In fact, the polling data shows there’s really only one group of Americans that rejects a secular society: white evangelical Christians. And this study is just further evidence that a lot of the political polarization in our country is the direct result of white evangelical Christians realizing that they no longer are the dominant majority and lashing out angrily in an effort to regain the levels of influence they used to enjoy.
For instance, the poll found that while a majority of Americans from all walks of life has come to embrace the rights of gay and lesbian Americans, white evangelicals remains stubbornly opposed to the gay rights movement. White evangelicals are the only category of the population to support business owners who want to discriminate against gay and lesbian customers. [...]
“Same-sex marriage now garners majority support among most religious groups,” the study authors wrote. “Roughly two-thirds of white mainline Protestants (66 percent) and Catholics (68 percent), and more than eight in ten (84 percent) religiously unaffiliated Americans and members of non-Christian religious traditions (86 percent) favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry legally. In stark contrast, only about one-third (34 percent) of white evangelical Protestants and roughly half (47 percent) of black Protestants support same-sex marriage.” [...]
Trump didn’t need to convince conservative Christians that he was one of them to receive their votes for his presidential bid, Cox suggested. All he needed to do was to assure them that he saw that they represented a privileged category and he would treat them as such. [...]
But, as Cox pointed out, white evangelicals — 83 percent of whom said they disapprove of premarital sex — show considerable distance between their moral aspirations and their actual behavior in other areas of life, too. They disapprove of divorce and gambling in large numbers, he said, but they divorce and hit the casino in the same numbers as everyone else.
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