the shrinking White Christian population

 

Since Tucson is close to the Mexican border, it’s not surprising that the city has a heavy Hispanic population. 44.6% of the population is Hispanic, slightly outnumbering the white population, which makes up 42.6 % of the population.

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/tucsoncityarizona

However, if you factor in the younger generation, the picture changes considerably.

Eight of the 12 high schools in the Tucson United School District are more than 50% Hispanic, and three of them are more than 80% Hispanic. Spanish is the first language for a fair number of those students.

Diversity is somewhat different in Catalina High School, which has a large number of students who were born in Africa. This school is also one of the three high schools in the district that offer Arabic as an optional course of study.

When we lived in Flagstaff, I learned that roughly 30% of the population is Native American, and the high school graduation speeches are given in both English and Navajo.

What we are seeing in Arizona is happening in most of the states in country, further reinforcing the fact that we really ARE a melting pot. The population growth in the country is not Caucasian, but minority (primarily Hispanic) so by the year 2045, America will be a ‘minority majority” county, and Caucasians will represent less than 50% of the population.

The shift in demographics is terrifying to the older white folks who largely populate the Republican Party.

You might find it strange that a large segment of the Republican base thinks Whites are the true victims of racism and that Christians are under attack. After all, America’s biggest racial group is still Whites; the most common religious affiliation remains Christianity. Whites and Christians dominate elected office at all levels, the judiciary and corporate America. What’s the problem?

 Well, there is a straightforward reason for the freak-out, and an explanation for why former president Donald Trump developed such a close bond with white Christian nationalists.

 This group feels besieged because they are losing ground. “The newly-released 2022 supplement to the PRRI Census of American Religion — based on over 40,000 interviews conducted last year — confirms that the decline of white Christians (Americans who identify as white, non-Hispanic and Christian of any kind) as a proportion of the population continues unabated,” writes Robert P. Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute. “As recently as 2008, when our first Black president was elected, the U.S. was a majority (54%) white Christian country.” By 2014 the number had dropped to 47 percent, and in 2022 it stood at 42 percent.

 The group that has declined the most is at the core of the MAGA movement, the group most devoted to Christian nationalism. “White evangelical Protestants have experienced the steepest decline. As recently as 2006, white evangelical Protestants comprised nearly one-quarter of Americans (23%). By the time of Trump’s rise to power, their numbers had dipped to 16.8%,” Jones explains. “Today, white evangelical Protestants comprise only 13.6% of Americans.”

And that decline may yet accelerate, because they skew older than the population as a whole. Put differently, there are far more baby boomers in this group than Generation Z members. White evangelicals are “losing” people with each successive generation. (“White Christian subgroups have each lost approximately half their market share just across the generations who are alive today,” according to Jones.) If your business had lost half its market share, you would be panicking, too.

With those kind of numbers, the responsible thing to do would be to think about “fixing” what’s wrong by adapting to a changing market. Instead, many in this cohort have doubled down, becoming the foot soldiers in the red-hatted MAGA movement. The decline isn’t going to be reversed by angry, gray-haired folks demanding abortion bans and “don’t say gay” bills.

 For now, white Christians have tried to stem the political tide by using repressive voting laws and cultural issues to stay in power. A few states have actually banned the teaching of “critical race theory” in K-12 schools, even though it is only studied at the college level. The Florida legislature is doing everything it can to pretend that the history that they don’t like simply does not exist. As a result, any discussion of Rosa Parks does not mention that she was an African-American, and Ron DeSantis just killed an African-American course of study in Florida college and universities.

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/19/poll-religion-christian-white/

Unless I live to be 95, I won’t be around the year when Caucasians become the minority, but long before then, the individual pictured below will definitely be an “endangered species” – and that’s a good thing.