The current direction of the GOP has been in my mind this week for reasons that have nothing to do with its exponentially growing list of potential 2024 standard-bearers. Instead, a few articles I read this week, alongside an interview I did with a reporter that should come out over the weekend, had me thinking about the mass politics of the GOP and what they mean.

I was asked about the GOP’s “war on wokeness.” I won’t go into details until I see the final piece. Instead, the pieces made me think about what the heck is going on in the GOP in particular, but more generally, with right-wing politics. The first is an op-ed by Kevin Bolling, the Secular Student Alliance executive director, in Newsweek. The piece titled “The Tides Are Against a President Ron DeSantis” argues that the policies promoted by the governor in Florida won’t work at a national level since they face many obstacles. The primary reason is the rise of the nones and the decline of white Christians. The latter have become the core of the GOP coalition and their values are increasingly at odds with a secularizing population.

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Bolling’s partially right, but he’s also committing a mistake I’ve spent nearly two decades complaining about. That mistake is the assumption, in this case implicit, that “demographics is destiny.” We’ve been hearing and reading about the coming so-called “minority-majority nation” for a few decades. Though the minority-majority nation trope applies to the moment when white Americans become a plurality (not even a minority) of the population, with the rise of the nones, we are also hearing about the end of white Christians’ dominance.

However, power and demographics do not go hand in hand in this country. Bolling is right that the policies promoted and enacted by Republican leaders such as Florida Governor DeSantis are unpopular with many segments of the population, in cases even a majority of the population depending on the policy. But the current incarnation of the GOP is quite aware of those pitfalls. White Christians are overrepresented in government and are working hard to consolidate power. In the case of white Christians in the GOP it also means treating democracy as an inconvenience.

The next article is by Hemant Mehta in Friendly Atheist. Commenting on a piece showing that a plurality of self-identifying Republicans report seldom or never attending religious services. Hemant claims that “Republicans who used to enjoy church for how it gave them cover to unleash their bigotry and force their extremism on others realized that the Republican Party, not their local congregations, was the best vessel for getting that done.”

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In this case, I think a few things are happening. One is that post-COVID, church attendance has decreased substantially. This change ought to affect Republicans as well. Mehta argues that “these are not nones,” but for the most part, they are. The data used to measure attendance in the Washington Post piece Mehta references compares the 2008 and 2022 Cooperative Congressional Electoral Study (CCES).

Between 2008 and 2022, the nonreligious population doubled from 15% to 30%. However, the U.S. population also increased. In 2008 there were roughly 34 million nones; by 2021 (the last year available) there were 77 million nones. Though most nones identify as independent and the partisan ones skew heavily Democratic, between one-quarter and one-third of the nones vote Republican.

I haven’t downloaded the latest CCES, but I was playing with a 2022 Pew dataset recently. I checked the proportion of nones among Republicans who report seldom or never attending religious services. That dataset shows that 46% of Republicans attend religious services seldom or never, consistent with the CCES finding. The nones account for 23% of the Republicans who seldom attend and 60%(!) of those who never attend; 39% of the Republican seldom/never attend cohort are nones. I noted in 2020 that Democratic- and Republican-leaning nones stand for very different things. In many ways, Republican nones are down with white supremacy but with a side of science.

Finally, Prof. Geraldo Cadava writes about the rise of Latino white supremacy in the New Yorker. Responding to the recent event in which perpetrators identifying as Latinx have committed atrocities in the name of white supremacy. The article attempts to explain, positing theories by various scholars, why Latinxs would embrace white supremacy. Prof. Cadava is the author of The Hispanic Republican, a very good book with the same blind spot that his analysis in the New Yorker is missing. No mention of religion or hispanophilia.

In the case of religion, there is a case to be made about the role that it plays in Latinx identity. For example, this year PRRI found that 29% of Latinx evangelicals are adherents of Christian Nationalism and an additional 22% are sympathizers. This group’s vote has been breaking heavily Republican. In my dissertation, I quote a pair of Pew polls that asked Latinxs about their identity. Evangelicals were the most likely to identify as “Christian” or “American” first, then some variation of Hispanic/Latino/Own nationality. In other words, the toxic version of Christianity preached by the right-wing is not dominant among Latinxs but is also not rare.

Then, there is the prevalence of hispanophilia. I don’t have numbers on this because as far as I know and can find, surveys of Latinxs have not asked about their Hispanic heritage insofar as it means coming/descending from Spain. Growing up in Puerto Rico, I was exposed to way too many who were proud of their European heritage and their Catholic heritage. These people were conservative and upper-class. The type of people who fawn over fascists. Prof. Cadava mentions that one of the infamous murderers had merchandise labeled “RWDS” as in “right-wing death squad.” And it checks out, these hispano/eurocentric Latinxs are the kind who had no qualms about Franco’s Spain or Chile’s Pinochet.

In conclusion, the views of the born-again Trumpist GOP are abhorrent, and they are unpopular, especially among groups in the population that are under attack. However, unpopularity and inability to get elected are two different things. They are not going anywhere in a country that is heavily gerrymandered and with institutions such as the U.S. Senate that favor conservative white populations. But they know their power may dwindle and are consolidating it.

The overtly Christian nature of the right wing may repel a lot of non-Christians, including the nonreligious. It doesn’t mean that those views will repel all the nonreligious. Many nones are racist, misogynist, and authoritarian. Their whiteness is more important than their atheism. Likewise, though Latinxs are in the crosshairs of racist Republican policies, many love dictatorships as long as they do not belong to the oppressed classes.

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• podcast interviews Margaret Downey about Thomas Paine. I have my qualms about “founder idolatry,” but Paine’s profile must be elevated in our community. Certainly, a better character than the one many love to highlight: Thomas Jefferson.

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