How the Elite Changed Its Mind on Christianity
Depending on who you ask, America’s young people are experiencing a religious revival. Gen Zers are now more likely to attend church weekly than millennials, with young men in particular leading the return to religious services. While Gen Zers are still more likely to identify as religiously unaffiliated than previous groups, there’s evidence that certain kinds of religious devotion are also growing in popularity—earlier this year, Roman Catholic dioceses around the western world reported spikes in adult conversions.
As the decline in religious attendance has slowed, the past few years have also seen a clear rise in the status of religion. It’s becoming more and more socially acceptable to be religious in elite intellectual spaces—something that could have a real impact on how religion is perceived by everyone else.
This is a big change from the past few decades, in which internet “new atheism” effectively framed religion, Christianity in particular, as fundamentally anti-intellectual and subtly low-class. Christians were cast as uneducated rednecks—creationists, climate-change deniers, and pearl-clutching censors. This framing of the religious was obviously influenced by the backlash to George W. Bush-era conservatism. Movies like Jesus Camp and shows like 19 Kids and Counting, which portrayed evangelical “fundies” at their most mockable, only reinforced the impression that religion is a small-minded, bigoted, and jingoistic endeavor.
These new atheists seized on the cringeworthy, distinctly lower-middle-class aesthetics of Bush-era Christianity. The aesthetics of many non-denominational Evangelical churches—unadorned auditoriums, cheesy worship music, and the occasional smoke machine or pledge to the Christian flag—fit within a broader cultural language of suburban kitsch.
These evangelical churches are essentially the Stanley cups of American religion: consumerist yet distinctly cheap-feeling, appealing to a certain kind of middle-class, middle-aged woman, and a constant subject of mockery for those who see themselves as better and smarter than people like her. New Atheists loved nothing more than mocking and memeifying this kind of Christianity, a sentiment that rubbed off on the intelligentsia writ large.
But that didn’t last forever. While evangelicalism is still the most popular protestant denomination, it’s no longer the only culturally salient version of Christianity to be found. Much of this is due to how the Republican Party became less entwined with this vision of religion.
When Obergefell v. Hodges took marriage equality national, conservatives no longer had a culture-war issue whose arguments were almost entirely religious in nature. Then Donald Trump—hardly anyone’s idea of a religious social conservative—swallowed
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