What are the implications of Doug Jones’ victory in Alabama?
Dec 16, 2017, 2:06 AM
Sen.-elect Doug Jones. (AP Photo/John Bazemor
We’re still trying to analyze the implications of Doug Jones’ victory in Alabama, which turned temporarily into a blue state when voters picked the Democrat over Republican Roy Moore.
RELATED: Did Moore’s defeat show the limits of denial?
One of the questions that was raised is whether the influence of white Christian voters in the South is waning.
Perhaps what we’re seeing is the influence of white Christians throughout America waning.
Robert Jones, author of “The End of White Christian America,” says he uses that idea as a metaphor. White Christians and their churches obviously aren’t completely disappearing, he says.
“What I do mean is that we’re at the end of an era.”
The end of the dominance of white Protestant Christianity in the country.
“In the last 10 years, it has gone from a majority white Christian country to a minority white Christian country. In 2008, we were 54 percent white and Christian.”
By the 2016 election, that dropped to 43 percent, he says.
This has caused anxiety for Christians, who, for a long time, were the country’s “cultural elite.” It is especially true, Jones says, for Conservative white Christians, who considered themselves the “moral majority.” That has declined while same-sex marriage, for example, has become more widely accepted.
“Left them with a sense of vertigo and feeling like they’ve lost the country…”
Is this feeling of dread what motivated people to vote for Donald Trump?
Listen to the entire conversation here.
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