This week, Policy Watch published a report on the Christian nationalism animating The American Renewal Project, a conservative evangelical group working closely with the N.C. Republican party to promote GOP candidates and recruit pastors to run for office.

The group, which rejects the concept of a separation between church and state, seeks to make its conservative interpretation of Christianity central to government policy and to mandate religious instruction and Christian prayer in public schools. Among the Renewal Project’s most passionate supporters: Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson. Robinson – the top elected Republican in the state, now teasing a run for governor – has headlined Renewal Project events at churches across the state all year, including one this week with U.S. Senate candidate Ted Budd.

The Republican party has long courted evangelical Christians, said Dr. Michael Bitzer, professor of History and Political Science at Catawba College in Salisbury. But research continues to show Americans becoming less religious – with declines concentrated among the protestants who make up the American evangelical movement. Anxiety over that shift has tightened the bonds between evangelicals and the Republican party, Bitzer said, leading to a GOP embrace of a brand of Christian nationalism that was once well outside the mainstream.

“Just as Black African American voters are reliable Democratic voters, evangelicals are now reliable Republican voters,” Bitzer said. “They tend to influence the candidates and they become the candidates seeking office under the Republican nomination.”

As the society continues to change and diversify, Bitzer said, many evangelicals have become worried about losing governing power in what they see as a zero sum political game. The recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade was the result of a 50 year campaign to return decisions about abortion to the states, he said, where religious conservatives have more influence. But increasingly, generations coming of political age have no religious affiliation.

Last year, the Pew Research Center found about 30 percent of American surveyed were religious “nones” – people who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular” when asked about their religious identity. When Pew began asking its current questions about religious identity in 2007, it found American Christians outnumbered religious “nones” five-to-one. Today, that’s down to a little more than two-to-one in a steady downward trend.

Self-identified evangelicals or “born again” Christians make up 60 percent of U.S. protestants. But the overall protestant population – evangelical and not – has dropped 10 percent in the last ten years, from about half  of Americans to 40 percent. The remaining evangelicals tend to be whiter and much older than the general population, Bitzer said, while rising generations are both more racially and ethnically diverse and less in line with socially conservative evangelical Christian values.

“Society is changing, there’s transformation under way,” Bitzer said. “And there are concerns by evangelicals about losing their governing power.”

To hold on to that power, Bitzer said, they need to instill some of their religious beliefs into government policy. Read more