Democrats passed an unapologetically progressive stimulus bill through the Senate this weekend, one that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has called “the most significant piece of legislation to benefit working families in the modern history of this country.”
This bill would not be on the brink of becoming law if Democrats did not have a governing trifecta in the White House, the Senate, and the House. And that trifecta in turn would not have been possible were it not for the defection into the Democratic column of a particular, and perhaps surprising, demographic: suburban whites with college degrees.
These voters, once a reliably Republican constituency, switched in large numbers in 2018, handing Democrats decisive House seats in places like California’s Orange County. In 2020, they helped elevate Joe Biden to the White House by turning out for him in places like Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County.
Though I spent a good deal of my childhood in the red-backed pews of a Southern Baptist church in rural Illinois, I can recall only a handful of memorable sermons. None sticks in my mind more than one from a traveling evangelist who kept referring to Bible-believing Christians in the United States as a “remnant.”
The prophet Isaiah frequently used the word to describe a small group of Israelites who would survive foreign invasion and oppression, but would eventually return to the land of Israel and fulfill the promise God gave to Abraham (Isa. 10:20–22; 11:11–16; 37:1–38).
That preacher drew a line between the remnant of Jews who survived the Assyrian army, and American evangelicals who are constantly pressed by the forces of culture to change their beliefs and become more mainstream. Tales of oppression in the 21st century were woven in and through the oracles of Isaiah as the evangelist pounded the pulpit.
The death spiral of evangelicalism has long been written about in both the religious and mainstream press. The assumption is that evangelicalism has weathered the storms of secularization and politicization poorly. Journalist Eliza Griswold, writing for The New Yorker, chalks this up to the theological rigidity of evangelicals: that they…
I think there are a number of things to unpack here as religious belief/identity is notoriously difficult to define, just ask any atheist jew or catholic.
My amateur sociological assessment of much US society is that church membership has always functioned as the glue that held relatively ‘new’ communities together. Sunday church is where everyone meets up and gets to know each other. A Chicago born friend of mine talked about having moved to the Deep South for work and having neighbours turn up on his door in the first week asking about his church affiliation. He first thought they were trying to proselytise and was pretty offended, then he realised they were simply asking if he wanted to make the effort to be part of the community, so despite being non-religious he went with the flow and found that they were wonderful neighbours.