Timely book that recounts the cultural and demographic change we have witnessed and are witnessing.

Sometimes it is good to read an outdated book. It gives witness to the past with the eyes of the present. The book was completely wrong in its hopefulness. White Christian America decided to double down on its hate, elect a monster, and work feverishly to tear the country apart. He makes one mention of that at the end of the book, that this is one possibility but remained committed to a rosier future than what occurred.

I grieve for this country, I grieve for my lost faith.

Ever wonder WHY they vote like they do? A thoughtful and fascinating look at the history, sociology and psychology of what the deal is with what I sometimes think of as the Other Half

Not terribly prescient but a good introduction to the subject.

oof. This was written right before the 2016 election, and I find its (too guarded, and not really, since the author says the demise is worth mourning (no)) optimism premature, although apparently according to the afterward the rise of Trumpism is more of a death rattle than a resurgence of WCA (which, I think will be sustained due to cheating, basically).

Ultimately kinda helpful and interesting, but not essential. Other books to provide context for 2016, for me, are Jane Meyer's DARK MONEY and Timothy Synder's THE ROAD TO UNFREEDOM, and books to provide context for this book are ONE NATION UNDER GOD by Kevin Kruse, which traces this false idea of WCA's conception of a Christian America, and SUNDOWN TOWNS by James W. Loewen, which I found repetitive at the time, but really drives home how white supremacist Christain America is and how it came to have such enclaves of homogenous whites.

Like a Buzzfeed news article, this book has an intentionally inflammatory title that's designed to draw you in, but for most part it's not the partisan bitchfest you might be expecting. It's a sober historical analysis by the head of the Public Religion Research Institute, and as you might expect from that name, a lot of research went into it and is cited in it.

What does the term “White Christian America” (WCA) mean? It's a specifically defined term that essentially means white Protestantism, of both the mainline and the evangelical flavors. Why doesn't it include Catholics? Primarily because Catholicism in America has almost never been viewed as a “white” denomination, but as the strange alien religion of a bunch of unwanted immigrants – first Irish and Italians, and more recently Hispanics and Asians. The interval between the rise of Catholicism as a significant American power (arguably the election of the first Catholic president in 1960 marked the beginning of that era) and the browning of Catholicism through immigration from lower latitudes was quite short.

With this understanding of WCA, most of the book reads like a sober and relatively balanced historical account of the rise and fall of WCA's influence on American culture, and you could read it from any political slant and not feel you're being insulted. But if you're reading it from a white Christian perspective, there's no question the message is dire in some respects: In 21st-century America, any church that continues refusing to welcome non-whites and people of a variety of sexual identities and orientations is probably doomed because of simple demographics. There just aren't enough straight white Americans who would rather build walls than bridges left to fill their pews.

Jones paints Mitt Romney's defeat by Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election as the watershed moment when it became clear that WCA was all but finished in demographic terms: Even though they had brought Mormons, viewed for a century as a wacky cult, into the fold by backing Romney, and even though Romney's campaign did everything right to secure the conservative white Christians who were the core Republican voting bloc, there simply weren't enough of them left in America in 2012 to propel Romney to the White House when the other groups united behind Obama.

But there's one area in which it can only be read as an overt and searing indictment of White Christian America, and that's race relations. The author has this to say on the matter: “No segment of White Christian America has been more complicit in the nation's fraught racial history than white Evangelical Protestants. And no group of white Evangelical Protestants bears more responsibility than Southern Baptists.” When you realize the Southern Baptist Convention began its life in the 1840s as a schism from mainline Baptists over the issue of slavery, it comes as no surprise that Southern Baptists are perhaps the single most racist religious denomination in America and have repeatedly led the charge in support of slavery, in support of segregation, in support of Jim Crow laws, and against the civil rights movement.

The heart of the book contains some good analysis (relying on other sources) of where we are now on race relations, why we're there and not somewhere else, the role that White Christian America played, and why WCA's efforts to put a Band-Aid on it with fatuous concepts like #AllLivesMatter are not helping to either move our nation toward reconciliation (first passing through the essential stages of repentance and reparation) or restore WCA's tattered reputation in the public arena.

But it also makes clear that while White Christian America will never again be the dominant monolithic cultural force that it has been for most of the nation's history, it's not too late for individual churches to do better and become more vibrant and connected to their communities than ever, with specific success stories. But all of those success stories are based on inclusivity... i.e. dumping the “White” from “White Christian America.”

The final section is an analysis of the classic “stages of grief” that explains a lot about certain things we're seeing in the USA today. In particular, it explains “Project Blitz,” an effort of the evangelicals to buy more time by creating a legacy of pro-Christian laws that will enforce their peculiar way of life in years to come even as they themselves become a tiny dissenting minority.

As someone who has always been part of a religious minority and who knows no other life, I personally think the death imagery used throughout the book is misleading and overblown. Yes, “White Christian America” as a hegemonic power is dead. But white Christian Americans are still very much alive, and while they are diminished in numbers and temporal power, this is no tragedy, and likening it to “death” is pure melodrama. And I find the whole “grieving” and “mourning” metaphor absurd and even offensive. The problem with hegemony is that no one ever gives up power willingly, and to those who are accustomed to having all the power, being asked to diminish themselves to the status of merely one among a group of diverse peers feels like persecution. So “death” and “doom” type language no doubt accurately encapsulates how white Protestant leaders, particularly evangelicals, feel about it. But in fact, no one is trying to eliminate white Christians or prevent them from having a seat at the table. They are merely being told they now have to make room for others at the table. They should be like Galadriel, who nobly released the One Ring and agreed to diminish herself.

The book was published mere months before the surprising election of Donald Trump in November 2016, and you may be wondering how Jones fits that event into his analysis. If you get the right edition of the book, you'll also get Jones' Afterword that discusses this very topic. According to Jones, Trump's election is not proof he is wrong about any of his analysis, but the proof he is right. It's not the resurrection of WCA, but its death rattle. It took a historically high turnout of a shrinking and embattled right-wing white Christian voting bloc, and a historically divisive opposing candidate on the left, and a Democratic runner-up who did everything he could to undermine the nominee's campaign, and the vagaries of the American electoral system, and interference by foreign powers to accomplish a win that was razor-thin. As part of the “stages of grief” analysis, it's clearly another effort at “bargaining.” WCA sold its soul to buy four more years of worldly power and a raft of federal judge appointments, including a couple of Supreme Court picks. And Jones believes it will ultimately prove to be no more than a desperate rearguard action, and may do them more harm than good in the long term, as white evangelicals' strong support of the not-so-Christian Trump further damaged WCA's public reputation and strengthened accusations of hypocrisy. It's clear from the numbers that the faction who once referred to itself as the "Moral Majority" is no longer a majority, and in the eyes of an increasingly skeptical American public, it's no longer moral either.

The most interesting part of this book was the end, where Jones compares the reactions of White Christian Protestants to their loss of population and power in the US, to the Kubler-Ross stages of grief. Overall, most of the book requires some experience reading political polling data, and a concomitant resolve to withstand the detailed breakdowns of the data and significance. To simplify, the old guard Christians, especially the southern conservative and the evangelicals are dying out, both via and aging population and their failure to attract younger members. The growing diversity of religions and growing secular nature of the country scares the crap out of these folks. Even though this book was published in 2017, there isn't one word about Trump and how his electoral victory contradicts any of Jones' projections for the future of WCP America. Jones, despite examining the Tea Party effects on the Republicans, failed to predict the degree of radicalization that movement injected into Trump's and the party's actions in general, over the last four years. The dying gasp of these bible thumpers, both the "true" believers and the bogus Trumpers, will be felt in the upcoming election. The Republican convention this week has more than exposed the dishonesty, anger, authoritarianism and blind stupidity of their leaders, if not their supporters.

This book was truly eye opening. As an unreligious person, I came in to this book very indifferent to the subject, but through the writing I soon felt a sort of sadness for the dying effect of WASPs. This book is very well written and educated, and provides a great read for even the most non religious person there is.

America is changing. Racial demographics and religious affiliation (or non-affiliation) tell us that White Christians are no longer the majority in the US. This book examines how White Christians have influenced culture, education, race relations, criminal justice, and politics; , and very timely. There is a concluding section on the 2016 election.