In just seven short years the number of people identifying as Christian has dropped immensely, and the number of people who refuse to belong to an organized religion – or believe in God – is growing dramatically. The GOP should be terrified.
A new study just released by the Pew Research Center today finds five million fewer Americans are willing to call themselves Christians, down almost eight percentage points since 2007. That year, 78.4 percent of Americans identified as members of the Christian faith. Today, just 70.6 percent.
And while a good portion of the drop comes from younger Americans, it is a trend occurring across all demographics, including race and education.
Pew finds that from 2007 to 2014, “the percentage of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated – describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular’ – has jumped more than six points, from 16.1% to 22.8%. And the share of Americans who identify with non-Christian faiths also has inched up, rising 1.2 percentage points, from 4.7% in 2007 to 5.9% in 2014. Growth has been especially great among Muslims and Hindus, albeit from a very low base.”
“American Christians – like the U.S. population as a whole – are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse,” Pew reports.
Non-Hispanic whites now account for smaller shares of evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics than they did seven years earlier, while Hispanics have grown as a share of all three religious groups. Racial and ethnic minorities now make up 41% of Catholics (up from 35% in 2007), 24% of evangelical Protestants (up from 19%) and 14% of mainline Protestants (up from 9%).
Some Republican presidential candidates may see this as an ace in the hole, believing Hispanics are more religious, and thus more likely to vote Republican. They’re wrong.
What Republicans don’t grasp yet, although, if they remain a viable party into the next decade they had better, is that despite believing that Hispanics are more religious than some other demographics, they are a different kind of religious, as popular progressive political blogger Heather Digby Parton (“Digby”) wrote recently at Hullabaloo.
“Hispanics are assumed to be very traditional and conservative, which makes them natural GOP voters, if only they knew it,” Digby writes, in response to Mike Huckabee telling an Hispanic audience, “I do not come to you tonight with the ability to speak Spanish. But I do speak a common language: I speak Jesus.”
She concludes that Huckabee (and, presumably, all Republican presidential candidates) relying on the votes of Hispanics because they are a growing share of Christians just “won’t work.”
“It turns out that Hispanic evangelicals have a different view of what Jesus thought government should do than Mike Huckabee does,” she says.
Why should the GOP be terrified?
In 2012, Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney by five million (4,982,296) votes. By 2016, there will likely be even fewer Christians than what Pew measured in 2014.
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Image by Thomas Hawk via Flickr and a CC license
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