as you said, it wasn't abortion. I mean, he was kind of with them on that issue. The breaking point was that he was for separation of church and state and for religious liberty for all religious Americans and not just for Christians. So when he backed, you know, the kind of moving, kind of striking down a practice of offering Christian prayer in public school, that was a breaking point. And when he backed and this was the other big thing that happened there. You know, the start of the Christian right movement. Again, it wasn't abortion. wasn't LGBTQ rights. was, it was the, the fact that Bob Jones university wanted to hold up its racist policy against interracial dating on campus and still take federal money. And, the federal government said, yeah, no, that runs a foul of the civil rights statutes. And, know, if you don't want to take federal money, sure, you could do that all day long. But if you want to take federal money, You have to abide by the civil rights, you know, statutes. And that was the thing that got Jerry Fultwell fired up and into politics and against Carter and backing Reagan. It was the birth of of the Christian right movement was actually that was defending the right of an evangelical university to be racist. Like that was the birth of the of the Christian right movement. Yeah, it's so fascinating. for those that don't know much about it, again, can't recommend your book enough. I just learned so much. I do want to get back to the white evangelical vote. You said something about eight in 10 evangelicals voted for Trump. Has that? been pretty much static from 2016, 2020, and even like the most recent election. Yeah, it's been, I mean, remarkably steady. It's just given everything. And you can see it even in between the elections. We polled in large surveys all during the year. And I mean, we must have asked the question about Trump favorability a hundred times between 2016 and 2024. the only time... that we have seen Trump's favorability rating go below 50 % among white evangelicals was actually before he got the nomination back in 2015, which was one of the first times we asked about it when he was kind of the rumblings where he was going to run for president, but he hadn't got the nomination. But I think it was in the high 40s at the time. But once he got the nomination in the summer of 2016, heading into the election, just that tight little time from spring to summer, Once he, once he becomes the Republican nominee, his favorability jumps up to around 70 % just in those few months time. And it essentially doesn't move like, like all through, like every time we've asked it, there's this very narrow band. It'll go up and down a little bit, but I don't think we've seen it dip below 60 ever, no matter what's happening in the world. It's been as high as 78. You know, so it's not just vote. mean, it's not just that. So I do want to put like, White evangelicals are not holding their nose and voting for Trump. Like I keep hearing that over and over and over again. That is not the case at all. When we ask about favorability, we ask about alternative candidates from Mike Huckabee, right? A Southern Baptist evangelical, even Ted Cruz when Cruz was running before, like no other alternative, like legitimate evangelical candidate comes anywhere close. Like they want Trump. and have held favorable views of him kind of despite everything. Yeah, I am curious. Do you see the same level of support for other Republican candidates that are on the ballot? Not necessarily presidential, you know, in like, I forgot who's running. I'm drawing a blank right now. a senator, House candidate, Republican, MAGA, like, they tend to get the same level of support that Trump gets? It's certainly at state level. There's more variation though, farther you go down the ticket. you know, and I think that's partially because people actually get to know candidates at the local level in a way they don't at the state level, but certainly for them at Senate races. I mean, there are places where a Senator will outperform Trump, but, but it very few cases where they will like drastically underperform, like they tend to lock in. And this is a part of the, what we're seeing is kind of. the nationalization of even local politics, right? And that's where partisanship has become, I mean, people used to split ticket vote a lot more than they do today. It's more likely straight up and down the ballot, like all the way down to dog catcher, you know, like it really is, we're seeing much less of that. it's just, it's because of the way that, and I should say it's not just polarization, it's negative polarization, right? So what has happened is, Yes, there is a positive attachment, but perhaps even stronger than that is the way. I would say this is this is asymmetrical. It's not the same on both sides, particularly the way that Republicans have demonized Democrats. They will use words. And it is different. This is not partisan to say it's different. just is descriptively different. It is much more often the case that Republican candidates will talk about the Democratic Party using apocalyptic And if we're talking Christian terms, Gnostic language, right? That is the party of evil. They are in league with the devil. Like they are satanic. Like those kinds of words like are being used to kind of demonize the other party. So the party, a candidate representing the other party becomes kind of unthinkable as an option, right? In that logic. And that has really taken off, I think, in the last 10 years during the Trump era. It started really in the 90s. with Gingrich and the kind Clinton era. It really started there, but it is like on steroids in the Trump era. Didn't also have some part to play in the Carter era as well. I wrote a blog recently because I'm a Christian. I'm also a Democrat. So I've been accustomed to being called all kinds of stuff, know, like a communism or communist evil. mean, just pick the pejorative, you know, descriptive term. But I recall there was a... I don't know, some sort of interview where Falwell was talking to, I can't remember, maybe it was Wyrick or something, but they were referring to Carter as like, you know, he's about as Christian as a tree or something like that. know, kind of this really sort of obscure kind of term. But in essence, trying to label him like, you can't really be a Christian if you're not voting, you know, for a Republican or whatever. Yeah, right. know, which is notably something he also said about Martin Luther King, Jerry Falwell did. So we should remember if he said that about Carter, Carter's in pretty good company in that category of people that Falwell declared, you know, fake Christians or not real Christians. And I mean, he called King a communist. Right. And and. In fact, that was kind of remarkable that the about face that Falwell made, because he essentially made these kind of public talks about King calling him a communist, saying it was just a rabble rouser, know, not really the stuff he was about wasn't really Christian and that true Christians should stay in their churches and talk about spiritual matters. Like that's what Falwell originally said. But when Bob Jones University lost their tax exempt status over their racist policies, he suddenly decided that Christians should be out there, you know, making policy. anyway, yeah, so it has longer roots. You're absolutely right. I you can certainly trace it back. But I do think the sort of willingness to kind of overtly like literally demonize, not just figuratively, but like literally demonize to say that they are, you know, that the other political party is not somebody you just disagree with or think is wrong or misguided, you know, but are literally in like, like willingly in league with the devil. You know, and this past election, you know, what do we see against Hamila Harris? Right. We saw her getting called Jezebel. Right. You know, and if you know that biblical story, that is a dark and violent story that they're evoking, you know, out of out of the Bible. So that's not a not a light thing to throw around against someone, particularly a woman of color, given the history in this country that we're facing. but one more comment on this, though. Why is this so bad, right? Is that, you know, in a democracy, kind of back to the first point I made is that one of most important things about a democracy is that losers are willing to admit that they lost and regroup, reorganize and try again, right? That's what democracy is about. But it's also about willing to say the people with whom we disagree, we grant them like legitimacy as citizens. our fellow citizens, right? So we may like strongly disagree, think they are the most misguided people in the world, that they are blind, that they are to, you the realities around them, they don't have the right facts, like whatever, right? But to kind of cross that other bridge and to say they are literally in league with the devil, they're evil, what we've done then is robbed them of their humanity, right? We've robbed them of, and what we should be granting everyone, you know, on face value, at least, is saying, look, they're operating in a way that is true to their own convictions. Now, we think they're wildly off track and definitely wrong. But at the end of the day, our job is not to demonize them, it's to convince them, it's debate, it's argument, it's organizing. Those are the tools of democracy. And I think we've just really got to... I hope take a step back and remember that I don't, I'm not hoping with any confidence, but I mean, I think that's where we're, we're getting off the rails really is that the brakes are off and we're not, we don't have enough. And again, this is not in both sides issue. This is really a Republican problem more than it's not that it's never a democratic problem, but we have to be honest here that this is more of a Republican problem than it is a democratic problem. And we are really missing. the leaders within the Republican Party saying this is not the way we do democracy. Yeah, are you seeing any signs of politics actually affecting theology in any sense? I remember when we were talking to Sam, he made a comment that just really blew my I knew what he was saying was real, just hearing somebody say it. There was some survey, and I can't remember if it came from you all or something Sam came up with, but it... It went along something like, you know, do you think that God plays a part in, I don't know, picking the president or something like that? I'm probably butchering the question. and it was like during Trump's presidency, there was like an overwhelming support of, yeah, of course God picks the president. Yeah, he picked Trump, you know? And then like, when the question was asked again during Biden's presidency, it was like, it went down and like by half. So I'm curious, like, are you seeing other, other incidents where, where sort of this know, allegiance to a political candidate or figure is affecting how people think about God. Yeah. Well, I mean, the thing that is I went back his last year to a book I hadn't read since graduate school. was H. Richard Niebuhr's The Social Sources of Denominationalism. This book was written in the 20s. It's like about 100 years old. And he was responding to Du Bois and other, you know, kind of African-American Christians who were saying, hey, white Christians. Don't you think it's a problem that most of you are on the opposite side of the political questions from us and maybe given our history, you know, might you want to pause a little bit and think about why that is? And he was kind of calling that, you know, he called it the scandal of the color line inside the Christian church. And this was in 1920, 22, 23. And that is really come. We're so used to seeing the political lines the way they are that I think The scandal is lost on us, right? And I think that is like really important to kind of just, it should not be the case that the two groups in the religious landscape that are the farthest apart are white evangelical Christians and African-American Christians. Like when we sort the religious landscape, you know, kind of like from most supportive of Republican candidates, least supportive. In every elections against this 1980, that sorting will show you that. So there's more distance between white evangelicals and African-American Protestants than there are between white evangelicals and Jews, than there are between white evangelicals and Muslims, than there are between white evangelicals and the unaffiliated. That's the biggest gap. These two groups of Christians. And I just think, wow, you know, something is deeply, deeply wrong here. And I think again about King, you know, saying that the church is too often the tail light. You know, it's sort of like way behind, right? It's not the headlights shining the light where we need to go, right? But it's drug along by other forces, you know, and captive to those other forces. And I think the preponderance of evidence, you know, suggests, you know, I mean, just the history that we've been talking about, you know, suggests that it has been so hard, particularly for white Christians to kind of have their Christian belief pulled separate from their whiteness. I think is the best way to say it. So, you the book I wrote before this one is called White Too Long, right? And it is the legacy of white supremacy in American Christianity. it's kind of half memoir, half social science where I'm tracing my own family, right, in Georgia and in this history. And that That term white too long comes from a James Baldwin, a New York Times op-ed that he wrote in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Right. And in 1968, he's writing just a few months after that has happened. He is so despondent. Now, you if you know Baldwin's work, he is never one to like, dip his pen in the well of hatred. He's never like, he talks about love, love, love and hope. Even, you know, he's like, even when I don't have any other choice, like if I'm alive, I have to continue to hope. But here he is really despondent and he's despondent because like King and many other, I think, African Americans who wanted to think the best of white Christians, he wanted to think at some point there would be this mass uprising of white Christians of goodwill who were willing to say, yeah, we're on the side. Of the oppressed, we're on the side or as Howard Thurman would put it, we're on the side of the disinherited. That's that's who Jesus would be with. Right. And we are going to be there. But he said this in this. It's just this. I titled the book and it's the epigraph in the in the book because I just. The entire time I was writing that book, I was thinking about these words white too long. And he said he and so he said this in this op ed few months after Martin Luther King was killed. And he said, I have been impressed by white Americans and have been impressed for a very long time that they are beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. And then he went on to say, they have been married to the lie of white supremacy too long. Or they said they have been white, if I may so put it too long, they have been married to the lie of white supremacy too long. And then he goes on. It's a beautiful, you know, piece of like 1200 words of, of, mean, I would put that piece up, you know, in the Pantheon with maybe even let it from Birmingham jail. It's a amazing piece of writing. and just like, hauls it like it is. And I think we're still struggling with that. And I do think, you know, mean, every group does struggle, I think, to sort of, you we all have our other identities that we wear, whether it's Rachel or class, or nationalist, you know, we're Americans, right? Or we're Southerners or whatever, we all have these identities, or, you we're men or women, or we're gay or we're straight, like all these things that kind of pull on us, right? like gravitational fields, I feel like, you know, pull us in. Sometimes they pull us the same direction. Sometimes they pull us different directions. And we have relationships that do the same thing, you know, with us. But I do think we all struggle with. You know, religion at its best and Christianity at its best is supposed to give us a different way to see the world, right? We're supposed to be born again. We're supposed to put off the old life and put on a new, right? There's all kinds of imagery about kind of, was once blind, but now I see, right? All of these things. And by the way, I know the word woke has become like a nasty word, right? On the right. But being born again is not too far from the idea of being woke, right? It's about seeing things, right? That you didn't see before. It's the very message of discipleship and salvation in the New Testament. And We struggle, I think, to kind of wake up, to open our eyes, to put off the old life, take on the new, because that other stuff, and I'm speaking here, you know, not, I'm not throwing rocks here. I'm speaking, you know, from experience. It's hard to figure out, and it has been hard for me. And one thing has kept me from writing, kept me, I'm sorry, has continued to keep me writing, is how difficult it has been for me. to figure out where my white identity ends and where my Christian identity begins. And to try to pull those two things apart so that my Christian identity can have some tiny bit of leverage on my white identity, right? And have me kind of see it for more, for what it is. That's beautiful. And I had no idea that the title was from James Baldwin. I was introduced to James Baldwin by Greg Garrett. He wrote a book. I forgot the name of book, but I had him on the show and he was telling me all about James Baldwin. was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. And I was like, just think, I was thanking Greg for introducing him to me because I just, I mean, I just had no idea. So that's really cool. And I admitted I didn't read that book. I read your other book. So now I've got a reason to actually read your mean, Baldwin was the guiding light on that book. mean, in many ways, I thought like, so here is this, you know, a man who's a couple of generations ahead of me, right. grew up in the 40s in Harlem, a black gay man from Harlem, right. But he grew up kind of a boy preacher and was like very seriously Christian, had all that, you know. And and I really I didn't come to Baldwin either until very late. it was, you know, and but reading Baldwin, I would say that so my book, Why Too Long, in many ways was me as a white Christian in the 21st century, trying to write back to that indictment that Baldwin had leveled with love. mean, I would say like. You know, it's not a kind of indictment like, you know, that I felt like was, you know, racist against whites or anything like it was like calling white people and white Christians in particular to be their better selves. Right. And so this, this was like my, that book was really my attempt to respond to Baldwin, and to sort of what kind of white Christian who grew up in the South in 21st century groups, Southern Baptist, right. In the denomination that was formed. to say that it was okay to enslave people, right? Based on the color of their skin. Like that's the story of my denominations, Genesis in 1845. What can I say? Back to that, you know, faithful, I would say, indictment. Yeah. How did the other believer, believing groups in ethnicities fare, at least based on what we know from exit polling or whatnot? Well, you know, speaking of the color line, you know, the Catholic vote is split right along lines of race too, but it's not white black. It's white Latino, in the Catholic church, you know? and so it's, it's, it's much the same. It's not quite as stark. So white Catholics voted about six and 10 for Trump and they have every time he's been on the ballot. So again, no movement there. but Latino Catholics, vote about six and 10, or maybe even a little bit more for democratic. candidates, right? So there is this very similar white Latino split in the Catholic Church that we're looking at. The one group of Latinos are the only non-white Christian group that voted majority for Trump are Latino Protestants. Like that group is kind of its own interesting group. It's small. It's about 4 % of the U.S. population. But that group tends to be charismatic, Pentecostal, evangelical themselves. So they're kind of culturally adjacent to the white evangelical world in many ways. And in fact, many of them, you know, come from countries that had strong white evangelical missionary presences there. So that influence is very direct. It's not coincidental. And you see that showing up. They voted about six and 10 for Trump as well, but they're the only non-white religious group that voted majority for Trump or Latino Protestants there. And they look very different than Latino. Catholics who vote the other direction. So that's kind of the complexity there. then like, know, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, like those roots are too small to measure individually in the exit polls. So we don't have specific numbers on them to break out. if you put them all together, they are still very safely in the kind of two thirds Harris, one third Trump and the unaffiliated Americans, which is the other big group in the country. They now make up only almost 30 % of the country. They vote at lower levels, so they're a little bit lower than that in the voting population, but they vote about 70 % Democrat as well. So again, to kind of boil it all down, it still is kind of white Christians plus this tiny little group of Latino Protestants voting for Trump and Republican candidates and everybody else on the other side. Wow. does the research provide any insight on like why white Christians sort of overwhelmingly voted for Trump? I know that that's a bit of a loaded question, because if you were to ask the question, why do white Christians vote for Trump, like you could probably go down a lot of different roads. like based on your understanding, like is there any data that kind of points to, hey, These are some of the top reasons. Yeah. Well, you know, I should just say like without flinching here, that white supremacy is a key reason why white Christians vote for Trump. and, I, I say that, you know, with a little bit of a chuckle, cause it's almost like it's so obvious. when you look at the history we've been talking about and laying out here, again, that is how you get seven and 10 Republicans being white Christians is because they fled the democratic party for the most part over civil rights. support. So there's that history that has to be said straight front. But we did also ask people that other issues. And here I think there's something telling that happened between 20, not a lot shifted between 2020 and 2024, but one significant thing did on this front. And that is the issues that Republicans and white evangelicals told us were the most important. Now, I should say that, like, you know, people don't always know what's driving their vote, right? It may be something a little more like subconscious and visceral, but but we do have to take seriously what they tell us is driving their vote nonetheless. But what here's what was really striking is that in 2020 and we asked Republicans and white evangelicals, you know, what was supporting what was the most critical issue, you know, for your vote? And I just want to take two of two of the issues and show how they should abortion and immigration. So in 2020, both Republicans overall and white evangelicals in particular, were much more likely to tell us that abortion was more than said abortion was a critical issue for their vote than said immigration. So it was a little more than half who said abortion was a critical issue in their vote and only about four in 10 who said immigration was a critical issue for their vote. In 2024, So we're post the Dobbs decision at the Supreme Court that kind of pushed abortion law back down to the state level, struck down Roe v. Wade. We've got Trump being kind of ambivalent about, you know, the typical pro-life platform. And in fact, I should point out that it is only in the Trump era that we get a Republican party that no longer has a pro-life platform. Like, that's notable. So when Trump arrived on the scene from the sort of eighties on, it also should point out that the Republican Party didn't have a pro-life platform in the seventies. That only happened in the eighties. But from the eighties until Trump, there was a solid like repeal, so not just repeal Roe v. Wade, but a ban on abortion was the official Republican Party position. The last time that was true was when Trump was first running for president. because it inherited the Republican platform. So the last time that was true in 2016, but once Trump becomes president in 2020, the Republican party didn't even put out a platform. Like they had no platform. basically they just said, yeah, whatever that guy. So if they had a platform, it was an authoritarian platform. It just said, yeah, whatever that dude thinks is what we support. in 2024, they did actually go back and reconstruct a platform. But if you go read it, it is. It is, I'm not kidding, a cut and paste job from Trump's tweets was the platform complete with misspellings and weird capitalization. Like, it's not even hiding. It wasn't anything like thoughtful. And it does not have an abortion ban as part of the platform anymore. And so Trump is responsible for moving the Republican party away from having a kind of straight up principled pro-life platform. banning abortion and yet, so here's what happens in 2024. So 2020, with that little interlude, in 2020, again, both Republicans and white evangelicals are more likely to say abortion is a critical issue of their vote than immigration. But in 2024, same question, same methodology, all of that. The number of people saying abortion, number of Republicans saying abortion was a critical issue for their vote fell to 29%. And the number of Republicans saying immigration was critical to their vote jumped to 71%. So now, so in 2020, just kind of make it plain, abortion, you know, outranks immigration by double digits as a critical issue. But in 2024, immigration outranks abortion as a critical issue by 42 points. Right. So it is just as massive shift. here and it is directly tied up with, you know, the only like the main thing we heard from Trump on the campaign was this xenophobic and racist language. I don't think I'm out on a limb saying that this was the most racist campaign we have seen a candidate runs as George Wallace in 1968. Like, I'm pretty sure I am on solid ground saying that we're gone are the dog whistles of the Reagan and Bush years. We're just got the megaphones out, right? So we heard just to kind of give you some receipts, right? We heard words like vermin being used to talk about human beings, right? We heard phrases like that immigrants were poisoning the blood of the country, right? Now that should resonate and prick our ears a bit because that is not just racist language, it's Nazi language. Right. You can pull those phrases, poisoning the blood of the country, vermin, rats. Those phrases are in Mein Kampf. Right. Not just general Nazi language, they are literally in Mein Kampf. And yet that's where, and, and, and so you see the salient shift. And so it is then, I mean, what Trump has done is kind of turn the Republican party into this kind of, anti-immigrant. white Christian nationalist party and where all the traditional, you know, so-called family values issues are like nowhere to be seen, right, as things that are motivating, leading issues motivating the party. And so in many ways, I think that I think even use this imagery in that Time magazine piece that I feel like they've always exaggerated the role that abortion played in Christian right politics. But now the fig leaf has kind of fallen off. right? And we are exposed to the, let's say, or uglier parts of the things that have held that coalition together. Yeah, well done with that imagery metaphor. Well done. Could have gone a lot of different ways, but you pulled it out. I am curious though, do we need better terms to define Republicans, Christians, know, just believers as a whole? Because I feel like if you're polling, and mind you, like, I don't know the first thing about polling, so this is why I'm talking to you, but... You know, when you use the word Christian, that word will mean something different if you ask somebody on the far left, far right, QAnon, you know, what have you. I mean, like there was a, there was a truth social poster. I took a screenshot and posted recently that, that they had mentioned Q, QAnon was legit from God, you know? So I'd imagine, I'd imagine if you spoke to this person in real life, they would identify themselves as Christian. But, you know, sort of the asterisk would be, you know, Christian light because I really adhered to QAnon. So, like, how does a pollster really, you know, wade through all the different permutations of what it means to be a Christian? Well, it's funny. I I feel like there's some kind of political science answers to that question, right? Some social science answers and there's some theological answers to that question as well. And they're both relevant, you know, here. And, you know, just one thing on the Q thing. We have measures actually of QAnon that we use and there's high overlap with white evangelical Christians. And so It's because Q taps a lot of Christian tropes, right? Apocalypticism, this idea that there are some people with special knowledge that other people don't have, there's prophecy, like there's all kinds of overlaps with kind of far right. And I should say like, you know, we should all dust back off our theology books and go read up on Gnosticism. If you really want to understand Q, right? There's a lot there. I'll leave that there. We don't have to go into Gnosticism, but. But on the social science side, I mean, it's already kind of remarkable again that when we measure, and this is true for PRI, it's true for Pew, it's true for Gallup, it's true for all major political scientists, that the most accepted way to measure the religious landscape is by self-identity, but it's not just self-identified by religion, but it's self-identified by race and religion, right? And the reason why that's important is because For example, you can't understand to kind of just go to the Catholic world for a minute. For reasons we've talked about, can't. It makes no sense to say, well, Catholics voted this way. Because Catholics are about 20 % of the population, but they're about 60 % white and 40 % Latino. And that 60 % of white Catholics behave very, very differently in political space than the 40 % of Latino Catholics. And so Social scientists who are more concerned about having categories to sort people in that correspond to how they behave on the ground have decided that race and ethnicity are important ways to divide the religious community in order to understand what they actually do on the ground, right? So like, again, if you flip that into a theological space, that social scientists have to do that to understand religious people in this country is itself a theological indictment of where we are. like in the country, right? I think it is and should be kind of a scandal that that is the only way social scientists can make sense of what's going on on the ground, right? It's to sort Christians into ethnic and religious, ethnic and racial groups. So I think that's one way social scientists have coped with it is to kind of sort people that way to make sure we're really understanding like what's really happening, you know, on the ground. I do think the other, other kind of lens we've been using, you mentioned we had Sam Perry on earlier, and he's been one of the big pioneers along with Andrew Whitehead on trying to understand this new movement of Christian nationalism. Because I think that's another big divider and should say clearly, not all Christians are Christian nationalists, not all white Christians are Christian nationalists. But it does correlate very, very strongly with support for the MAGA movement and Trump. So if you want to understand that political movement, You have to understand a kind of this set of theological convictions that and these are more kind of worldview theological convictions that you know, God wants Christians to Take dominion over, know these seven areas of society the New Apostolic Reformation Thing that that to be truly American you have to be truly Christian or you have to be Christian to be truly American Everybody else the second class US law should be based on the Christian Bible like those kinds of questions those kind of, and they're about dominance really of a particular sort. And it typically means white as well, white and Protestant Christian dominance in the country. I think we have some of these lenses, but it's a complex and complicated scene along racial lines and then these kind of this new movement. And I should say one last thing here that the Christian nationalist movement is a new term. And I think we need the new term because the the kind of alignments have shifted since the old Christian right. And so this is a new way, I think, of helping us understand how they've shifted. But it is of a piece with the old Christian right movement that resisted civil rights. It is of a piece with the solid block of white Christians that supported Jim Crow and the undoing of reconstruction after the Civil War. is of a piece with the kind of white Christians that We're supportive of the Confederacy. is of the peace with the even longer history of the Europeans who landed on the shores of this country, like claiming these lands and taking them from indigenous people, enslaving African people to come develop them, but claim them for European Christianity, right? It is all of a peace. And we're still in many ways trying to reckon with that. with that history, right? And try to find a faith, I think, that isn't so, again, so tied to whiteness and that is, I think, accepting of and supportive of a pluralistic democracy. That's the struggle. That's really awesome. So I guess what's what's P.R.I. What's Robbie Jones working on for for 2025. How are you going to help us as a society better wrap our heads around sort of this new Christian reality we all live in. Well, I think it's about protecting democratic norms. I that is front and center for us. So in the research, we'll be measuring, you know, that and which of those are eroding, which of those are holding. That's one good thing. Data is, you know, good for us to kind of say, we have some trends here. We know where we are. Are things eroding? Are we holding it, you know, holding the line on, yeah, on just basic things like that, you know, everybody should have the right. Equal rights to vote, separation of church and state, like things that are basic constitutional protections for a pluralistic and the very idea of pluralism, That we should be, we are and should be a religiously and ethnically, racially pluralistic country. And that's a value we should honor and protect. So we're going to be asking a lot about those kind of big, big issues. That's really awesome. Well, thanks again, Robbie, for coming on our show. I always learn so much when I talk to him. Yeah, yeah. And to our audience and listeners, thanks for stopping by and yeah, make sure you keep your conversations not right or left, but up and we'll see you next time. Take care. See you. yeah, yeah. I'm sorry. Yeah. I did my outro too fast. the one thing I did forget to mention is, so one other place you can find my writing is on Substack. So I'm writing it at a Substack called White Too Long. It is www.whitetoolong.net. Again, that's straight out of that James Baldwin quote and from my last books. Writing Weekly there, it's free to sign up if you want to kind of get more of my ongoing writing. Hope to see you there. Yeah, awesome. Thanks again, Robbie, for everything. This has been amazing. And yeah, to our audience, again, keep your conversation that right or left, but up, and we'll see you next time. Take care.