White Christians now make up less than half of all Americans, but virtually ALL of the Republican party.

Courtesy of the National Journal:  

Long the dom­in­ant group in Amer­ic­an re­li­gious life, White Chris­ti­ans have fallen be­low a ma­jor­ity of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion—and they are mov­ing to the right polit­ic­ally as they re­cede. 

The res­ult is that, like race and age, re­li­gious af­fil­i­ation marks a sharpen­ing point of dis­tinc­tion between Re­pub­lic­ans and Demo­crats, pre­vi­ously un­pub­lished res­ults from the Pew Re­search Cen­ter’s massive Re­li­gious Land­scape sur­vey show. 

As the na­tion re­lent­lessly di­ver­si­fies, both in its ra­cial com­pos­i­tion and re­li­gious pref­er­ences, White Chris­ti­ans now rep­res­ent just 46 per­cent of Amer­ic­an adults, ac­cord­ing to Pew data provided in re­sponse to a re­quest from Next Amer­ica. That’s down from a 55 per­cent ma­jor­ity as re­cently as 2007, and much high­er fig­ures through most of U.S. his­tory. 

Yet even as White Chris­ti­ans shrink in their over­all num­bers, they still ac­count for nearly sev­en-in-10 Amer­ic­ans who identi­fy with, or lean to­ward, the Re­pub­lic­an Party, the Pew study found. White Chris­ti­ans, in fact, rep­res­ent as large a share of the Re­pub­lic­an co­ali­tion today as they did of Amer­ic­an so­ci­ety over­all in 1984, when Ron­ald Re­agan won reelec­tion. A clear ma­jor­ity of all White Chris­ti­ans across the United States now identi­fy as Re­pub­lic­an, Pew found.

The data demonstrated that the result of the changing demographics is that the Republican party is becoming more entrenched in conservative religious values while the Democratic party is split among the white less religious liberals, and the more traditional, and more religious, blacks and Hispanic voters.

This means that the GOP can get the voters animated with simple talking points claiming there is an attack on their religion, or that the brown people are coming to take their freedoms away, while the gays are indoctrinating heir children.

On the other hand the Democrats have to walk a finer line, preaching more tolerant attitudes, while also being careful not to insult those raised in more traditional Christian homes.

Even though the trend is working in favor of the Democrats, there are still numerous elections ahead where the cohesion of the Republican party presents a real challenge to Democratic candidates.

And in smaller local elections, where getting out the conservative vote means simply paying a visit to the local churches, the challenge for liberals is to find a candidate that the various fractions within the Democratic party can rally behind.

Sadly this is the problem with leading those who make decisions based on critical thinking, as opposed to those who makes theirs based on faith.