{"id":328,"date":"2014-10-28T09:26:00","date_gmt":"2014-10-28T09:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/10\/godless-millennials-could-end-the-political-power-of-the-religious-right.html"},"modified":"2014-10-28T09:26:00","modified_gmt":"2014-10-28T09:26:00","slug":"godless-millennials-could-end-the-political-power-of-the-religious-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/10\/godless-millennials-could-end-the-political-power-of-the-religious-right.html","title":{"rendered":"Godless Millennials Could End the Political Power of the Religious Right"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
The 2014 midterm elections are drawing near, and it appears that the Democrats may well lose the Senate, since they\u2019re fighting on unfriendly territory \u2013 a large number of seats in red states are up for grabs.\n

But if you look deeper than the national picture, there\u2019s a more interesting story. In southern states like Georgia<\/a> and Kentucky<\/a> \u2013 which in the past would have been easy Republican holds \u2013 the races are unexpectedly tight. In fact, the only reason that the questions of which party will control the Senate in 2015 is unsettled at all is that an unusual number of races in dark red states are toss-ups<\/a>, despite an overall political climate that generally favors conservatives.<\/p>\n

What we\u2019re seeing may well be the first distant rumblings of a trend that\u2019s been quietly gathering momentum for years: America is becoming less Christian. In every region of the country, in every Christian denomination, membership is either stagnant or declining. Meanwhile, the number of religiously unaffiliated people<\/a> \u2013 atheists, agnostics, those who are indifferent to religion, or those who follow no conventional faith \u2013 is growing. In some surprising places<\/a>, these \u201cnones\u201d (as in \u201cnone of the above\u201d) now rank among the largest slices of the demographic pie.<\/p>\n

Even in the deep South, the Republican base of white evangelical Christians is shrinking<\/a> \u2013 and in some traditional conservative redoubts like Arkansas, Georgia and Kentucky, it\u2019s declined as a percentage of the population by double digits.Even Alabama<\/a> is becoming less Christian. Meanwhile, there\u2019s been a corresponding increase in the religiously unaffiliated, who tend to vote more Democratic<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s driving the steady weakening of Christianity? The answer, it would seem, is demographic turnover.<\/p>\n

Read the rest here<\/a><\/p><\/span><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 2014 midterm elections are drawing near, and it appears that the Democrats may well lose the Senate, since they\u2019re fighting on unfriendly territory \u2013 a large number of seats in red states are up for grabs. But if you look deeper than the national picture, there\u2019s a more interesting story. In southern states like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nGodless Millennials Could End the Political Power of the Religious Right<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The 2014 midterm elections are drawing near, and it appears that the Democrats may well lose the Senate, since they\u2019re fighting on unfriendly territory \u2013\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/10\/godless-millennials-could-end-the-political-power-of-the-religious-right.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" 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