Vox: The age of white Christian America is ending. Here's how it got there

Though the book begins and ends with a mock eulogy for white Christian America (WCA), it’s not quite a eulogy, nor is it gleeful grave stomping. Rather, it is a sensitive, nuanced look at the decline of a world "where few gave a second thought to saying ‘Merry Christmas!’ to strangers on the street ... a world of shared rhythms that punctuated the week: Wednesday spaghetti suppers and prayer meetings, invocations from local pastors under the Friday night lights at high school football games, and Sunday blue laws that shuttered Main Street for the Sabbath.” [...]

Jones traces WCA’s decline as a culturally powerful institution, however, not just as the result of demographic change but rather as the result of white Protestant churches failing to adapt to a multicultural, multiracial America. Jones casts his eye on a complacent mainline Protestant church that failed to hold on to the fervor of its members, and an evangelical church that sailed to the “moral majority” on issues of segregation and race. [...]

Mainline Protestantism declined first, as it lost ground to secularism and to the evangelical right, which was quicker to raise the political pulse. But as the culture wars of the ’80s and ’90s gave way to certain permanent shifts in American culture — most religious Americans now support same-sex marriage, and among young evangelicals support is likewise increasing — evangelicals found themselves, too, at sea. [...]

But Jones recognizes, too, that mainline Protestantism largely squandered its enormous political, social, and financial advantage over its evangelical cousins to the South, inadvertently ceding its status as the mouthpiece of American Christendom. After all, he says, mainline Protestantism’s contributions to civil rights "were ultimately more symbolic than revolutionary, and more focused on the press than grounded in the pews."

Overall, the age gap reflects this disparity: According to PRRI’s research, almost seven in 10 seniors identify as white Christians, versus fewer than three in 10 young adults. The recent decline in (white) mainline numbers in particular is striking: from 24 percent of the population in 1988 to just 14 percent in 2012.

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