An interesting new study from Ryan Burge really puts some numbers to something we’ve long suspected: White evangelicals want America to be a Christian nation. Even as the nation is trending steadily less religious, Christians are growing more adamant that they’d like it to be that way. Burge notes that a full 61 percent of White evangelicals agree with the statement “the idea of America where most people are not Christian bothers me.” That’s far and away more than any other group surveyed.
There are some bangers in here.
"The idea of America where most people are not Christian bothers me"
61% of white evangelicals agree.
It's 28% of white Catholics. pic.twitter.com/UtOBzlkL5G— Ryan Burge 📊 (@ryanburge) September 6, 2022
Only 28 percent of White Catholics were “bothered” by the idea of an America where most people aren’t Christian. And just 16 percent of non-White evangelicals were bothered. Among non-evangelical White Christians, just 22 percent were bothered.
We need a lot of follow-up questions here, the big one being why?
On the one hand, most evangelicals believe that those who are not Christians will spend eternity in hell, so this belief could just be neighborly concern. On the other, we know that 43 percent of all Americans believe that being Christian is an important part of “being American,” so this could be an element of Christian Nationalism attempting to marginalize non-Christians. Without more intel, we just don’t know.