By Jay Michaelson
Legal Affairs Columnist
The Daily Beast
Are cracks appearing in President Trump’s Christian-right firewall?
On Thursday, the soon-to-retire chief editor of Christianity Today, a leading centrist evangelical magazine, called for Trump’s removal, describing his extortion of the Ukrainian government as “not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.”
Yet Christianity Today does not speak for the large majority of evangelicals who are politically conservative, and around 70 percent of white evangelicals say they approve of Trump’s job performance. It’s hard to see either the CT editorial or Trump’s impeachment moving that needle very much, because, simply put, conservative Christians have far too much at stake.
First, as numerous evangelical and Catholic leaders say, over and over again, the soul of America really is changing rapidly—for the worse, in conservatives’ view. The “Christian Nation,” half-real, half-imagined, that Christian conservatives thought they were living in is rapidly disappearing: The most recent Pew Research Center survey showed that only 65 percent of American adults now identify as Christian, down 12 percentage points in the last decade alone.
Meanwhile, the Pew report showed, “the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular,’ now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009.”
That is a shocking, rapid transformation.
And of course it’s not just affiliation numbers. Social mores on issues like LGBTQ equality are rapidly changing, and multiculturalism is indeed threatening white Christian hegemony, both racially and religiously.
Where conservatives and liberals differ, of course, is in interpretation. To liberals and secularists, America has always changed, and if it is changing for the more multicultural and less religiously homogeneous, the better.