‘Younger evangelicals are clearly rejecting their evangelical parents’ politics. Growing numbers of young evangelicals and former evangelicals are questioning or rejecting the movement’s teachings on a range of social issues, including sexual abstinence (so-called “Purity Culture”), LGBTQ equality, patriarchy, racism and climate change. They are more politically liberal than their parents and are “losing interest in the culture war.”
For some time now, “younger white evangelicals have become more permissive of abortion, (even as) older ones have moved in the opposite direction,” supporting more and more stringent abortion bans.
As a scholar of religion, I have long believed that pursuing a political strategy to change the Supreme Court has deformed evangelicalism, making it a political movement more than a theological one. When evangelicals supported Donald Trump by more than 80% in 2016, some students of the movement were surprised. How could the party of “Family Values” support a man who has five children by three different women? How could they continue to support him even after hearing him laugh about grabbing women by their private parts on the “Access Hollywood” tape?
If pundits had missed the signs that evangelicalism had traded its core theological values for political gains, its younger members seem to have figured it out.
Now, many young people are rejecting the label evangelical altogether, with some declaring themselves to be exvangelicals. Having lost sight of the core meaning of their movement, evangelicals are losing their children, first as voters, then as co-religionists.’
Valerie Cooper, Duke University
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Soon Trump will command only the demographic that SPECIALIZES in being dumb, reactionary, and hypocritical: The ultraorthodox.
And since most of them – UD predicts – will be moving to theocratic Israel, in flight from American officials who might soon put real pressure on them to allow their children to go from subliterate to marginally literate, UD will now make another prediction.
Realizing that he cannot win the presidency, Trump will take his adherents to the promised land, where he will work out a power-sharing arrangement with Netanyahu and Jerry Falwell, Jr., who will already have moved his flock there.