A thoughtful, considered, and evidence-based look at the influence of White Protestantism on American politics and culture.

I hadn’t expected to learn as much as a I did from this book. Jones is as much a historian as a statistician, weaving the story of White Protestantism’s dominance and decline in 20th and 21st century America, and what “mainline” and “evangelical” (I read this to mean fundamentalist) white Christians have done in response.
Jones delves deep into linking the rise in LGBTQ civil rights acceptance with the decline of White Protestant church memberships. And he explores, with honesty, the 20th/21st centuries’ history of racism in White Protestantism. However, Jones only skims the surface of the Religious Right’s Crusade to stop abortion rights, mostly linking it to White Protestantism’s final acceptance of Catholicism. Wish he had gone into the sad history of this and how their rhetoric has led to violence for professionals and suffering for women.
Jones also seems completely oblivious to the Right’s campaign to make it harder to vote. It coincides almost completely with the emerging knowledge that White Christians will be a minority by 2050, but it negates his opinion, even in the Afterword written after the 2016 election, that the Religious Right will accept the end of the cultural and political dominance, and became a willing member of the coming plurality. They won’t. They have already shown a willingness to make voting require an ID that many poor people will struggle to get; to decrease voting machines in segregated precincts with people of color: and to keep felons who have paid their debts to society from voting. Non-fundamentalist White Christians may have found ways to join the coming plurality, but the Religious Right is choosing apartheid and Jones has no acknowledgment of this.
This book is a great place to start to understand White America’s response to changes in our population, but I would continue on to understand issues Jones either just touches or doesn’t explore at all.

Jones leaves out the gender element, voter suppression and goes way too easy on the vicious attempts to de-legitimize Obama as an America (and a Christian), but otherwise has things dead to rights. In retrospect, people foaming at the mouth about a Cheerios commercial should have been a bigger clue, but here we are.

A good analysis of the rise and decline of White Christian, in this case primarily Protestant, America. I agree that the end of WCA shouldn't be seen as a bad thing. It simply shows an evolving of both society and religious views. His last sentence sums this up rather well: "But this much is clear: in the soil fertilized by White Christian America's remains, new life is taking root."

That said, with the recent election, we may be seeing the last gasps of WCA, at least the more fundamentalist parts of it as they attempt to roll back progress made by society about which they disagree. They may try to end certain progress, but society as a whole won't allow it, especially the Millenials.

A worthy read on cultural shifts in America. Would be welcome to have additional data from competing research firms to corroborate.

I know it won't be everybody's reaction, but what I was thinking while I read this was "It's about damn time." The author shows how the world that many people are longing to go back to was overwhelmingly white, and straight white male Protestants were in charge of everything; women, gays, and minorities were forgotten if not actively suppressed. There's a /reason/ some of us don't want to go back to the 1950s, or even the 1970s.

A good read on the topic of Christianity in America in the last 50-60 years or so. I'd be curious how the author would integrate the election of Donald Trump into his ideas, seeing as how 75% of white evangelical Christians voted for him.