White American Christianity is dying, but the zombie form can still kill you

27 November 2024 · Adam Fontenot

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When Catholics and Protestants are counted separately, the largest religious group in the United States becomes not one of them, but “nothing in particular.”¹ Even 10 years ago, my generation (millennials) was 35% unaffiliated.² One recent poll suggests that the rate of non-religion among those 18-29 may have risen as high as 43%.³

In 1991, the year before I was born, 6.73% of American adults had no religion. Thirty years later, this number had risen to 28.37%. The proportion of Christians dwindled from nearly 90% to only about 65%.⁴ Church attendance numbers further cratered during the COVID pandemic, and as of 2022 more than two thirds of Americans attend less than once a month. Weekly attendance is only practiced by about one in six; gone are the days of family church-going that Boomers remember from their youths.⁵

The vast majority of American 30-year-olds were born to Christian households. Somehow, over the course of our lives, a large proportion has decided it isn’t for us. This isn’t because we grew up online or because our generation thinks differently than the one before. “Generational” is too slow a word to describe this demographic shift: previous generations are secularizing as well, we’re just doing it more quickly. These days, about one in five of our Boomer or Gen X parents are Nones as well.⁶ Generational turnover provided an opportunity for change, but was not its cause.

So what happened? Most people reading this will be shouting the obvious answer by now. Nearly 80% of the drop in Christian identification between 2000 and 2021 happened after 2010, and fully half of it happened after 2016.⁷ And… yeah. I quit calling myself a Christian in 2016 because I couldn’t abide the institution’s cynical alliance with a transparent and pathetic form of evil, one so vulgar that its own moral leadership called it out (before proceeding to endorse it).⁸ I know I’m not alone in that. This exodus wasn’t confined to just Christian identification: disbelief in God spiked more than 50% from 2016 to 2022.⁹

While Christianity’s alignment with right wing politics was masterminded decades ago by influential conservative leaders in the church, much of the shift into outright populist Trumpism may have come from the pew.¹⁰ Nevertheless, it was the institutional church that took the hit. Gallup found that in the early years of the 2010s about half of American adults trusted religious institutions a “great deal” or “quite a lot”. In recent years, that number is consistently less than a third. Another third now trust it “very little” or not at all.¹¹

If you’ve read an essay like this one in the past, you are probably anticipating what I’ll say next. God is dead, and Christians have killed him. Christianity is permanently on the decline, leading to a long term realignment in American attitudes and politics.

I used to believe this, but I was wrong. Christians have traded virtue for power, and they’ve won. They’ve done it successfully. Trump is the ludicrous clown puppet who “leads” a coterie of ideologically unified and intelligent white Christian nationalists and outright fascists who have the ability to set the course of US history for at least the next few decades. Looking at the Supreme Court alone, right wing Christians already achieved their chief aim of overturning Roe and Casey, and they have an excellent chance of increasing the conservative margin on the Court to 7-2 or 8-1 in the next four years.

Furthermore, the demographic situation for conservative Christians is not necessarily as dire as the statistics above might suggest. Identification as evangelical Christian was in the upper 30s or low 40s in the early 1990s and remains in the low to mid 30s today, reflecting only a slight drop overall.¹² And earlier this year, Pew Research suggested that the long term trend of decreasing religiosity could have reversed.¹³

Meanwhile, Christian nationalism is on the rise. Research by PRRI found that nearly two thirds of white evangelical Protestants qualified as Christian nationalist “adherents” or “sympathizers”, and that 54% of Republicans did. Of white adherents, 85% believe that white Americans face racist discrimination at levels at least as high as black Americans, and 81% believe that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.”¹⁴

An additional survey by PRRI and Brookings found that approximately one in six Americans agrees with the statement “The United States is a white Christian nation, and I am willing to fight to keep it that way.”¹⁵

Meanwhile, the MAGA agenda now includes promoting Christian ideology to future generations. Take just one of Trump’s proposals, withholding funding for local school districts that teach students about LGBT orientations and identities, or that recognize students’ transgender identities.¹⁶ The pretense, of course, is that students are indoctrinated by biology and sociology into becoming trans or gay. Not even evangelicals believe this; the real reason is that knowledge is not neutral. What children are familiar with, they learn not to fear.

When a conservative leader says that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” everyone interprets this as calling for death camps.¹⁷ And, well, it is quite clearly a dog whistle for that at best. But what is really happening here is that the ideological basis of the Christian agenda is being quietly revealed. What they want is a social order that looks like this:

The promise is that by the year 2040, you’ll be able to drive down the street without ever seeing a visibly queer person. Americans (well, the white ones at least) will be having babies, thanks to President Vance’s incentives. If you’re a man, women won’t be so damn uppity all the time. Most people will go to church again. People who don’t fit into this view may be tolerated at the margins, but they will exist only in the negative, the That Which We Are Not. Adam Kotsko describes the process this way:

In response to this massive, positive social change, they are trying to reinstitute the closet. The strategies are the same as always — tarring all sexual minorities as pedophiles, equating all non-normative practices with the most extreme (e.g., acting as though social transitioning is tantamount to irreversible surgery), stripping gender and sexual minorities of basic political rights, etc., etc. The goal cannot be to eliminate homosexuality and trans experience — every intelligent person knows that’s impossible. The goal, rather, is to make the cost of expressing homosexual inclination or trans identity so high that the marginal few who could go either way find a way to make conformity work. In other words, a hard core of people who have no choice but to express homosexual inclination or trans identity will have to live thwarted, persecuted lives to marginally increase the odds that some bigot’s son or daughter will suck it up and settle into a “normal” marriage and produce a grandchild or two, so that the next generation can in turn suck it up and conform as well.¹⁸

I think he’s right, and he’s also right when he adds that we have no good reason at this point to believe they are going to fail. “Haven’t things gotten, you know, a little out of hand?” is the perennial refrain of social conservatism everywhere, and when Trump proposes “one really violent day” to restore order, he’s gesturing toward what many Christians have on some level come to believe needs to be done.¹⁹ It’s not so much a proposal for a literal Purge as it is recognition of the role of violence in the conservative imaginary.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that they’re going to succeed at their plans. We will (and must) fight them; but their odds just increased quite substantially.

So a particularly violent version of Christianity has seized power, and is actively and openly plotting to use its control of the engines of ideological production to ensure that future generations “freely” opt to be (or look) straight, raise families, and go back to church. How can I say, then, that Christianity is dying?

The surface meaning involves Christians finally surrendering any pretense to moral superiority. This is, as it were, an internal criticism. Trump’s few opponents within the Christian establishment, including Russell Moore, have been making this point for years now. Moore describes a world in which the words of Jesus themselves are seen as “subversive” by evangelicals.²⁰ I take this a step further: evangelicals see the Sermon on the Mount as undermining their ideology because it does in fact undermine their ideology. They’re right!

I grew up evangelical; it’s a common trope that Christians don’t read the Bible as much as they say they do, but I was one of the ones who read the whole thing. I walked away because I had no interest in pretending it doesn’t say things like this:

You shall not deprive a resident alien or an orphan of justice; you shall not take a widow’s garment in pledge. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the LORD your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this. When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be left for the alien, the orphan, and the widow, so that the LORD your God may bless you in all your undertakings. (Deut. 24:17; NRSV)

or

Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise. (Luke 3:11; NRSV)

Of course, American Christianity was paradoxical long before Trump. As George Marsden has said, from the very beginning fundamentalist Christian assertion of dogma against liberal theology was joined to the fight to preserve the character of a nation understood as essentially Christian.²¹ Furthermore, as Kristin Kobes Du Mez points out in her book Jesus and John Wayne:

Despite evangelicals’ frequent claims that the Bible is the source of their social and political commitments, evangelicalism must be seen as a cultural and political movement rather than as a community defined chiefly by its theology. Evangelical views on any given issue are facets of this larger cultural identity, and no number of Bible verses will dislodge the greater truths at the heart of it.²²

Going further back in time, plenty of other Christian horrors are well known, American and not. Were Christians “the baddies” the whole time? If so, why did so many people only notice this in 2016?

I think most people, including Christians themselves, subscribe to a political theology we might call potentialism. When applied to America, this view recognizes that the country has made serious errors and that its founding principles are flawed. Nevertheless, say potentialists, the constitutional framework of the United States contains within it a kernel of democratic truth with the potential to reform American social structures in an image of equality. Similarly, we might understand unfortunate moments in the history of Christianity (such as support for slavery) as deviations from core principles of love and respect for humankind.

This narrative of Christian history is underwritten by a theory of false consciousness. Take “compassionate conservatism” as an example. How does an ’80s Christian defend gutting welfare programs for the poor? Well, you see, we’ve learned that if you give people welfare they become addicted to it, and unable to help themselves or climb out of the hole they’re in. So it’s kinder not to help them at all. The thing to understand about this period is that some people really did believe this.

Liberal Christians may have read this and nodded along, because this is a common refrain from anyone who’s had the misfortune of arguing with evangelicals. These right wing Christians agree with us, we say, about the basic tenets of Christianity like concern for the poor, they’re just duped by “big business conservatives” into believing that we need to go about it in an incredibly counterintuitive way.

The problem, as I see it, is that even if this used to be true it no longer is. Certainly, American Christianity was corrupt in many ways from the start. But by the death of Christianity I don’t mean either that this corruption extends to the present day and vitiates the Christian message, or that Christian support for Trump is the result of blindness to the truth. Rather, I mean to mark a change — at some point in the last decade, the mask slipped. Christians, especially those used to thinking themselves pious, were not initially prepared to support Trump. Their ideology was not up to the task of making that support defensible. Then they dove in anyway.

The right wing and evangelical Christians who found their existing ideological basis for supporting Republicans insufficient in 2016 could be observed building a new one in real time. This work extended from the highest levels of leadership to the grassroots. No less a force than James Dobson was enlisted to deem Trump a “baby Christian” and urge others “not to evaluate him based on his past position but rather on what he says are his current convictions.”²³

Some accuse Evangelicals of having made a “devil’s bargain” with Trump to give him power in exchange for select policies and nominating their preferred candidates to federal offices. This isn’t quite right.

First, Trump had a surprising level of grassroots support among evangelical Christians even prior to the 2016 primary elections. In January, as Du Mez points out, he enjoyed the support of 37 percent of white evangelicals in a race that was still wide open.²⁴ (The Iowa caucuses that year fielded 12 Republican candidates.) This indicates that the health of evangelical institutions had slipped substantially already, in that these voters supported Trump well before he began making overtures to evangelicals by the selection of Mike Pence and soliciting endorsements from their leaders.

Second, what closed the deal for most was not a cynical tit-for-tat exchange. Rather, what Trump needed was the creation of an elaborate permission structure which would enable Christians who believed themselves pious people to support him. That’s why, as I’ve said, leaders came forward to declare him a “baby” in the faith, or to carve out “Cyrus exceptions” for supporting morally dubious leaders suspected of being vehicles for God’s will. Even if some Christians voted for Trump in 2016 because they truly believed at the time that he was the lesser evil, there is no getting around the fact that they were unapologetically in the tank for his 2020 and 2024 campaigns, despite an indisputable history of wrongdoing while in office.

What happened, then, was not a calculated decision by evangelicals to support a man whose affect and views they hated in exchange for two or three policy wins. Instead, Christians underwent an ideological realignment. The leaders’ hands may have been tied; had they not given new and surprising justifications for Christians to support Trump, in all likelihood the rank and file would have voted for him without them.²⁵ Rather than lose control, they authored an ideological basis for believing that Trump’s views were good ones, and in fact his behavior was good too, or at least defensible.²⁶ Let’s look at the process by which this occurred.

It’s a surprising historical coincidence that Trump announced his candidacy in 2016 a mere 10 days before the Obergefell v. Hodges decision legalized gay marriage in all 50 states. At this moment the conservative Christian world was rocked to its core. They reformulated their view of Christian manhood in the light of the need to distance themselves from the threat of (perceived) effeminacy.

Whereas Trump’s character previously lay well outside the acceptable bounds for Christians, in the new ideology his serial adultery and unabashed sexual aggression toward women reveal urges that all men should aspire to. Pastor Mark Driscoll infamously prefigured this idea when he warned that liberals are rewriting Jesus as “a limp-wrist hippie in a dress.” Impossible not to imagine Driscoll’s Jesus, a “pride [sic] fighter,” feeling violent and sexual urges — though as a perfect being he wouldn’t act on them.²⁷ Trump is one of us, imperfect. In the canonical Christian Bible, Jesus’s sexuality never receives comment, but the evangelical Christ is unambiguously heterosexual.

This is what lay behind the “locker room talk” excuse for Trump’s words on the Access Hollywood tape. The surface level meaning — that talking about women in grotesque terms is permitted in certain contexts as masculine bluster — would not have convinced any self-respecting Christian. What did, however, was the shared fantasy in which Trump figured as the returned Christ-as-Übermensch. Christian men are not permitted to talk about women in the way that Trump talks about them (in locker rooms or otherwise). But they may aspire to be a person for whom it is permitted. In fact it is desirable for them to do so.

Christians endorse the idea that men should be “real men.” This is ideological; what is really going on has very little to do with driving trucks or fathering children. It has everything, in fact, to do with women: what you can do to them, how you can talk about them. As a piece of the identity-formation puzzle, this is difficult for Christians because there are limits to what you can do to a woman. But there are not, it turns out, limits to what you think a Man (like you) can do to a woman. Locating this power in a flesh-and-blood human being secures Christian male identity from the Hodges threat.

Since this moment in which the collective Christian consciousness left the ground, it continues to float. Slavoj Žižek described ideology with the slogan, “They know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did not know.”²⁸ Everyone knows that the idea of locker room talk masks a system of social entitlement in which some men are allowed to say and do what they want to women. Christians did criticize Trump’s words. Yet in thinking that we’ve seen through the illusion, we miss that we’re continuing to behave as though the words really were gender-appropriate braggadocio — when we, say, vote for Trump, or ignore the women who accuse him of sexual assault.

The same goes for the racist views of Trump and others. Right wing Christians emphatically do understand that Trump is a racist, in both his policies and his personal attitudes. Like almost everyone, they see through the illusion of “America First” to the reality beneath. But this does not stop them from continuing to push for “America First” precisely as if it were a neutral expression of patriotism.

JD Vance, a Catholic, ran a political ad in 2022 commenting on accusations of racism:

Are you a racist? [Vance points at the camera.] Do you hate Mexicans? The media calls us racist for wanting to build Trump’s wall. They censor us, but it doesn’t change the truth. Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans — with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country. This issue is personal. I nearly lost my mother to the poison pouring across our border. No child should grow up an orphan. I’m JD Vance and I approve this message because whatever they call us, we will put America first.²⁹

Notice that Vance doesn’t even bother to deny the accusation of racism. Everyone immediately recognizes that the ad is racist; they deploy ironic detachment and performative incredulity (as Vance evinces here) to perpetuate America First as if it were not.

On consider how Vance defended his decision to share false claims of Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats:

I’ve been trying to talk about the problems in Springfield for months, and the American media just ignored it. There was a congressional hearing just last week of “angel moms” who lost children because Kamala Harris let criminal migrants into this country, who then murder their children. The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m gonna do Dana because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.³⁰

We believe the lie not because we believe the lie but because behind the lie is a “truth” that we cannot speak. The same applies to the claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. A lot of people believe this but almost no one believes it. We all know that behind the ideological mask of “election integrity” lies the reality of demographics shifting away from white American Christianity, but that doesn’t stop reporters or pundits from treating it like a legitimate concern. Ordinarily we avoid talking about the underlying reality, at least until the mask slips. Elon Musk, for example, lied that Democrats were importing voters by flying undocumented migrants “directly to swing states.”³¹

Even Vance’s ad contains a line about “Democrat voters pouring into this country,” which seems incongruous with his point about illegal immigration. It’s left to the viewer to make the points add up in one of several ways, which are all plausibly deniable readings of Vance’s intent, but all are racist. Is “Democrat voters” a euphemism for the Mexicans who are “killing Ohioans”? Are the Democrats hoping to create new U.S. citizens, whose voting preferences are understood as illegitimate because they’re not “real” Americans? Do undocumented Mexicans who cannot vote in elections somehow vote anyway, and reliably for Democrats, because, well, obviously? Vance doesn’t intend any of these meanings, and yet he intends all of them.

I emphasize Vance so much because he is simultaneously the appointed heir of MAGA ideologues and the central figure of the ongoing rewrite of Christian identity. Formerly a Trump critic, Vance’s change of heart gets described by media analysts as “dramatic and complete.”³² As his opponents are fond of pointing out, he once said that Trump “might be America’s Hitler.” At the center of the point I wish to make is the idea that Christians like Vance did not make a total about-face in which they decided they had Trump all wrong. Rather, they decided that maybe a good Christian Hitler was not such a bad idea after all. Vance, in an interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, stated that Trump using an alternate-electors scheme to stay in power wouldn’t count as dictatorship because “he would have served four years and retired and enjoyed his life and played golf.”³³ Trump himself said just two days before election day that he “shouldn’t have left” after the 2020 election.³⁴

As early as 2019, Vance was promoting views that promised to unite Christian social philosophy to America-first politics. In a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, he said

There are a lot of ways to measure a healthy society, but the most important way to measure a healthy society is by whether a nation is having enough children to replace itself. Do people look to the future and see a place worth having children in? Do they have economic prospects and the expectation that they’re going to be able to put a good roof over that kid’s head, food on the table, and provide that child with a good education? By every statistic that we have, people are answering “no” to all of those questions. Our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us.³⁵ [Emphasis added.]

What was perhaps once a commitment to charitable social policy now has the unmistakable ring of the fourteen words when read in the context of Vance’s extreme views on immigrants — to say nothing of would-be parents who worry about the future of a child who might be gay, trans, a woman, a non-Christian, or simply need a healthy planet to live on.

I say all this because I believe that what was once American Christianity, with all its complexity and heterogeneity, has become little more than a fig leaf for white Christian nationalism. Worse, they know not what they do no longer suffices as an explanation for Christian behavior. Rather, they know what they do, and yet they do it.³⁶

From this perspective, the recent exodus is not the cause of Christianity’s death but the symptom of it. Now that it has become apparent what Christianity does, what function it has in our social order, those who can’t accept this are walking away.

Anyone who hasn’t quit reading this by now is probably shouting about exceptions, and that’s what I want to talk about now. In fact, I really need to apologize for not making this more explicit, but I simply could not tell a coherent story about what Christianity is up to, in a broad sense, while continually carving out every single exception that applies.

In particular, this essay excludes the entirety of historically Black denominations in America. This regrettable fact lives downstream of the empirical truth that white American Christianity as an institution has excluded these groups and excised their congregants from its own. The result of this divide means that even those Black Americans with Christian nationalist sympathies experience this differently than do white Americans. Historian Jemar Tisby explains:

So what accounts for the differences between black Christian adherents to Christian nationalism and white Christian adherents to Christian nationalism? Well, of course there are many factors, but I want to focus on one historical factor, the stark separation between white and black churches. It’s been said that 11 o’clock a.m. on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America. Now this does not only mean that white Christians and black Christians are in different congregations on Sunday, it means they’re hearing different messages. We’ve seen from the data a strong correlation between higher church attendance and stronger adherence to Christian nationalism, and this means that churches are vectors of Christian nationalism — super-spreaders of this anti-democratic ideology… Black Christians, on the other hand, receive very different messages about faith and politics. And black Christians have always have had to interpret Christianity in the context of their own oppression in the United States.³⁷

So the exclusion of Black churches from this narrative of “American Christianity” — and its death — is one written into the history of American Christianity itself. By all means, if you attend a historically black denomination, and you feel that it provides you with support and hope, don’t let my words take away from that.

What about the liberal denominations populated mostly by white people? Surely they’re another exception? I’m not so certain.

This problem is emphatically not just an evangelical one. For one thing, Mainline Protestant churches have been bleeding congregants to evangelical and non-denominational churches for years now. In fact, according to Christianity Today, “it’s twice as likely for a mainline Protestant to become an evangelical these days than for an evangelical to leave for a mainline tradition.” ³⁸ On top of that, evangelicals retain those who grow up in the church at rates fifteen percentage points higher than mainline Protestants. If you’re a liberal Christian, you should be asking yourself, “why are so many young people inclined to leave the Mainline church for either Evangelicalism or non-affiliation?”

Even putting aside whether liberal Christianity has any kind of theological bulwark against the appeal of right-wing populist ideology, consider the large number of your fellow congregants who support Trump and his agenda. According to the 2024 exit poll results, white Christians who did not identify as evangelical collectively supported Trump by approximately a 55-41 margin. This means that in the typical non-Evangelical church, white supporters of Trump heavily outnumber Harris voters.³⁹

I conclude from this that most churches outside the evangelical world are eaten up by the same extreme ideology that plagues those within. If you’re inclined to say “my church supports and welcomes people from across the political spectrum,” then consider why this is and what that means. Are you prepared to sit in a pew next to fascist collaborators for the next few years, while from the pulpit you hear nothing that even makes them uncomfortable? And if my use of “fascist collaborators” bothers you, consider what the ideological water you’ve been swimming in has inured you to.⁴⁰

On the other hand, maybe some people can genuinely say “I don’t think anyone at my church voted for Trump. At least, if they did, they would hear things here that would make them wildly uncomfortable.” If so, great! Let me propose the following:

Identify a small group of people in your church whom you can trust absolutely. Begin private, closed meetings with them at which you plan for the future. (You can, if you like, couple this with Bible study.) Keep any communications among the group exclusively on Signal — an encrypted messaging app. Come up with a set of concrete goals for your group that will help you resist fascism.

For example, you can organize to obstruct the trucks when they show up to deport your immigrant neighbors. You can come up with a plan to distribute abortion drugs when a national law against abortion goes into effect. You can establish lines of communication and support for hiding trans people in your attic during a pogrom.

If your response is to say “I don’t think this is appropriate for a church group,” then what good is your religion?⁴¹

Church attendance isn’t just for socializing. American Christianity is a religion that indelibly shapes the ethical worlds of its adherents, giving them a sense of what sort of life it makes sense to lead and what causes they ought to advocate for. Right now, its most visible formations are actively using the church as a foundation to build Christian Nationalism. If even the most strident opponents of fascism within the church don’t believe it has the potential to organize around resisting it, then the time has come to walk.

There’s no shame in leaving. I’m not asking anyone to stop believing in God (about half of the unaffiliated do), or to stop following Jesus. I’m asking people, pleading with them, to stop supporting the institution that is out to kill us.

How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked. (Psa. 82:2-4; NRSV)