January 4, 2025 – January 6th: Bad Theology, Bad for Democracy

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—INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT—

 

REV. PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH, HOST:

 

Dr. Robert P. Jones is founder and president of the Public Religion Research Institute. He’s also the author of a growing list of powerful books exposing the complex intersection of American democracy, religion, and race. The titles include The End of White Christian America, and, most recently, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future. Bringing together scholarly analysis and hard research data, Robby’s one of the few experts that can actually help us understand what’s happening to our democracy, and some of the trends in views and beliefs that empower those changes. So, with all that said, Robby, welcome back to The State of Belief.

 

DR. ROBERT P. JONES, GUEST:

 

Thanks! Glad to be here.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

Well. You are here at the beginning of 2025. Lots has happened, most influentially, the election of Donald Trump for a second term, not consecutively, and one of the things that is very much on my mind, and one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you, is the rewriting of history of January 6th. It is literally driving me insane that we are in a moment being led by a president-elect who has tried to rewrite what happened that day, and why it happened, and who made it happen. And so what I want to start with? How are you experiencing this? You live in the DC area. This feels close to you. How do you understand what is happening with January 6th and the impulse behind it?

 

ROBBY JONES:

 

The PRRI offices are just a few blocks from the White House. So, when I get off the metro and I walk to work, I glance down 16th Street, can see the White House, and so it’s very close. And we will see, as we did on January 6th, downtown being boarded up and security fences going up and all of that in a way that we wouldn’t have seen before January 6th.

 

They’re boarding things up all the way up into Silver Spring, Maryland, because a lot of what happened on January 6th was that people were staying in the suburbs because it’s cheaper. So many of the rioters were actually camping out in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs, and then taking the Metro down to commit violence in downtown. So we’ll see just the surrounding areas looking like a war zone in the coming weeks.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

And that’s what it turned into. You know our offices, Interfaith Alliance, actually, we can see the Capitol from there, and we’ve already been informed that there’s no way to get to our offices without photo ID and identification that says exactly where our offices are. These protective actions of our nation’s capital are because of a riotous mob that was spurred on by lies by the former president, now President-elect Trump, saying he hadn’t lost the election – when he actually did lose the election. And we’re coming into this January 6th in a different way than we have in the past, in the 1the looming promised pardon of these people, and the continued lie about our election.

 

You have studied race. You have studied the dynamics of religion. This perpetuation of a lie, that the 2020 elections were stolen – I think a lot of people don’t understand the religion that is underneath that, and I think it’s really important to elevate that. I know you know Matthew Taylor and Katherine Stewart and many of our friends who have really looked at the dynamic of the kind of almost cosmology around that day, and I wonder if you could talk specifically about what you understand as the cosmology of the MAGA Christian movement underneath January 6th, to make sure that everyone listening understands that as a ground level of understanding what happened on January 6th.

 

ROBBY JONES:

 

Well, let’s just start with the word “lie.” I think that’s exactly right, and just remember that the lessons we learn from people who studied fascist and Nazi movements are – the reason why we had this term “big lie” is because what they found is, when you’re trying to do a kind of authoritarian fascist movement, the bigger the lie, the better. You have to tell an outrageous lie, and you have to make people believe the outrageous lie. And once you’ve done that, you’ve moved them psychologically into a very different headspace, and they’re willing to then go along with a whole bunch of other things.

 

So the biggest lie is, of course, that the election was stolen from Donald Trump, and he has insisted on that all the way through. And if you remember, he made it a condition of JD Vance, who once called Trump America’s Hitler, had to come bend the knee and get on board with the big lie before he could become the vice presidential candidate.

 

And so how big is that still with us? It’s truly, truly remarkable that we found in our pre-election survey, just ahead of the 2024 election, so four years after Donald Trump has been telling this lie, that nearly two-thirds of Republicans still believed – 63% – that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. So he has succeeded in brainwashing one of our two political parties, two-thirds of one of our two political parties now affirming this absolute lie, no evidence to that, that the election was stolen from Trump.

 

And on the religious side, it’s become a kind of key thing of belief among White Christian nationalists, as well. So kind of the base of the Republican Party, evangelicals, it’s nearly six in ten evangelicals who believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. And just to put this in stark relief and to show you kind of how this operates. Supposedly that’s based on a bunch of rigged elections and all of this stuff. Of course, Donald Trump lost every lawsuit that he tried to file in courts of law alleging voter fraud, was turned down on every single one of them. But this year, when we asked whether they thought the 2024 election was conducted fairly when Trump won, it’s two-thirds of Republicans saying, oh yeah, of course the 2024 election was conducted fairly and accurately. It’s just the 2020 where our guy lost.

 

But the fact that lies are at the center of allegiance, and it’s now turned into a litmus test – this is also being used as a litmus test for government appointments. That you don’t get a cabinet appointment, you don’t get… And even inside, they’re using it even to hire the next tier down people on job applications. They’re asking people: what do you think about the 2020 election? Was it legitimate or not?

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

It’s all so shocking. I think one thing that I want to continue the exploration of is this idea how God played into the 2020 election, and he couldn’t have lost because God had already anointed him to win. And that was a big idea that undergirded the lie for many of the Christians who were out there with their Jesus flags outside of January 6th, while police officers were being murdered and our Capitol was being desecrated.

 

Can you talk a little bit about that big lie, a big cosmological lie, that because Trump was appointed, anointed by God, he couldn’t have lost the election. So someone else must have done something, some trickery, and these are self-appointed apostles who are just making these decisions and saying this kind of garbage, and everybody else has to say oh, yeah, ok. Well, I guess, if God anointed him, there’s no way that our democratic system of voting could have gone against God’s will. This is just a really dangerous precedent to set.

 

ROBBY JONES:

 

Well, it’s not only terrible theology, it’s just terrible for democracy. This idea that, yeah, God could only get behind one candidate, whoever it is, is really just terrible. It’s corrosive of democracy, and I think one of the biggest problems with it, then, is you also see… Back in seminary, we talked about things like Manichean heresies in Christianity, I don’t know if you remember this or not…

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

Wow, yes, I do remember.

 

ROBBY JONES:

 

…Or the Gnostics. And one of the big Christian heresies was this kind of division of the world into good and evil, and that only certain people had these insights from God about the true nature of good and evil, and that things were black and white. And that’s what we’ve got this resurgence of. And so what we saw that’s just so destructive is this idea that, yeah, one party is God’s party, one candidate is God’s candidate.

 

And the flip side of that, which I think is the darker side, is that the other candidate is in league, literally, with the devil; the other candidate is satanic, the other candidate is evil. And I think that kind of bifurcation in politics as a battle of good and evil, and you assign one of those two labels to one of the two candidates that are standing for election – that’s the end of democracy if we go down that road.

 

Because what it means, then, it also means, just for the bigger picture, democracy depends on people being willing to lose and willing to say that they lost. And so I think one of the big things we can celebrate in this election is that one of our two political parties was willing to say they lost, right? Kamala Harris didn’t hold out the election and say, no, you know… We should really be celebrating that, that she conceded the election. We said that she lost. In close elections, we demand a recount. We can challenge things in court, all that’s legitimate in a democracy. But at the end of the day, we acknowledge we lost, and then we regroup and we reorganize if we’re on the losing side, and we try again.

 

But I think this good and evil thing, the worst thing about it, is that it means not only do we demonize the elected official who’s on the other side, if we’re convinced that God’s only on one side of it, but we demonize our fellow citizens. And I don’t mean that metaphorically, I mean we literally demonize them. We say they are in league with the devil by supporting this other candidate. And again, that just corrodes the bonds of civic friendship, because what you have to believe about your fellow citizens that you disagree with: at some level, you have to grant that they are operating in good faith. That by their own lights, even if you disagree with them, they have a different view from you, but you want to kind of have enough humility to realize, you know what, I may be wrong at the end of the day, and it may be that I changed my mind on this. And the whole idea of democracy is that we keep debating, but we don’t declare that one side’s good, one side’s evil – and of course, it’s always, God is on our side if we have that worldview.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

You’ve done a lot of work, especially with your last book, which was really an impressive book called The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future. A lot about how we tell the story of history, and how important it is to tell a story that’s accurate. And we are really seeing a lot of efforts around the country that are diminishing histories that make the White population uncomfortable, let’s just say what it is.

 

And I think one of the things about January 6th that I’m really worried about is that eight years ago, Kelly Anne Conway, after the inauguration and people were saying, well, it wasn’t as big as Obama’s and that was just a fact. She said, we have alternative facts. And I think we’re about to get a new effort, it’s already happening, an effort at a new story that a huge percentage of our population is going to believe about what happened on January 6th. And people are going to forget what it looked like. They’re going to forget what it felt like.

 

After January 6th, all these corporations spoke out and said, we’re not going to support people who were a part of this. All these Republicans and Democrats condemned it – and now we’re seeing a backtracking on all of this, and we’re seeing an effort to rewrite history based on power. Given your own sense of both exploring history and writing history, but also examining histories that have been suppressed, how do you understand this moment and how what each of us might do in order to not buy into the big lie, and to continue to tell the real history?

 

ROBBY JONES:

 

Well, I’ll start with the big picture. I’m really glad we’re talking about this. So, in The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, it really was about how do we tell a truer story about who we are and how we got here, because really, it’s the only way we’re going to be able to look into the future. And I’ve been so reliant in a lot of this historical work on the work of James Baldwin, and I’m going to read a little thing here, because it just goes right to the heart of it. So this is a piece he wrote in 1964, right in the middle of the battles over the Civil Rights Acts of ‘64 and ‘65 being passed, where Americans were also arguing about what’s our historical narrative and what does it mean for who gets to be truly American, who gets admitted to full rights.

 

He put it this way about myth-making and history and why truth is important. He said this: “It is the very nature of the myth that those who are its victims and, at the same time, its perpetrators, should, by virtue of those two facts, be rendered unable to examine the myth or even to suspect, much less recognize, that it is a myth that controls and blasts their lives. To be locked in the past means, in effect, that one has no past, since one can never assess or use it. And if one cannot use the past, one cannot function in the present, and so one can never be free. I take this to be, as I say, the American situation in relief.”

 

So that was 1964, but this idea that if we don’t have the truth, a true sense of where we came from, if we can’t tell the truth about our past, we don’t have anything we can even use to unlock a present that we can all kind of live into together. So it’s hugely important, and so we’re going to see, I think, battles over the past because of how they’re usable in the present. That’s why we’re going to see these battles.

 

And let’s not forget, too, that not only are we going to see this rewriting around January 6th up front and center, but in 2026, we’ll be having the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and it will be a whole other round of American myth-making, and we know where this is going to go under Trump. The last thing he did before he left office was set up the 1776 commission to rewrite history. And that’s one of the first things Biden did when he came in office was to shut that down. But we’re going to see that resurrected.

 

But I want to give you a couple of numbers here, because we actually asked, just ahead of the election, about what people thought about this lie about the January 6th attacks, and so we asked people: “Do you agree or disagree that the people convicted for their role in the violent January 6th attacks on the US Capitol are really patriots who are being held hostage by the government?” Because that was one of Trump’s biggest talking points during the campaign: they’re patriots. They’re being held hostage by the government. So we said we would ask.

 

And these are people who were convicted; not just there, but we asked specifically about the people who had been convicted for their role in the violence on January 6th. And even asking it that way among Republicans – they’re essentially divided. It’s 46% of Republicans, nearly half, saying that they agree that they’re patriots. And if we look at Republican subgroups, you can really see, again, people who believe that big lie.

 

If you look at Republicans who believe the lie, and that’s two-thirds of them, it is two-thirds who say yes, these people are patriots. If you look at people who have favorable views of Republicans, who have favorable views of Trump, it’s a majority, 52%. If you look at Republicans who are Christian Nationalists, it is 56% who believe this. Republicans who are QAnon believers, it’s 67% who believe they’re patriots. And Republicans who watch Fox News – it’s two-thirds who believe the people who committed violence on January 6th were actually patriots. I mean, that’s how far down this road we are, as crazy as that sounds.

 

And among religious groups, it’s not quite as high, but it is four in ten White evangelicals who have gone all the way down to saying, yes, these people are patriots.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

Those are stunning statistics. You know, the flip side is, it still means, what, two-thirds of the American people disagree with that.

 

ROBBY JONES:

 

That’s right. Actually, it’s almost seven in ten who disagree.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

And I want to lift up that number, because it shows this is a fringe group. I mean, it’s not fringe, it’s substantial, I guess fringe would be like one in ten. But still, it’s nowhere near the majority. Even among Republicans it’s a contested question, and I think it’s really important for us to talk about that, and say, do you really want this kind of Republican Party? Do you really want this kind of government? And he’s promised, day one, to do this.

 

And I think that’s a weakness, because this is about Donald Trump’s vanity. Ultimately, it’s about his vanity. It’s not about principle, it’s not about America, it’s not even about the Republican Party. It’s about his personal vanity. He can’t be a loser, which shows how brittle this guy is. And so I think that there’s an opportunity for those of us who do have a voice, and for the wider media, for us to really make sure that we speak into that seven out of ten and say, you’re not crazy. They’re trying to make you feel like you’re crazy, but you’re not crazy. You’re right. This is outrageous. And it’s outrageous that a president is coming in and making this his priority, when he was talking about a lot of things on the campaign trail. He’s saying this is his priority because it’s all about him, again. It’s about him being a winner.

 

This election felt, for me, and I think probably I can include you, it was a devastating result in that Trump got reelected; but what we are insisting is that he did not get a mandate for a lot of the things that he’s saying he’s going to do, because they are still unpopular with a wider percentage.

 

And I wonder if you could talk into that, because a lot of us really lean into the statistics of PRRI, the organization that you founded and are still president of. So let’s talk about that, because one of the first shows I did afterwards, and had some great people on the show, and the consensus is this is not a mandate for his Christian Nationalist agenda.

 

ROBBY JONES:

 

No, it’s not even close. It’s just really clear. If you look at the numbers, I mean, he didn’t get 51 percent, much less 60 percent, 70 percent, you know, anything you might think of as a mandate. I mean, this was a squeaker of an election, really. Turnout was down a little bit, but regardless, I’ll put it this way, too: in a country as big as ours, if you just moved two hundred and thirty three thousand votes, you could change the outcome of the election. In just Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, 233,000 votes would have been the difference in those states and would have been the difference in the election. So that’s how close it was in a country of nearly 300 million people. So yeah, this is not a mandate.

 

A lot of this stuff is wildly unpopular. I think that’s exactly right, especially the more extreme things, here. I think the real problem is we have only two political parties, that’s one structural problem we have in the country.  If he was in a European country, he’d be Marine Le Pen in France. He would have a White nationalist party, a white Christian Nationalist party, and it would have 25% to 30% support, max, and that’s the base he’d be operating out of. He’d be the far-right Christian Nationalist candidate.

 

But in our system, he’s managed to take over one of our two political parties and amplify that 25 to 30 percent into what looks like a majority, but it’s not. And I think that’s the real problem, is that even among Republicans, like we said, that idea that the January 6th protesters were really hostages and are patriots – it doesn’t get a majority, even among Republicans. They’re kind of divided.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

And this includes all the kind of stuff that’s in Project 2025. Every time they talk about it it’s very unpopular, but everyone they’re electing, everyone they’re elevating in their cabinet, are all proponents of Project 2025. And so they are going to try to continue to roll back abortion rights in this country. They are going to try to roll back LGBTQ rights, and anybody who doesn’t think that’s true is living in an illusion. You don’t understand the animus towards – especially trans, but then it’s everyone. This is Christian Nationalism 101. They want to continue with censorship efforts. They want to continue bringing prayer into school and 10 Commandments into school. All of these kinds of things, and those are not supported by the majority of American people.

 

And so it’s just really important – and your statistics and your polling is so helpful – a reminder that at the same time Donald Trump was elected president in this squeaker, school vouchers had been defeated, abortion was largely passed, except for when it didn’t reach 60 percent in Florida. There were just a lot of ways in which the other kinds of issues didn’t show a mandate for the kind of radical ideas that Donald Trump is going to have.

 

ROBBY JONES:

 

On many of these things that we think of as culture war issues or controversial issues, today the country is really more like a two-thirds, one-third country than a 50-50 country, even on what we think of as controversial issues. Let me just do three real quick.

 

So, abortion rights. It is now nearly two-thirds of the country, post-Dobbs, support has gone up since the striking down of Roe v Wade. It’s always been around the high 50s, close to 6 in 10. It’s now 64 percent of the country supports the legal right to abortion and, as you said, even in Florida, Ron DeSantis’ Florida, it was 57 percent that voted to protect abortion rights in Florida, of all places.

 

On the legal right of gay and lesbian people to marry, it is now nearly two-thirds of the country that supports the legal right to marry in the country.

 

And immigration – a path to citizenship. Talking about should those who are in the country illegally be provided a way to become citizens if they meet certain requirements? We’ve been asking that question for more than ten years. Every time we’ve asked that question, it’s around six in ten Americans who support a path to citizenship. So those are three that we think of, like, oh, we’re all divided – but there’re actually like six in ten or more on the supportive side of those statements.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

It’s going to be really interesting. There was a kind of active disbelief. I’ve seen all these Trump voters in 2024 saying, oh, he’s not really going to do that. He’s not going to round up immigrants, he’s not going to pass an abortion thing. He’s not going to come after LGBTQ people. You know, they voted for him thinking he’s not going to do the things that he said he’s going to do. And if we learned one thing from 2020 – believe him when he says he’s going to try to do something. When he’s going to separate families at the border, he’s going to do it. It’s really wild.

 

You know, we’re two White guys, middle class White guys. I’d love to hear a little bit more from you about the interplay between race and religion and what it means going forward. I mean, we can talk about the election somewhat, but I’m really interested in what it means going forward.

 

And I just I want to read this… Bill Kristol just tweeted this. He said, “I think it should be kind of a big deal that Elon Musk tweeted at 1:03 am, ‘Only the AFD can save Germany’ – and the AFD is the neo-Nazi party.” Elon Musk comes from South Africa, a White South African. I just find this absolutely shocking, you know, as an example of how race is playing out in this drama that’s about to unfold. Obviously, I talk a lot about religion on this show, and for a good reason, because that’s my expertise in my personal life. But you know, you can’t talk about religion without talking about race, ever – and certainly not right now, as we go into 2025 and start looking at what will be happening across our country at the national level, and then at various locations. You’re from Mississippi, you’ve tracked this stuff for a long time. What do you see, 2025 America, what do you see as far as the interplay between race and religion?

 

ROBBY JONES:

 

Well, you mentioned South Africa. One of the things I outline, I talk a little bit about my own family’s history in my previous book White Too Long, is the kind of growing realization for me, growing up in Mississippi, that I grew up among the ruins of an apartheid state. You know, I grew up in the 70s and 80s in Mississippi. I remember – this is how close at hand this is – I was in third grade, I was born in ’68, I’m 56 years old – in third grade was the first time our schools actually got desegregated, in 1976. That’s 22 years after Brown v. Board of Education demanded that that happened. So Mississippi drug its heels for 22 years until the Jackson Public Schools got around to doing that.

 

So that’s in my lifetime, and so that is all this struggle – that we’re trying to struggle from, really, a democracy intended for White people into a pluralistic democracy. And that’s been the real struggle of really, the 20th century, the way of kind of thinking about the 20th century, and you can still see the legacy.

 

I mean, how did we get the two political parties that we have today? The two political parties, if you look at them, the most outstanding feature of them is how the parties have sorted themselves by race and religion. So today, Republicans, self-identified Republicans today, are 70 percent White and Christian. Now, the country is only 41 percent White and Christian. The Democratic Party is 25 percent White and Christian. So you can see this like stark sorting.

 

And I also want to say this: that often, I think way too often, even in progressive circles, we try to talk about the problem that we’re having as polarization. As if the division itself is the problem. But I think that’s a wholly wrongheaded way of looking at what’s going on. It’s sort of like, well, was polarization the problem during the Civil Rights Movement?

 

Well, yeah, we were divided and we were polarized over White supremacy and injustice. And if you believe in equality, if you believe in democracy, we ought to be polarized over White supremacy!

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

There is right and wrong, yeah, a hundred percent.

 

ROBBY JONES:

 

So just looking at the vote this time, just kind of to bring this point close to home, it is still the case that if you want to describe in very broad terms the voting patterns in the religious landscape, it is this: for the most part, White Christians support Republican candidates, and everybody else supports Democratic candidates.

 

The one exception to that rule are Latino Protestants. They’re four percent of the population, it’s kind of a smallish group, it’s growing – but they are largely evangelical and charismatic, and they kind of are adjacent to the White evangelical kind of cultural and theological world, and they tend to vote that way. But overall it is White Christian groups.

 

And it’s been this way guess since when? The Civil Rights Movement. What gave us the patterns of the parties that we have today? It was White Christian flight from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party after the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965. I mean, to make this really personal, all my grandparents were Democrats. But by the time I got to college, there was not even an operating college Democrat group at my little Baptist college in Mississippi. There was a very active college Republican group, and it was all about White Christians fleeing the Democratic Party for the Republican Party – not over gay rights, not over abortion: over integration and civil rights for African Americans. That was the fuel, is still the fuel that gives us the two political parties today.

 

And one last point here: I’m still stunned that the two groups that are the furthest apart in the electorate are White evangelical Protestants and African-American Protestants. There is more distance between White evangelicals and Black Protestants than there are between White evangelicals and Jews, than there are between White evangelicals and Muslims, than there are between White evangelicals and the religiously unaffiliated. These are the two groups, and from my point of view, growing up in the south, growing up as southern Baptists, here’s what I’m saying to my fellow White evangelicals and White Christians: Look, for most of our country’s history, we have been on the wrong side of civil rights, the wrong side of slavery, the wrong side of Jim Crow. If we are this far from our Black brothers and sisters in politics today, maybe that ought to give us a little bit of pause.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

Wow, that is really stark, and it’s absolutely true. And if we have a great tradition of Christianity in this country, and we do, it is the Black Protestant tradition. It’s just important to name that. And I’m more and more convinced that Make America Great Again is really a movement to 1963. What Make America Great Again means is pre-civil rights. And all of that is tied with everything else that happened in the 60s, which is the Immigration Act and the movement towards gay liberation and women’s liberation. All of that. They want to go back to when everything was great for them, for one small group in America…

 

ROBBY JONES:

 

It’s probably early 50s, so it’s pre-Brown v. Board of Education.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

Oh right, that’s right, that’s absolutely right. So here we are. You know, this is the first show of 2025. What do you see on the horizon? What are the trends that, looking backwards, we can look forward? What do you see as demographic trends, religious affiliation trends – and what will that mean for a Trump-Vance agenda, for looking towards 2026? It doesn’t have to be just politics, but you know this general sense of, where’s America going? Because, believe me, the world is wondering this question: whither America. Whither America.

 

ROBBY JONES:

 

Well, I would say that the kind of political agenda that we’re likely to see is going to be at great odds with the country itself. We’ve already talked about this a little bit, but the trends are pretty clear. So, back in 2016, when I published The End of White Christian America, I was talking about demographic trends. And I was just highlighting then that we had moved from being a majority White Christian country to one that had slipped below a majority White Christian country. So I was charting a move from the country being 54% White and Christian as recently as 2008, to, by 2016, it had gone to 47% White and Christian. Today, that number is 41% White and Christian. Right, so it’s just continued to go down.

 

So the big trends in terms of race and religion, are still declining numbers of White Christians in the country – and that includes, by the way, White evangelical Protestants. In fact, there is no group that has declined more over the last 20 years than White evangelical Protestants. They’ve gone from being nearly a quarter of the country to being only 13 percent of the country – that is one-three – today. And yet, because Trump has leaned in, they’ve just had this outsized influence – and they vote 85% for Trump. So they’re kind of just all in for one political party.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

You know, there were several years there where there was an incredible gloating of the evangelical community, like versus the mainline Protestants. They were like, oh, it’s because your theology is so bad, it’s because your faith in Jesus is so bad, and because you’re not really Christian and all of these things that you’re declining and we’re not, because we’re, obviously, the only ones blessed by God in this country. And I should be above it, I really should, I admit it. But there’s something a little bit gratifying of this; like, okay, you know, talk to me again about how you guys are so much better than the rest of the Christian population. And I’m sure they’re filled with humility right now.

 

ROBBY JONES:

 

And they’re now the same size. They’re now the same size, Actually. The White mainline group and the White evangelical group are both 13% of the population.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

I think it’s worth saying, because there was this sense, like, we’re ascendant, you’re descendant; and as far as power, they have really sold their soul. I’ll mention one other thing, because I had a great conversation with Ruth Graham – and I want to see if this tracks with you: In 2020, there was a little bit of pastors kind of going, oh wow, the rank and file is kind of pro-Trump and I’m going to hold my nose and try to manage this, and figure out a way. And she said in 2024, that was gone. Like, basically, the pastors, the leaders, the elites of the evangelical movement had gone all in for Trump, and there was no longer really – aside from a few, Russell Moore, a few on the margins – pretty much all of them had gone all in. And that in that way, just as Trump transformed the Republican Party, Trump has transformed the White evangelical religious tradition in America.

 

ROBBY JONES:

 

Well, you know this idea that White evangelicals were holding their nose for Trump. The last time that was true was on Super Tuesday in 2016, or before that actually, and that’s when they actually turned to support Trump over Cruz in the primaries. Before that, it looked like there were other candidates – Huckabee, Cruz, other ones – who were viable, legitimate evangelical background kinds of candidates. And they chose Trump over those people.

 

And ever since then, we’ve been tracking Trump’s favorability, and this is where you just ask: do you like the guy? Not, are you going to vote for him? Do you like the guy? Do you have favorable or unfavorable view from him? Ever since then, no matter what has been, no matter what scandal has broken, no matter what comments, he has never really been below 60% – 60% approval – and his approval has been high as 80%. It’s kind of gone between 60 and 80% every time. It’s back up in the seventies for this last election.

 

And I want to say this, because I think this is the other myth, and it’s a zombie myth I am just trying to single-handedly kill, is – that’s one, that they were holding their nose and voting for Trump. They’ve always been down with his agenda: his anti-immigrant agenda, his anti-gay agenda, like all of it. They’ve always been down with that. But the other thing is that it was Christians in name only that are supporting Trump, right, it’s the non-churchgoing evangelical. Again, there is virtually no evidence for that claim; and what, in fact, what we have found very, very consistently is that among White evangelicals, the more you attend church, the more likely you are to support Trump. So it is coming through the churches, absolutely through the churches.

 

In the last election, those who attended weekly or more, White evangelicals, 88 percent said they supported Trump. If you look at those who are sitting out church and say they seldom or never attend, it’s 77. So they’re still all in all of them, but there’s an 11 point spread more likely to support Trump If you were sitting in Sunday school, listening to sermons, and being a part of that community.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

I really appreciate you going up against the zombies there, because that really makes it more clear.

 

So, we’re going to see questions about immigration. We mentioned immigration. You know, I think that there was certainly a time when evangelical churches were actually participating in sanctuary and in lobbying for more humane immigration policy. As you mentioned, some of the ways that evangelical churches have stayed afloat is the influx of immigrants. And so how do you see just a few of these big issues that are coming down the pike. How do you see those playing out among not just evangelicals? We’re just talking about that. Your research goes across the board: Jews and Muslims and mainline and more like dharmic traditions. How do you see religion functioning as part of our democracy in 2025?

 

ROBBY JONES:

 

I still think that the striking thing is the way that far too many White Christian groups have kind of abandoned basic principles of pluralistic democracy for their own self-interest. And I think that’s a real tragedy; and the only piece I’ve written publicly and published was a piece in Time Magazine after the election, called “What White Christians Have Wrought,” because we would not still be talking about Trump right now if it were not for White Christian voters.

 

And we’ve been talking a lot about White evangelicals who did vote more than 8 in 10 for Trump. But the thing we forget, though, is that other White Christian groups, White Catholics and White mainliners – six in ten. Six in ten. Every time Trump has been on the ballot, six in ten have supported him. And so I think we’ve got to talk about that piece, as well. That’s kind of important here.

 

But on immigration, the really heartbreaking thing is that… So, I’m with you. I remember doing a data presentation on immigration at a bipartisan closed-door meeting that had a bunch of groups, religious groups in it as well, and I sat next to Richard Land at that meeting, who was at the time at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for the Southern Baptist Conviction. He was at the table as part of a coalition talking about the possibility of supporting a path to citizenship.

 

We had a Gang of Eight way back during the George W. Bush years, bipartisan senators who were trying to kind of craft a bill and George W. Bush was likely to support it. And it couldn’t get passed, but there was still a kind of effort there. And what we see in the data, I think the heartbreaking thing is that we do see the evidence of the kind of corrosive racist drumbeat that Trump has been beating over the last decade, now. So you’ve got to remember that we’ve had a decade of Trump demonizing immigrants. That’s a long time for the leading candidate of a political party to be on, and it’s one of his biggest talking points. And it’s gotten worse, I just want to say that, too. We should be really clear about this, that if we didn’t think it could get worse from the 2016 era, it did get worse in the 2024 election, where Trump literally moved to quoting Mein Kampf and Nazi imagery about immigrants poisoning the blood of the country.

 

And the heartbreaking thing we see in the data, whether we’re talking about policy or people getting on board with these awful racist and Nazi sentiments, is that we can see the erosion of support for humane immigration policies among White Christian voters. You could just see it.

 

So ten years ago, there was a slight majority of both Republicans and White evangelicals, the most conservative group in the religious landscape, who supported a path to citizenship. So it was like 52, 53, 54%, something like that, every time we’d poll on it. So we had a bipartisan, cross-religious landscape support, majority support, for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who are living in the country. Those numbers have cratered. They are down now in the 30s, and there’s only one reason they’re down in the 30s – and that’s because Donald Trump has been hammering on this for a decade.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

Yeah, One of the true disgusting parts of this last campaign was the the conversation about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and the fact that it was a made up fact about eating pets. Vance has admitted he had made it up, and they never would recant it. It became continually a talking point. It’s just reprehensible, it’s immoral, and that’s what we’re living in.

 

Okay, I want you to give me, before I let you go, I want you to give me a headline of how religion played out in 2025. When we talk in 2026, what’s going to be the headline? You have to put on your visionary, your prophetic – not prophetic in the social justice, but prophetic in the seeing the future – hat and say: what do you think will be the headline? And I will hold you to this, and I want all of our listeners to hold him to this. What’s the headline for 2025? Religion and democracy. You’ve had a lot of good headlines and good book titles, so give me the headline for 2025 religion and democracy.

 

ROBBY JONES:

 

Wow, you really put me on the spot here. You know, one of the things pollsters really hate to do is project into the future. So I don’t know what the headline is going to be exactly, but here’s what I would say, I guess. I’m worried that the headlines will be: White Christians capitulate. That they don’t find their feet, that they don’t stand up, and that what we see are something like, White Christians fail to speak out against mass deportations. That’s the thing that’s haunting me, that’s the thing that’s on my mind.

 

And I went back and looked at – I hate to be such a downer, right here at the beginning of the year, but I may say that as a warning as well, because we’ve been here before. And I went back and actually looked at some public opinion polling from 1942, which is when we actually did do internment camps in this country against people of Italian, German, and particularly Japanese ancestry that impacted over 100,000 Japanese Americans at the time.

 

And when public opinion polling asked about it at the time, during all of the war fervor, there was more than nine in ten support for that policy. That we should all remember was FDR, was Franklin Delano Roosevelt that issued that order. And even when people asked like, should they ever be able to return? Like half the country said no, they should not even be able to be returned. So, we’ve been capable of going down that path before, and I think the thing that worries me the most is I see more ducking and covering among White Christian groups than I see standing up for justice now, and so these next few months are going to be absolutely critical. I hope you make me eat some crow next year when that headline does not come to pass.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

Yeah. Friendly amendment: I think, as a headline writer for Huffington Post for a long time, I feel like I can take that and up the clickability a little bit. “White Christians Fail Moral Test.” I think that that’s really what I’m hearing. And let’s say this is an invitation to prove us wrong. Please prove us wrong. We’re pointing fingers out there. This is us, you know. This is us. This is our communities, this is our traditions. My own tradition, the mainline Protestant tradition. We have to answer for this. So, let’s just say prove us wrong, people.

 

ROBBY JONES:

 

One last thing. I would love to see us be polarized over injustice. That’s my last thought.

 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

 

Polarizing the way the Civil Rights Movement, and that there is an understanding that there is a right or wrong answer, and that we will be very clear that there is a right and wrong answer – and that some are standing on the right side. Let us, let us hope, let us pray.

 

Dr. Robert P. Jones is founder and president of the Public Religion Research Institute. His books include The End of White Christian America and White Too Long the Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. His latest, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future, has just been published in paperback. And his Substack, which is really worth following, is robertpjones.substack.com.

 

Robby, it’s always great to talk to you. You’re the most depressing person I know. I’m joking! You’re not. Actually, I feel better after talking to you, so thank you so much for being with us on The State of Belief one more time.

 

ROBBY JONES:

 

Thanks, Paul, and thanks for all you do.