Donald Trump, a 77-year-old Bible salesman from Palm Beach, Florida, has emerged as the nation’s most prominent Christian leader. Trump is running for president as a divinely chosen champion of White Christians, promising to sanctify their grievances, destroy their perceived enemies, bolster their social status, and grant them the power to impose an anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQ, White-centric Christian nationalism from coast to coast. That Trump doesn’t attend church and has obviously never read the book that he hawks for $59.99, seems of interest exclusively to his political opponents.
What might catch the attention of some evangelical conservatives, however, is that Trump’s ostentatious embrace of White Christian militantism coincides with a precipitous decline in religious affiliation in the US. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, one-quarter of Americans in 2023 said they were religiously unaffiliated. “Unaffiliated” is the only religious category experiencing growth. In a single decade, from 2013 to 2023, the percentage of Americans saying that religion is the most important thing, or among the most important things, in their life plummeted to 53% from 72%.
I doubt Trump is even a major one. It’s probably a much bigger factor that baby boomers are dying off and boomers are much more religious than GenX, Millenials, or Gen Z.
So you’re saying that the biggest factor in people leaving religion is people leaving religion?
Less people leaving and more too many people not really signing on in the first place, at least not beyond possibly being forced to attend as kids. Combine that with the baby boomers being an unusually large generation (hence the name) and in the process of dying off, and…
Short version - anything even kinda popular among boomers that isn’t ubiquitous among the following generations is going to decline due to the sheer number of boomers and religion is experiencing a genuine decline in rate of uptake in addition to that effect.
In other words, Trump isn’t causing people to leave religion so much much as people aren’t really leaving religion so much as not really joining up in earnest while the existing flock slowly dies off.