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Dead Constitution See other Dead Constitution Articles Title: Does the Religious Right’s Decline Help the Alt-Right? There isn’t a strong relationship between religious observance and racial attitudes. In a recent piece for The Atlantic, Peter Beinart asserted a connection between America’s declining levels of religious observance, the success of Donald Trump’s secular brand of right-wing politics, and the related rise of the so-called alt-right. Beinart’s essay deserves to be read in its entirety, but his basic argument is that liberals should hesitate before dancing on the grave of the religious right. Yes, organized conservative Christians were a major hindrance to certain progressive victories. And with the religious right in disarray and Christianity as a whole experiencing long-term decline, the progressive agenda may face fewer roadblocks on cultural issues in the future. Yet according to Beinart, we should not forget the progressive influence that Christianity has had on American culture and politics, or the role Christian institutions play in building social capital. It is not true that Christianity has served only reactionary ends. In fact, Christianity may have been one of the few forces keeping explicit white identity politics in check. No longer shackled to Christian notions of love and equality, the religious right’s remnants may embrace the racial right. I welcomed Beinart’s article as a sign that the mainstream discussion of religion and politics is becoming more thoughtful and honest. Conservative evangelical Christians, for all their faults, were never the caricatures that progressive journalists described during the Bush era. Yet Beinart overstates the importance of Christianity as a defense against radical right-wing politics. Certainly, it is naïve to assume that former conservative Christians will all become secular egalitarians, but the future of white identity politics is probably not closely tied to the future of Christianity in America. Thanks to a helpful series of questions on this subject included in the American National Election Studies 2016 Pilot Study, we can now begin discerning some of the correlates of white racial attitudes, especially feelings of white identity and solidarity. These are critical attitudes to study right now, given that the alt-right is counting on a growing constituency for explicit right-wing racial politics in the years ahead. In the aforementioned survey, respondents were asked how important their race was to their identities. White respondents were also asked, “How important is it that whites work together to change laws that are unfair to whites?” The survey additionally asked respondents the frequency with which they attend worship services. In the following figures, we see white attitudes on racial identity and solidarity broken down by religious observance. The most observant attend worship at least once per week. The middle category attends worship anywhere from a few times per month to a few times per year. The least observant category darkens a church door less than once a year (or never). Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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