S6, Ep. 05: Secularization and the fracturing of the American left w/ John Compton, Angela Parker, and David Gushee

Today’s episode brings you a special presentation on the politics of secularization, featuring a presentation from Dr. John Compton and responses from Rev. Dr. David Gushee and Rev. Dr. Angela Parker. Given the week after the 2024 presidential election, the lecture and responses explore how rising secularism contributes to the growth of political extremism, how flagging participation in faith traditions correlates to diminishing civic engagement, and the importance of taking a holistic approach to the various issues undermining democracy and dividing progressive movements.

SHOW NOTES:
Segment 1 (starting at 00:37): Today’s episode

Dr. John Compton was the speaker for the 20th annual Walter B. and Kay W. Lectures on Religious Liberty and Separation of Church and State, presenting three lectures on the politics of secularization Nov. 13-14 on the campuses of Mercer University in Atlanta and Macon, Ga. 

To watch each of the three presentations in their entirety, click on the titles below:

Lecture 1: Democratic Values in a Secular Age

Lecture 2: Secularization and the Rise of Political Extremism

Lecture 3: Secularization and the Fracturing of the American Left (featured in this podcast, including responses from Rev. Dr. Parker and Rev. Dr. Gushee)

You can also read a recap of the lecture series in BJC’s winter 2024 magazine, Report from the Capital.

 

Segment 2 (starting at 03:18): Dr. John Compton

A professor of political science and chair of the political science department at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., Dr. Compton’s lectures focused on the theme of the politics of secularization. Read more about Dr. Compton on his faculty page. 

Segment 3 (starting 36:13): Response from Rev. Dr. David Gushee

Rev. Dr. David P. Gushee is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, Chair of Christian Social Ethics at Vrije Universiteit (“Free University”) Amsterdam, and Senior Research Fellow at the International Baptist Theological Study Centre. Learn more about him on his website or on his faculty page at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology.

 

Segment 4 (starting 45:24): Response from Rev. Dr. Angela Parker

Rev. Dr. Angela N. Parker is associate professor of New Testament and Greek at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology. In her research, Dr. Parker merges Womanist thought and postcolonial theory while reading biblical texts. Read more about Dr. Parker on her faculty page. 

Respecting Religion is made possible by BJC’s generous donors. You can support these conversations with a gift to BJC.

Transcript: Season 6, Episode 05: Secularization and the fracturing of the American left w/ John Compton, Angela Parker, and David Gushee (some parts of this transcript have been edited for clarity)    

DR. COMPTON: (audio clip) As left-leaning elites have become more secular, they have lost sight of religion’s critical supporting role in the major egalitarian reform movements of the 19th and 20th centuries.

REV. DR. GUSHEE: (audio clip) We are being out-organized by the other side.

 REV. DR. PARKER: (audio clip) So what does return to church actually look like?

 

Segment 1: Today’s episode (starting at 00:37)

 HOLLY: Welcome to Respecting Religion, a BJC podcast series where we look at religion, the law, and what’s at stake for faith freedom today. I’m Holly Hollman, general counsel of BJC.

For today’s episode, we’re bringing you a special presentation focused on secularization and the fracturing of the American left. It’s a lecture and two responses that were part of an annual event we host at BJC. Our speaker is Dr. John Compton, and his lecture was part of BJC’s 20th annual Walter B. and Kay W. Shurden Lectures on Religious Liberty and Separation of Church and State. 

Dr. Compton gave three presentations on the campuses of Mercer University in Macon and Atlanta, Georgia, all focused on this theme of the politics of secularization. I was glad to be there in person, along with other BJC staff members for this lecture series, which we held the week after this year’s presidential election. And it was helpful not only to be with students, faculty and community members on the Mercer campuses but really to take a breath and think more broadly about changes in our country.

Dr. Compton is a professor and chair of the political science department at Chapman University in Orange, California. He’s the author of several books, including The Evangelical Origins of the Living Constitution and The End of Empathy: Why White Protestants Stopped Loving Their Neighbors, a book that adds significant historical and social scientific perspectives about changes in the religious and political landscape over the past century.

This is the third of his three lectures, and it was given on the campus of Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology in Atlanta, Georgia. After this presentation, we’ll also hear responses from two professors at McAfee, Rev. Dr. David Gushee and Rev. Dr. Angela Parker.

Dr. Compton’s first presentation, which was at the law school, examined how declining rates of religious belief and participation are likely to impact support for democratic values, such as protection of civil liberties and the renunciation of political violence.

His second presentation on the Macon campus focused on the relationship between religiosity, secularization, and right-wing extremism, as well as what that means about our discussions of Christian nationalism.

In the final of his three lectures, which we are sharing today, Dr. Compton laid out a case for how rising secularism contributes to the growth of political extremism, pointing out how flagging participation in faith traditions correlates to diminishing civic engagement.

You can watch all three of these presentations online. We’ll put a link in our show notes. So now let’s hear from Dr. Compton, and then we’ll share responses from Dr. Gushee and Dr. Parker.

 

Segment 2: Dr. John Compton (starting at 03:18)

DR. COMPTON: (audio clip) Yesterday we mostly talked about the impact of secularization on democratic values and on the rise of political extremism, people holding views that are anti-democratic, pro-authoritarian, xenophobic, etc.

Today I want to look at the consequences of secularization for progressive causes and to some extent for the Democratic party coalition more broadly. I wanted to start out with this op-ed that ran in The New York Times or, you know, Ross Douthat that is a regular opinion commentator for The New York Times. And on Easter Sunday in 2017, he wrote a column, somewhat tongue-in-cheek opinion piece entitled “Save the Mainline,” which you see here.

And he argued that American liberals should consider going back to church. Of course, Douthat acknowledged that modern-day liberals, at least those who are white, are an overwhelmingly secular group. Yet he pointed out that many of liberalism’s foundational tenets, its commitment to human equality, its concern for the marginalized, its faith in progress, were inherited from the nation’s rapidly fading mainline Protestant denominations.

Moreover, he noted that many liberals have personal connections to mainline churches. They are “former Methodists, ex-Lutherans, lapsed Presbyterians and the secularized kids of Congregationalists.” Although these post-Protestant liberals seem happy to have left religion behind, Douthat suggested that their preferred political philosophy was the worse for having been secularized.

Since liberalism had, quote, “de-churched,” it had struggled “to find a non-transactional organizing principle or a persuasive language of the common good.” Further, it was becoming increasingly clear that, quote, “religious impulses without institutions aren’t enough to bind communities and families or to hold atomization at bay.”

Hence, Douthat’s recommendation: American liberals should find the nearest still-functioning mainline Protestant church and attend a Sunday service. Doing so would, quote, “make liberalism more intellectually coherent, … more politically effective, and more rooted in its own history.”

It would enliven neighborhoods and communities, creating, quote, “spillover effects that even anti-Trump marches can’t match.” And it would rejuvenate families. After all, he wrote, “church is a better place to meet a mate than Tinder, and even in its most modernized form, it is still an ark of memory, a link between the living and the dead.”

Now, if Douthat’s goal was to bait The New York Times’ primarily liberal, secular readership, then the column was a smashing success. As of this writing, there are 1,226 comments appended to the column, nearly all of them vitriolic in tone. Near the top of the “most liked” comments is the one I have on the right here, and I’ll just read you a brief snippet in case it’s too small to read. This commentator who’s from Boston writes, quote:

“So let’s march into the past, liberals, to find religion. Let’s trudge backwards in intellect, in compassion, in understanding, in common sense. We’ll stop along the way and savor the miscegenation laws that kept the races pure. We’ll resurrect Limbo, along with the anguish of parents whose dead babies languished there. We’ll stop at a German Catholic church and listen as they celebrated Hitler’s birthday from the pulpit.

“We’ll spend a little time, rooting for the inquisition, back when belief was merely a matter of how tightly they turned the screws. We’ll warm our hands on the fires that burned heretics and witches. Further back, we’ll visit Galileo as one of the greatest minds of the past 500 years, withered under house arrest for challenging the Church’s position of power in the universe.”

The comment goes on like this for five paragraphs. I begin with this column and the negative reaction to it, because I think it illustrates what might be called American liberalism’s religious blind spot. And by this I mean three things, so maybe we should call it a threefold dilemma.

First, as left-leaning elites have become more secular, they have lost sight of religion’s critical supporting role in the major egalitarian reform movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. From the abolition of slavery to the eradication of child labor to the creation of child and maternal health programs, to the construction of the welfare state, to the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act, none of these reforms could have succeeded absent, one, the support of grassroots denominational and ecumenical religious networks and, two, the availability of widely shared symbols and biblical injunctions, urging concern for the oppressed and marginalized.

In a society where these religious supports are increasingly unavailable, large scale reform projects of the sort favored by liberals have become ever more difficult to enact and even more difficult to implement when enacted.

Second, I think, liberal or progressive elites are — or maybe we should say, were — increasingly oblivious to the fact that many non-white Democrats continue to view politics and party affiliation through a religious lens. Millions of Black Americans identify with the Democratic party, at least in part because they believe it embodies, or once embodied, core principles of the Black Protestant tradition. If current secularizing trends continue, there’s a real risk that the same Black Americans who are drifting away from organized religion will simultaneously drift away from the Democratic party or progressive politics more broadly.

Third, there’s little discussion of the fact that secularization is beginning to drive a wedge through the Democratic coalition. Non-white Democrats are, on average, far more religious than white Democrats, and perhaps for this reason, they tend to hold more conservative views on so-called culture war issues than white Democrats. In fact, on many issues, non-white Democrats’ views are closer to the average Republican than to the average white Democrat.

To be sure, this is not an entirely new development, and Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans are still much more likely to pull the lever for Democrats than Republicans. Yet there are signs that the first two groups, at least, are becoming more open to Republican appeals.

So let me take each of these three points in turn, beginning with religion’s role in driving the major progressive reforms of the 20th century. So a little-remembered fact about American political history is that the high-water mark of American liberalism coincided with the high-water mark of mainline Protestantism, and this was not a coincidence.

Church attendance soared in the 1950s and ’60s, and as a result, the nation’s largest Protestant denominations found themselves suddenly flush with cash. To advance church teachings on social justice, they launched dozens of new programs, many of them coordinated through the newly formed National Council of Churches.

It dawned on me, I was talking about the National Council of Churches a bit yesterday. The South was like the one region of the country where the National Council of Churches had no presence whatsoever, so I should probably keep that in mind. But, nonetheless, I think it’s very instructive.

Often working closely with organized labor, the National Council of Churches’ policy-focused departments advocated for a more generous welfare state, for federal aid to education, and for an end to racial segregation. In so doing, they employed both top-down and bottom-up strategies.

While New York and Washington-based representatives testified before Congressional committees, state and local Protestant church councils organized hundreds of conferences and letter-writing campaigns. And their efforts yielded results. Time and again, conservative members of Congress, finding themselves on the losing end of an important vote, complained that their constituents had been whipped into a frenzy by liberal ministers and churches.

And I think this is one of the reasons that the Douthat column resonated with me when I read it back in 2017 is because I was deep in doing archival research in the National Council of Churches’ archives, reading about all of these grassroots campaigns, and then, you know, you flip over and read through the comments appended to Douthat’s column, and it’s as if this history never existed. So I think it’s very instructive to go back and look at it.

Two very brief examples will suffice to demonstrate the point. The first is the successful mid-1950s campaign to protect the New Deal welfare state in the face of conservative attacks. Beginning in late 1952 with the Republicans poised to capture control of Congress and the White House, the National Council of Churches launched a full-blown public relations effort on behalf of Social Security and on behalf of federal labor protections.

At the time, no one could foresee that the newly elected president, Dwight Eisenhower, would ultimately side with his party’s moderate wing and oppose major cuts to Social Security or other welfare programs. In fact, Eisenhower himself may not have known this until he found himself buried under a deluge of pro-welfare state propaganda, much of it sponsored and funded by the National Council of Churches.

The National Council of Churches’ public relations effort was spearheaded by the Department of Church and Economic Life. This was a body composed of more than a hundred labor leaders, corporate heads, academics, farmers, and clergymen. Among other activities, the group drafted a theologically informed defense of welfare capitalism which was reprinted in full in The New York Times with an article on the front page and the full text reprinted later in the paper, and other major newspapers, just as a series of Republican-sponsored proposals to gut social welfare spending were working their way through Congress.

In addition, the Department of Church and Economic Life funded a series of best-selling books that advanced a Christian case for strong unions and a generous welfare state. Possibly hard to believe, but these books arguing — building a Christian case for Social Security, for other social welfare programs, actually were best-sellers. One of them went through like 12 printings in the mid-1950s.

But the secret to the group’s success was its ability to work in tandem with local religious and labor leaders to mobilize opposition to Republican cost-cutting measures.

Thanks to the National Council of Churches’ recent investment in building up a national network of ecumenical church councils — and you can sort of see the bare spot in the South, but Atlanta had a church council. Thanks to the effort in building up a network of ecumenical church councils, the Department of Church and Economic Life had a ready-made vehicle through which to organize supportive conferences and workshops from Kansas to Maine.

The group’s repeated claims to speak on behalf of 35 million Protestant churchgoers were taken seriously only because top-down efforts like The New York Times‘ statement were echoed by hundreds of similar statements signed by workers and moderate business leaders in small towns and cities across the country.

By mid-1954, thanks in part to the NCC’s efforts, legislation to reduce Social Security funding had stalled in Congress. As important, the president had by this point come to view his party’s conservative wing as a fringe faction whose economic views should not be taken seriously. Quote: “Their number is negligible,” Eisenhower concluded in a November 1954 letter to his brother, “and they are stupid.”

[Audience laughter.]

But for all its success, the mainline campaign to save the welfare state was dwarfed by the churches’ efforts on behalf of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In June 1963, when the Kennedy administration finally resolved to pursue meaningful civil rights legislation, Black civil rights and labor leaders recognized that they faced a major obstacle. To achieve House passage and overcome the filibuster in the Senate, they had to persuade dozens of moderate and conservative Republicans in plains and mountain states, areas where there were few Black voters and even fewer union members.

With Republican leaders refusing to rally support behind the bill, it was unclear how these wavering Republicans could be reached, that is, until the National Council of Churches joined the effort. Once again, the National Council of Churches formed a special task force, the Commission on Religion and Race, which soon set to work coordinating pro-civil rights educational and lobbying activities across the Midwest and Rocky Mountain states. As in the 1950s, the local church council network served as the conduit, connecting NCC officials and lay leaders to rank-and-file believers.

By this point, thanks to funding from the NCC and outside foundations, the network had expanded to nearly 300 professionally-staffed councils and 750 employees. The combined annual budgets of the nation’s state and local church councils now exceeded $13 million, or $132 million in today’s terms.

Between August 1963 and June 1964, local church councils from Nebraska to New Jersey worked closely with denominational leaders and the National Council of Churches, organizing letter-writing campaigns, educational workshops, speaking tours by civil rights leaders, and lobbying trips to the nation’s capital, all with the goal of convincing undecided Republican lawmakers to support the civil rights bill. “Not since prohibition,” wrote the columnists Evans and Novak, has “the church attempted to influence political action in Congress as it is now doing on behalf of President Johnson’s civil rights bill.”

In the end, of course, the civil rights supporters broke the Senate filibuster, and LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act into law in July 1964. And there’s considerable evidence that the lobbying efforts of the mainline churches were the decisive factor in the bill’s success. For example, the 1964 National Election Study found that 68 percent of Northern white Protestants had, quote, “discussed problems of race relations” at their churches, and of that 68 percent, a remarkable 91 percent reported that their minister favored integration.

Moreover, the same study found that church attendance was strongly correlated with support for integration among Northern white Protestants in 1964. Given that no such relationship exists in earlier or later versions of the study or among other religious groups, it’s logical to conclude that the pro-civil rights educational campaign succeeded in shifting Northern Protestant churchgoers to the left on the issue of civil rights.

This was the view of Georgia Senator Richard Russell, leader of the filibuster effort, who in his speech conceding defeat blamed the nation’s, quote, “religious leaders” for duping “thousands of good citizens into signing petitions supporting the bill.”

Now fast-forward to the present. There are still millions of Americans who support progressive causes, and because Democrats are now the party of the highly educated, neither the party nor the major liberal interest groups lack for money. What they do lack, however, are institutions capable of mobilizing or persuading large numbers of citizens at the grassroots level.

The two institutions that once performed this role, organized labor and the Protestant mainline, have faded in importance, and nothing comparable has emerged to take their place. Instead, power and influence are increasingly concentrated in a handful of top-heavy interest groups dominated by wealthy, highly educated donors and staffers who rarely have occasion to interact with rank-and-file voters.

As the Harvard social scientist Theda Skocpol has pointed out, modern-day liberal activist groups often operate out of a Washington or New York office, and most have no presence whatsoever in the hinterlands. This is not true of the Baptist Joint Committee, which now has regional organizers in North Texas and other places, so there’s — I wouldn’t want to throw everyone into this category by any means.

Dues-paying members, for their part, typically have little face-to-face interaction with each other. The experience of joining an interest group often centers on making an online donation, which in turn yields a flood of texts and emails seeking further donations and maybe some group-branded swag. Rank-and-file group members are rarely consulted about group strategies or policy priorities, and many members seem not to be particularly interested in such matters.

The Tufts political scientist Eitan Hersh interprets this as evidence that the point of 21st century group membership is not so much to engage in the gritty, day-to-day business of influencing policy, as to experience the warm and fuzzy feeling of supporting the correct team. However closely modern-day liberals may follow politics, Hersh points out, most of them are engaging in what he calls “political hobbyism.” They cheer vigorously from the sidelines, while remaining largely clueless about the forces that determine the outcome on the field. So that’s point one.

Point two, you know, if the mainline Protestant institutions that power the Democratic policy victories of the postwar period are now, we might say, on life support, there is at least one segment of American society in which religion continues to provide critical support for progressive causes. Black Protestant churches continue to connect average voters to the Democratic party and its candidates, much as they did in the 1960s.

To be clear, Black Americans who do not attend religious services are about as likely to identify as Democrats as those who do. And yet the type of religious group to which Black Americans belong matters a great deal for predicting party identification. And, again, I’m at a school of theology, so I’m explaining this as if I were at a political science conference, when many people here are probably already familiar with this.

But those who identify with the traditional Black Protestant traditions, such as the AME, are far more likely to be exposed to theological perspectives that link Biblical values to egalitarian political projects and which stress the Democratic party’s role as the traditional vehicle of progressive change in the U.S.

As the sociologist Jason Shelton has recently written, preachers affiliated with traditional Black Protestant denominations have “for centuries organized to inspire and motivate a collective conscience in pushing back against racial discrimination and inequality.” The story is very different, however, in the nation’s growing nondenominational megachurches which also boast sizeable numbers of Black members. Here, Shelton points out, churchgoers are far “more likely to hear a sermon against abortion than to see a Democratic politician in the pulpit.”

Recent data from the Chapman Survey of American Fears clearly support these claims. In 2024, more than 72 percent of traditional Black Protestant church attenders identified as Democrats, as compared to 48 percent of nondenominational Black respondents and 33 percent of Black respondents who identified as “nothing in particular.” So you’re given a list of options, you know, denominations and faith traditions, including even atheist and agnostic, and if you say, I don’t know, then you’re grouped in “nothing in particular.”

The role of religious affiliation in connecting Black voters to the Democratic party can also be seen in here, which displays voting intentions for the 2024 presidential election, sorted by religious category. This data was gathered in July 2024, shortly before Joe Biden dropped out and Kamala Harris became the nominee.

Although you may notice that rates of support for the Democratic nominee are similar across the three categories, Black “nothing in particulars” were far more likely than other respondents to say they did not intend to vote in 2024. Also noteworthy is the fact that nondenominational Black respondents supported the Republican nominee at significantly higher rates than Protestant denominational affiliates and “nothing in particulars.”

In addition to influencing party identities, religious participation and Protestant affiliation affect Black voters’ levels of civic and political engagement. Black Protestants who affiliate with a denomination currently register to vote at noticeably higher rates than nondenominational Protestants, who in turn register at higher rates than “nothing in particulars.”

At the same time, we have data from the National Election Studies and other studies showing that Black respondents who are meaningfully connected to a religious congregation, defined here as attending services at least monthly, are both more likely to have been contacted by someone about the recent election — this was 2020, but I’m quite sure this pattern will hold when the 2024 data comes out any day now — far more likely to be contacted by someone about the election and more likely to have contacted someone else about the election. So there’s a connection between religious participation and civic engagement and get-out-the-vote efforts more broadly.

Now, the problem for Democrats, as Shelton and others have pointed out, is that traditional Black Protestant identification is trending downwards. The percentage of Black Americans who belong to a traditional Black Methodist denomination has declined by 15 points since the early 1990s, while the percentage affiliated with traditionally Black Baptist denominations is down 10 points.

At the same time, the percentage attending nondenominational churches has grown from around 3 percent to around 12 percent, and the percentage who claim no religious affiliation has grown from around 5 percent to 20 percent. In light of this evidence, it’s reasonable to conclude that a continuation of current trends will negatively impact both the Democratic party’s electoral fortunes and the prospects of left-leaning political causes more generally.

And there’s a real generational element to this, as you can see here from some data from the Survey Center on American Life. Black Protestants really stand out for the sharp generational divide, with younger respondents being much less likely to say that they’re members of a religious congregation.

So clearly Black Protestantism remains one of the most important forces driving Black voters to identify as Democrats. Viewed from another angle, however, religion is threatening to drive a wedge through the Democratic coalition, as the party’s primarily white donor class continues to secularize at a much faster rate than rank-and-file and non-white Democrats.

Figure 4 here illustrates the divide on matters of religious belief and practice. The obvious takeaway, as you can see here, is that, compared to white Democrats, both Black and Hispanic Democrats are far more likely to be personally religious. In the case of Black Democrats, the percentage who describe themselves as “religious” is almost twice as large as that for white Democrats.

Moreover, Black Democrats are nearly three times as likely as white Democrats to be weekly church attenders. Finally, Black Democrats are more than five times as likely — and Hispanic Democrats nearly three times as likely — as white Democrats to say that they look to religious leaders for guidance when making decisions about which political party or candidate to support.

There is also, interestingly, a really stark divide on matters of church-state separation. I think this tends to come as a surprise to a lot of people, but views on church-state separation — I have just four examples of this here: a question about, Do you favor prayer in schools; do you favor displaying religious symbols in public; do you believe the government should advocate for Christian values; and do you believe the government should declare the U.S. a Christian nation.

In each case, Black and Hispanic respondents are far less supportive of strict church-state separation than white Democrats. Fully 77 percent of Black Democrats favor allowing prayer in public schools. 68 percent favor allowing religious displays in public places. 51 percent believe the federal government should advocate for Christian values. Hispanic Democrats’ views fall somewhere between the two groups, but in each case, Hispanic respondents are less supportive of church-state separation than white Democrats.

The Democrats’ internal divide remains stark when we move from church-state issues to what we might call broader culture war type issues. In sum, Black and Hispanic Democrats register more conservative attitudes than white Democrats on a wide range of social and cultural issues. And the chasm widens further when we distinguish between rank-and-file white Democrats and those who might be described as Democratic elites, which I would define as people who say they’ve given money to the party recently.

So here I’ve added a category in green for white Democrats who we’re calling Democratic elites. They say, I gave money in the last cycle to the Democratic party. As we can see here, white Democratic donors position themselves to the left of other Democratic groups on abortion, trans rights, immigration, and the environment. Whereas more than 93 percent of white Democratic donors believe that, quote, “transgender people should be allowed to use the bathrooms of their identified gender,” only 50 percent of Black Democrats and 67 percent of Hispanic Democrats agree.

Similarly, whereas 88 percent of Democratic donors oppose all legal restrictions on abortion, only 61 percent of Black Democrats and 59 percent of Hispanic Democrats share this view.

And this is the picture when we’re comparing white Democrats and white Democratic donors to Black and Hispanic Democrats. The gulf gets even wider if we were just to compare white Democratic donors, say, to all Black and Hispanic Americans. And you can sort of see here that the gap grows.

So to be sure, the Democrats’ internal divide on religion and social issues is not new. It can be seen in public opinion data going back at least two decades. And until very recently, the consensus among political scientists was that it was unlikely that this would affect voting behavior, at least in the near future, due to Hispanic and especially Black voters’ strong sense of personal loyalty to the Democratic party, a loyalty rooted in the party’s decades-long history of advancing the cause of civil rights.

As the political scientist Tasha Philpot has pointed out, even when Black voters hold similar positions on social issues to Republican voters, they tend to afford much less weight to these issues relative to other concerns, such as matters of racial equality.

In light of recent polling data and recent election data, however, there is reason to doubt whether the conventional wisdom on this point still holds. We don’t know yet exactly how far Republicans have cut into the traditional Democratic share of the Black and Hispanic vote, but it seems clear that there was movement in this direction during the 2024 election. And in a closely divided, deeply polarized country, even small shifts in group voting patterns can have enormous repercussions.

So it always takes a few months before people can hash out the exit polls and decide if they were accurate or where they need to be weighted or adjusted. But people have probably already seen some of the preliminary exit poll data, and the shift toward the Republicans among Hispanic voters was enormous, it looks like. And you can actually sort of see a trend here, if you look at, you know, Latino men, for example, were Democratic +31 in 2016 to Republican +12 in 2024; similarly, pretty big shift among Latino women.

There was a lot of speculation. Some of the early polling data suggested a really big shift in the Black vote. I don’t think that that quite materialized. It certainly didn’t materialize in the case of Black women. There does seem to have been a small but meaningful shift for Black men in terms of their voting patterns.

So, again, take some of this with a grain of salt and maybe check back in six months after people have crunched and re-crunched the numbers. But in any case, there was pretty — we’re pretty clearly beginning to see some cracks in voting behavior, and, you know, for a long time, that was the debate among political scientists. We know there are divides on social and cultural issues. When will that start showing up in voting behavior, or will it? And it looks like it is starting to show up, so not great news if you’re a Democratic party official or something.

So where does this leave us? In short, we’ve arrived at a historical moment when the left’s vision of justice is growing more expansive, even as the Democratic party’s core constituency groups are growing more heterogeneous in their thinking, and even as the last of the institutions that might be expected to build majority support for ambitious policy goals are fading into irrelevance.

Given the grassroots networks of the early 1960s, it’s not unimaginable that party leaders and activists might succeed in building major support for, say, sweeping criminal justice or climate reform. But that’s not the situation we find ourselves in. Instead, organized labor’s political clout is much diminished; the mainline Protestant churches are on life support; and the traditional Black Protestant denominations are shedding members at an alarming rate.

Lacking institutional levers that might allow them to change public opinion, party leaders are caught in a bind. To win elections, it may be necessary to backtrack from some of the party’s more unpopular positions, as Kamala Harris and other high-profile Democratic candidates clearly did in the 2024 election cycle. Yet any move in this direction risks a backlash from donors and activists the party can ill afford to alienate.

To be sure, the best minds on the left have been working diligently for many years to square the proverbial circle, that is, to explain how an increasingly fractured and atomized citizenry might still be mobilized to support ambitious, justice-oriented goals. More often than not, the resulting prescriptions have taken on the flavor of a secular religion.

As early as 1971, the philosopher John Rawls closed his famous Theory of Justice by urging readers to view politics and society from, quote, “the perspective of eternity,” by which he meant the readers should see their own well-being as interconnected with that of their least fortunate neighbors, including those yet to be born.

Two decades later, Richard Rorty — the late Richard Rorty — asked liberals to, quote, “put hope for a casteless and classless America in the place traditionally occupied by knowledge of the will of God.” Citing his idols Whitman and Dewey, Rorty hoped that an intergenerational struggle for social justice would one day function as, quote, “the country’s animating principle, as the nation’s soul.”

Even more recently, the political theorist Wendy Brown has developed a theory of what she calls “reparative democracy,” by which she means an ethos or mode of life that will replace the, quote, “damaging presentism of liberal democracy” with a “focus on our interlinked and common past, present, and future,” a mindset that will redefine “personal and political freedom as relational, responsive, and responsible, with past and future always on the horizon.”

All this is sensible enough on the level of theory. Brown and the other thinkers just cited are likely correct that democracy’s future prospects hinge on the development of perspectives, animating principles, and modes of life that encourage citizens to see themselves, not as isolated rights-bearers or happiness-maximizers, but as community members whose well-being is interconnected with that of others, with neighbors, with the natural environment, and with one’s ancestors and descendants.

The problem, of course, is that perspectives, animating principles, and modes of life require institutions to nurture and sustain them. And on this point, Brown, like most contemporary political theorists, offers little guidance.

Now, one thinker who, I think, does offer useful guidance is Eboo Patel, who delivered these lectures in 2020. In his recent book We Need to Build, Patel chronicles the stories of dozens of Americans who have undertaken the hard work of constructing organizations and networks to deliver social services, advance progressive causes, and promote interfaith understanding.

As the founder of Interfaith America, it’s perhaps not surprising that Patel puts religious groups and reformers at the center of his story. Historically speaking, he points out, religious groups are among the only social institutions that have succeeded, at least on occasion, in prompting citizens to sacrifice immediate gratification in the service of aiding the less fortunate, caring for the environment, and promoting the well-being of future generations. “At their best,” he writes, the “civic energy” generated within religious communities spills outward into the broader society, as believers seek to make real the inspiring version of a just world.

To be sure, Patel knows all too well the prospects for a widespread revival of reform-minded religious activity appear grim. He points out that congregations virtually across the board are losing members and that the ongoing decline of progressive religious communities will mean fewer volunteers, less money, and lower morale. Yet he draws comfort from the past instances when organized religion has successfully reinvented itself in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. In short, he’s enough of an optimist not to scoff at the idea that American liberals might one day go back to church.

Thank you.

(Applause.)

 

Segment 3: Response from Rev. Dr. David Gushee (starting at 36:13)

HOLLY: After Dr. Compton’s presentation, two professors at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology offered their responses and insight. First, we’ll hear from Rev. Dr. David Gushee, Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology. Then we’ll hear from Rev. Dr. Angela Parker, professor of New Testament and Greek at McAfee.

You’ll hear Dr. Gushee share findings from his research and writings that confirm the negative effect a lack of religious belief and belonging can have on a democracy. Dr. Parker shares her insight, including a call for focusing more closely on the influence of white supremacy and white privilege in undermining democracy and dividing progressive movements. Here’s Dr. Gushee.

DR. GUSHEE: (audio clip) I would like to join others here at Mercer in happily welcoming you, Dr. Compton, to our Atlanta campus where most of us work here who are here today, and we’re just really glad that you’re with us.

I’d like to begin with a 30,000-foot observation, more like a surmise. Based on what I have read of your book, which everybody should read, The End of Empathy, this book here — everybody should read it. It only has three reviews on Amazon. This must change as quickly as possible — and also by listening to your talks here, that surmise is this: Looks to me like you are engaging in the question of the relationship of religion to the erosion of U.S. democracy. But rather than accepting the paradigm that the problem is primarily what has been called white Christian nationalism, you are at least pursuing the hypothesis that the problem is secularization.

It is crucial to add here that the way you look at secularization in your political science lens is both in terms of the erosion of belief in God, et cetera, but also, just as important, in terms of the decline of religious participation in actual churches or religious bodies, so it’s not just belief but participation.

Yesterday you noted the growing gap between stated religious belief and religious participation, and in your next book, you are going to be exploring what to make of these untethered believers, a fascinating phrase, untethered believers. And I’m really glad you’re doing that.

I want to suggest a point of connection between your work and mine, at least as I see it. In 2023, I published this little book called, Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies. And in that book, I gently suggested that the phrase “Christian nationalism” that has been dominating the conversation since the Perry and Whitehead book, Taking America Back for God, does not fully describe the problem.

I, instead, use the phrase “authoritarian reactionary Christianity” to describe the gathering storm on the political right, not just in the U.S. but in several other countries, and I take pains to say in my book that political authoritarianism and a visceral posture of negative reaction to the modern world, which includes opposition to moral liberalization, to gender equality, and to racial and ethnic pluralism and other things, that they do not need to be tethered to religion.

Authoritarianism and anti-modernity doesn’t have to be tethered to religion and sometimes is not, and they do not need to be tethered to actual religious communities with actual practicing believers who are being taught such a vision. Sometimes it happens that way, but a lot of times, it doesn’t. And in my book, I describe evidence that a lot of the, quote/unquote, Christianity that has fallen for authoritarian reactionary politics of the MAGA type is very, very thinly connected, if at all, to anything resembling practicing Christian communities or orthodox Christian belief.

This dovetails very nicely with your finding that people who still actually participate in organized religious communities are less rather than more likely to fall prey to anti-democratic extremist or pro-violence politics. In other words, they have a tradition that sets some boundaries on how they think about politics, whereas I think the true believers on the MAGA side oftentimes — you might say, they’re building a religion on the fly.

In today’s talk, you described challenges on the left wing of the spectrum in our country that I have had ample occasion to observe in the last two decades and that showed up in this election. These include the deep secularization of the elite left. You mentioned the donor class as shorthand, but we must also name the media and academia.

This deep secularization, both in belief and practice, is alienating to other key parts of the Democratic constituency, notably religiously practicing and morally moderate/conservative/complex Christians, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Asian American, and white.

Democratic political leaders of the last generation have been trying to find ways to straddle this gap, to continue to draw on the support of the mainly white elite left while not losing the rest of their constituency. Faith outreach efforts that I’ve been approached with, have been involved with since Obama have attempted to help with this project, but the results of this election once again show how limited the success of these efforts has been.

Your intensely interesting research on Black voting patterns shows a threefold hit that is almost like a postmortem in advance on what actually happened during the election. The threefold hit, just to restate it, that the mainstream Black denominations are weakening numerically, that the newer, nondenominations and mega churches are less loyally Democratic leaning — and they’re the ones that are growing — and that the growing population of especially younger non-churchgoing or “nothing in particular” Black voters is either politically disengaged or can be reached by politicians like Trump.

I also want to remark that the dramatic weakening of mainline Protestantism is massively important. It is a combination of numerical decline and also — we must understand this here in this room — the loss of the ability of clergy and academic leaders like some of us gathered here to be able to persuade or certainly to impose our social justice vision on the people who are in our churches with us. We have lost our own people.

I also note another consistent thread in your work. In all of your work, I see that you see that institutions and infrastructure matters, not just books and ideas and sermons. You say that in your last book, that the high-water mark of progressive liberalism was also the high-water mark of mainline Protestantism. But you also painstakingly demonstrate the massive organizational and infrastructure that local and national Protestant groups had to muscle change through Congress. That’s unimaginable today. I think the National Council of Churches as a whole has like fewer than ten people on their staff, something like that.

This leads me to the moment of despair, not too strong a word, in which I and others perhaps find ourselves today. We academics tend to think that if we just give one more speech, write one more book, post one more clever blog, or if the clergy preach one more brilliant sermon, that we can win the battle for the soul of America and our churches.

But while we may find plenty of listeners in our echo chamber, we have no real infrastructure. We are being out-organized by the other side, and they also have the advantage, as you indicate in The End of Empathy, that they are operating in tandem with the latent self-interests and longstanding prejudices of the people that they are serving.

If you’re reinforcing prejudices that already exist and advance people’s personal self-interest, that’s easier than making the opposite case. At the end of your paper, you quote people like Rawls and Rorty as they essentially absolutize politics as the new religion. I have seen this happening, too, even in churches, but in doing so, they and we are mobilizing nonexistent troops, and in the process, participating, I think, in the loss of spiritual and religious transcendence in the churches that survive today.

This is one reason why I’m planning to make a turn in my work at this time back both to the long, slow work of academic scholarship and the long, slow work of forming disciples in local churches. This is where I’m going in my work. Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

 

Segment 4: Response from Rev. Dr. Angela Parker (starting at 45:24)

HOLLY: After Dr. Gushee’s response, Dr. Parker shared her response, which included both her personal experiences and findings, including the importance of focusing on whiteness and white supremacy in these conversations. I note that her microphone wasn’t working for the first few minutes, but it clears up soon thereafter. Here’s Dr. Parker.

DR. PARKER: (audio clip) I’m part of the 93 percent of Black women who voted for Kamala Harris, and that is a very different position to be in and to respond to this paper. So first of all, let me say, thank you, because I have to get that out of the way. Thank you for this gracious invitation to respond to your wonderful, profound, and astute lecture, Dr. Compton. It is an honor to do so, and it’s going to be different than Dr. Gushee’s response.

The main crux of Dr. Compton’s argument is that liberals must return to the church, so I have to contextualize myself first. I am a womanist New Testament academic. That means that in my scholarship and in my teaching, I center the lived experiences of Black women as I perform New Testament exegesis and interpretation and what these interpretations mean for church and society.

So when I find myself in faculty meetings and we’re discussing curriculum and having discussions about the church, like many African Americans across these dis-United States of America, I have to ask: What church are you talking about?

The reality is that there are multiple churches, and the Black church is not monolithic, and just by saying “Black church,” that means that we have white church. So before we can even discuss what returning to the church means, you have to discuss that there is white church and put that in context.

There is a construction of whiteness. Generally people of color are targeted, rendered invisible, and generally harmed by whiteness, while whiteness tend to be privileged by it, and whiteness tends to be heterosexual, male, and economically secure persons who are privileged the most. And the person who’s heterosexual, male and economically secure is privileged for protection, while the least privileged would be the woman of color, hence what we have seen in the recent election. The privileged, economically, heterosexual male privileged, and the woman of color not privileged.

You can’t see this election and not recognize that privilege. And so now what are we actually looking at and interrogating? Black folks voting and not looking at the privileged people who make up the majority of the United States of America.

Second, white supremacy’s smooth functioning depends on the knowing and unknowing complicit nature of white people, so you have to be complicit in looking at this data, and saying, let’s look at the Black voting data and not look at the white voting data and not look at the fact that white men and white women actually increased their voting for Trump.

Third, the social processes by which race is constructed give actual content and meaning to racial identities. Our racial identities are not neutral phenomenon, nor are they best understood as only or primarily cultural. They have political meaning. They have material content, and they become recognizable and meaningful in relationship to white supremacist construction processes.

Systems of racial injustices are repeatedly inscribed on our very bodies as we move through political landscapes as our own racialized selves. These inscriptions shape and form or malform our selves, our psychological selves, our spiritual selves, our faithful selves. Psychologists have been able to document stages of white racial identity development, characterized by certain perceptions and relatively predictable behaviors because of the shared experience of being white in the context of white supremacist systems.

So what does white supremacy mean? It means that white race believes that it is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over other races. And that number at the bottom shows that. So instead of looking at that little bit of increase, which is not even an increase, of the Black vote, why not look at the large increase of the white vote?

So what, then, does it mean for American liberals to return to the church? The concept of church has been hijacked by white Christian nationalism in the Republican party. White Christian nationalism’s deep story goes something like this: America was founded as a Christian nation by white men who were traditional Christians who based the nation’s founding documents on Christian principles.

And I do think that it’s the authoritarian nature, so I agree with Dr. Gushee about the authoritarian reactionary ideas of Christianity, that they think the United States is blessed by God. That’s why it’s been successful, and they have to wrestle it away from those elites like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, who let those others get in front of the line.

But that return to church, Dr. Compton’s argument that Democratic liberals need to return to church in order to win back ways of organizing and being a part of the cultural conversations, it makes sense. But my question is: Whose church? What church? And this is where the unnamed assumption in your work, Dr. Compton, needs to be addressed. And what is that unnamed assumption?

The unnamed assumption is that non-white Democrats who are religious are automatically more conservative. And that’s not true, because I’m standing right here in front of you. Non-white Democrat, religious, and progressive. You cite the 2024 and the 2019 and the 2020 statistics from the CSAF and the ANES questionnaires which seem to show that Black and Hispanic folks trend more conservative than their white counterparts.

However, I’m unsure that these stats are necessarily true, because I’m part of that 93 percent Black women who voted for Kamala Harris, as I opened with. And my husband is representative of the 81 percent of Black men who voted for Kamala Harris in this last election. And out of all of the demographics of the United States of America, Black women and men were the highest that turned out for the Democratic presidential ticket, and we comprise 13.6 percent of this country.

So I argue that it is unfair to focus attention on the population that represents 13.6 percent of the nation when we represent very little of the power dynamics of this nation, which is why I focus on whiteness and white supremacy in the first place.

And in my conversations with Black men and Black women over this past week, we’ve tapped out. We’re not coming to your marches anymore. We’re tired of you focusing on us. You need to get your own houses in order, because we’re not doing this anymore. We’re not. We understood the assignment of saving democracy and bridging allyship across all of the woke policies regarding transgender policies, religious freedoms, abortion, reproductive rights, and marriage equality.

Black Democrats who are part of the Progressive Baptist National Convention which meets next month in Savannah, Georgia, and which is still one of those denominational organizations that’s still growing in the midst of denominations that are shrinking like the Southern Baptist denomination, are still here. I belong to one of its churches. We have women leaders. We ordain LGBTQIA+ leaders and clergy.

So what does return to church actually look like? I would argue that it looks like an actual Bonhoeffer moment. In James Cone’s work, Black Theology and Black Power, which he wrote in 1969, he said, it’s time for Black Christian theologians to begin to relate Christianity to the pain of being Black in a white racist society, or else Christianity will be discarded as irrelevant in its perverse whiteness.

And then traveling from Black religious scholar James Cone to both of our friends, Reggie Williams, in Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus, Williams argues that Bonhoeffer’s time at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem is essential for a discussion of empathy, empathy as a theo-ethical practice rooted in a Christological understanding of Jesus as vicarious representation for Christian social ethics.

Can we think about the mental state of other people? Can we think about the mental suffering that others are going through? Reggie Williams makes a strong case for the significance of empathy as a tool for social transformation. So I would argue that as a faith development in white Christianity, that empathy needs to come into consideration.

Going back to church means going back to Black church and broadening the idea of what true and actual worship is to include this vicarious representation that whiteness needs to encounter, that you’ve deliberately not looked at previously. Perhaps instead of looking at the small shifts in polling data, we should be looking at the larger shifts towards white supremacy that we’ve seen in this election.

And if you need a text, Luke chapter 4: Jesus, after reading from Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He sent me to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. He rolled up the scroll, gave it to the attendant, sat down. Eyes of all the synagogue were fixed on him. He began to say to them, ‘Today the Scriptures have been fulfilled in your hearing.’ Is not this Joseph’s son? He said,’Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown, but the truth is there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine all over the land. Yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them were cleansed except Naaman. When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, led him to the brow of the hill, about to throw him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst.”

As I read this text, I read Jesus with Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited. In 1949, Thurman read Jesus and his Jewishness, and associated Jesus with the disinherited of the earth. But in this particular text, Jesus does something beyond that. Jesus bumps against the “Make Israel great again” rhetoric. It’s not lost on Jesus’s auditors that he’s lifted up the widow of Zarephath in Sidon or Naaman the Syrian, those folks way outside of Israel. How dare the blessings go to the folks outside of Israel.

However, the point of the gospel is that the blessings are not just for the Israelites. The point of the gospel is the blessing is not just for white supremacy. And if someone is not used to reading the text — if someone is used to reading the text and, I don’t see color when I read the text, then you can go to your white church and read Luke 4 and not see color. And I would wager that if you’re reading Luke 4 in a predominantly white church, you can do that and not see color and not see the parallel of make Israel great again.

But if we take Dr. Compton seriously and we want liberal Democrats to return to church, might I suggest a return to Black progressive church spaces where white liberals can learn the art of empathy and vicarious representation through Jesus’s ethnic thinking as represented through this particular womanist interpretive lens and scholarship. And then perhaps, just perhaps, we might let you in the door of Black church.

(Applause.)

 

HOLLY: That brings us to the close of this episode of Respecting Religion. Thanks for joining us. And thanks to Dr. John Compton, Dr. David Gushee, and Dr. Angela Parker for sharing their research and insights with us.

For more information and to watch all three presentations for the Walter B. and Kay W. Shurden Lectures on Religious Liberty and Separation of Church and State, visit our website at RespectingReligion.org for show notes and a transcript of this program.

Respecting Religion is produced and edited by Cherilyn Guy. You can learn more about our work at BJC defending faith freedom for all by visiting our website at BJConline.org.

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