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.