Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post: “The decline in White evangelicals’ numbers has sown desperation and increasingly anti-democratic political sentiments. ‘Notably, the declining population shares are most acute among the Republican Party’s most stalwart supporters, White evangelical Protestants, who have declined steadily from 23 percent of the population in 2006 to 14.5 in 2020,’ Jones explained. ‘With 84 percent of them voting for Trump, there are few new voters to be gained.’ Instead of trying to reach out to new voters, Republicans choose to ‘drive down the votes of the growing number of Americans who are not White and Christian.’ Hence, their ‘big lie’ that the election is stolen and their ensuing crusade to suppress voting.”

“The sense of panic among White evangelical Christians also fuels the long-standing animosity toward racial justice that is prevalent in their communities. Just as they erected thousands of Confederate statutes during post-Reconstruction to reassert White dominance, they once more seek to distort history in service of white supremacy. Their current mission to rid schools of critical race theory (CRT), which is not actually taught in public schools, echoes a similar effort to mis-educate children about slavery. Jones noted, ‘Well into the 20th century, they donated history books with Confederate sympathies by the hundreds to schools and libraries, sponsored essay contests based on these slanted sources, and even developed a ‘[United Daughters of the Confederacy] Catechism,’ designed for children to memorize questions and answers reflecting the Confederate version of the causes of the Civil War.’ Our politics have fallen victim to the primal scream of once-dominant White evangelicals. Having failed to capture the hearts, minds and souls of a majority of Americans, these communities are turning against democracy. They prefer an authoritarian theocracy to a multiracial society in which they are a distinct minority. And that, candidly, is a threat to our democracy and to the notion of equal justice under the law.'”