So it’s useful to think about why the intuitive response for, say, an Iowa Republican might be very different from the natural response in New York, Boston, or Washington, DC. Consider some recent analysis by politics and religion writer Ryan Burge, who tried to analyze whether there was some sort of “Trump effect” in religious practice after 2016. Specifically, he looked at the proportion of Americans who never attended church in the six years since Trump’s election in compared to that share during Barack Obama’s last six years as president.
Overall, the rate of church non-attendance has been rising for some time, so one would expect some increase independent of political conditions. But Burge finds that among Republicans, the pace of disaffiliation didn’t change much between the Obama and Trump presidencies. Among Democrats, however, there were sudden increases in how quickly non-attendance rose: to 16 percent, up from 3 percent in the Obama years, among Democrats born in the late 1970s , and 14 percent, 2 percent before. -Trump, among those born at the end of the forties, to choose just two examples.
This implies that if you were a church in a predominantly Republican area or congregation, you probably didn’t notice any significant changes between the Trump era and the previous period. So Never Trump’s insistence that a vote for Trump was culturally costly, driving people away from Christianity, would not match your lived experience. Whereas if you were a Christian in a more liberal-leaning area, you’re more likely to have seen something like the Trump effect.
This divergent experience maps, to some extent, the debates between pro- and anti-Trump Christian commentators. The most anti-Trump voices have often been figures invested in making Christian inroads within the professional classes or the liberal intelligentsia, or at least maintaining a Christian presence there. The most pro-Trump voices have often been conscious outsiders to these spaces, operating in environments that are more conservative.
So it’s no surprise that during Trump’s presidency and ever since, the first group had their fears about him confirmed and their hostility toward him entrenched, because they were experiencing it firsthand, on their social media and their churches, part of the alienation and the fall. outside that followed his choice. Whereas the second group, operating in a different context, would feel that the prophecies of doom had been wildly exaggerated, because they were not seeing the same crises.
