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How do you think religion in the West will interact with the Culture War in the next few elections, and in the future? Up until recently, the religious right seemed to be a mainstay of at least American politics. In Europe of course, Christianity is mostly an irrelevant force (though theoretically Catholics should have some weight?).
However, the evangelical right has been losing quite a bit of power and cultural cachet, and we're seeing the rise of more traditional versions of Christianity such as Catholicism and to a lesser extent, Orthodoxy. Buddhism has also made inroads in a more serious way, as well as Islam mostly via immigration of Muslim peoples.
In the future, how will these religions impact politics? Personally I see a fusion of Buddhism x Christianity already happening, and expect a sort of Christian orthodoxy mixing in Buddhism mental techniques as the most successful religion of the 21st century. That being said, I feel it could shake out in many different areas on the political spectrum - ironically, many of the Orthodox priests I know personally are surprisingly liberal.
One area we could see a resurgence is in monasteries, and the potential downstream impact in local communities. Within the Catholic community (and Orthodoxy in the U.S.) there has been a groundswell lately of pushes for more monasteries, and revitalizing the monastic order in general. We'll see how it shakes out.
Tell me, what do you think religion will do to the modern political landscape?
I'm not actually sure we are seeing a rise in more traditional, or 'high' forms of Christianity. There are some links here, but as far as I'm aware Orthodoxy is not growing in America in any particularly significant way, and the supposed trend of people converting to Catholicism is mostly a few high-profile examples, rather than a larger statistical trend. If you take away migration, the Catholic Church in America looks like a mainline Protestant church, like Episcopalians. Their retention is quite dismal, and to the extent that they've managed to hide that decline and retain political or social force, it's on the back of Catholic migrants. Evangelical Christianity remains the 'stickiest' form of Christianity in the US.
Now that said, raw numbers don't tell the whole story - the church that most successfully cultivates elites is not necessarily the one that will have the most social or political influence. The most visible example of this is probably the Supreme Court. Catholics utterly dominate the Supreme Court. At the moment it's six Catholics, two Protestants, and a Jew, and notably it has zero evangelicals. Congress also has slight Catholic overrepresentation, but it's much more marginal - 28% versus 20%. At any rate, it is possible that Catholics will become the de facto representatives of Christianity in the halls of elite power in America - the mainlines are collapsing, evangelicals are too plain and uncultured to ever get in there, and Orthodox are, with apologies, a rounding error.
There is potentially a discussion to be had about how Catholics got into that position, and I'd guess it has to do with the quite large and influential Catholic education system. (I also have a pet theory that religions that place a strong emphasis on the interpretation of law are naturally going to do better in terms of producing lawyers and judges; hence Catholic and Jewish overrepresentation on the Supreme Court, and I'd hazard a guess that Muslims will do pretty well too.) But that's something of a different subject.
Anyway, predictions...
I think Catholicism will not take over America or even necessarily grow that much from its current position, but I think it will get more politically influential, as it seizes ground that used to be held by mainlines.
Mainlines will continue to collapse. Some outward adherence to mainline churches will survive in places, among politicians, but the era of mainline dominance is over. In America more broadly I don't think mainlines will all die out, but they will need to reinvent themselves; I foresee conflicts like the like in the Methodist church, between theological progressives who see the church as handmaiden to preferred cultural causes, and cranky traditionalists, which will probably end with the former withering away and fading into culture, and the latter declining in numbers and turning into a small but devout rump.
Evangelicals will not advance much in terms of political power, but they are disorganised and in constant ferment and will remain a powerful voting base for politicians canny enough to appeal to them. That said, what appeals to them is somewhat unpredictable, as they are a fickle demographic that is highly responsive to charismatic leaders. Right now they are more-or-less solidly behind Trump, but they didn't come to support him for theological or doctrinal reasons, and I think Trump's successors may not necessarily inherit evangelical support. I'm really not sure which way they will go.
Orthodox are irrelevant. Again, apologies for being so blunt, but there are just far too few of them and I don't see any signs that will change.
Mormons are one that I predict will grow and increase in power. I think they have the most gravely mistaken theology of any of these groups, but even so, they are demographically healthy, expanding, and confident. They are currently adjacent to the big evangelical coalition and can sometimes be counted with it, but not consistently, and when you look under the surface there's a lot of submerged evangelical dislike of Mormons, so that may not be stable. I think they will grow in influence unless there is some kind of concerted effort to declare Mormons 'uncool', the same way that evangelicals are uncool, and keep them out of power that way.
As for other religions...
There aren't enough Muslims to be a very significant electoral demographic nationally, but there are towns and potentially states where the Muslim vote matters, so I expect to see local gains in influence for them without making a huge impact nationally. The big question I have with Muslims is whether American Muslims as a community hold on to traditional doctrines or become secularised; there are plenty of people for whom 'Muslim' is an ethnocultural identity but doesn't make moral demands or shape their moral or political thought. (Think e.g. Zohran Mamdani.) I expect a significant number to hold on and continue to practice. As mentioned above, I expect Muslims to do reasonably well in terms of elite roles, especially those to do with law.
Jews are, well, an invitation for certain people to come out of the woodwork and declare them the secret puppet masters of the US. I don't know the future of Jews in America. Until recently I would have said that America has been a very good home for Jews, and I expect American Jews to continue to prosper, but we have yet to see how much Israel/Gaza causes a realignment. This is definitely one to keep an eye on.
Hindus mostly can't be disentangled from Indian ethnic politics. (Sorry, ISKCON, you tried but there aren't enough of you.) I'll skip over that because it's much more to do with ethnicity and multiculturalism than it is about Hinduism as religious belief. Sikhs are in roughly the same camp.
Buddhists are a group that I expect to continue to grow, partly from immigration and partly from conversions, but to have practically zero political impact. Buddhist organisations, at least in the US, rarely mobilise for politics, and most converts practice on their own or in small groups without necessarily applying Buddhism to politics more widely. There aren't many of them anyway; Buddhists as a constituency is not worth pandering to. Maybe in some local contexts where there are heavily Buddhist migrant groups, but I doubt you'll get much more than politicians visiting a temple or dharma centre and saying they appreciate this group.
That's probably most of what matters. Scientologists are few and don't matter, Unitarian Universalists are few and don't matter...
I think it's worth at least considering the possibility that we are backed directly by God :P
This is a secular space, so I try to reserve my belief in divine intervention to the side. ;)
More seriously, I know you were joking, but I think that in Christianity it's a grave mistake to assume that divine favour clearly correlates or anti-correlates with worldly power or success. God tests and tries his people, and uses them in unexpected ways. Sometimes the church may be powerful and accepted in society; sometimes it may be reviled and persecuted. We shouldn't read too much into either situation.
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I would also just add that "evangelical" continues to be much more of a signal for "right-wing" than "Catholic" and so I think Catholics are an easy place for righties to get people who agree with them on most everything without also having a religious affiliation that is listed under I AGREE WITH RIGHTIES ON MOST EVERYTHING in the dictionary. (Obviously evangelicals are more nuanced than that, but in terms of public optics I do think it matters a bit.)
As per your comment, I would not be surprised if this actually changes, and Catholicism becomes smaller but much more visibly right-wing as older generations of leaders die out (and as the left shifts to be more and more hostile to religion and away from old Catholic-friendly patronage networks). I foresee Catholic thought-leadership staffed with evangelical foot-soldiers as being a very potent coalition in the future, despite their cracks.
Yes, it's possible to be Catholic and in good standing among progressives on the understanding that one does not take Catholicism's moral teachings seriously. Catholicism is resolutely pro-life but nobody on the left even attempted to give Joe Biden any grief over being Catholic as far as abortion goes. It is accepted that you can be Catholic while just ignoring what it teaches. (Something like this may be happening with Islam as well.) It's only when a person signals a credible level of obedience to church teaching that Catholicism comes into the spotlight (e.g. Amy Coney Barrett). By contrast, if a person regularly attends an evangelical church, that in itself is probably going to be taken as more indicative of their moral beliefs. For better or for worse, evangelicalism is taken as a stronger signal of moral and political belief.
It's possible to be a left-wing evangelical, but it requires a bit of throat-clearing first. You need to deliberately distinguish yourself from other evangelicals, whereas I don't think Catholics need that. That said, I suspect this is mainly due to the much larger population of non-practicing Catholics? There are a lot of people who still identify as Catholic in a 'cultural' way without going to mass or taking Catholic doctrine seriously, whereas when someone raised evangelical ceases to go to church or take evangelical Christian doctrine seriously, they stop calling themselves evangelical at all. I'm sure it doesn't hurt either that Catholics are fairly split in terms of political affiliation, whereas evangelicals line up much more solidly behind the Republicans. Identifying as Catholic by itself just isn't a good signal of moral or political beliefs.
That said I would not be surprised if this changes - if younger people who leave Catholicism increasingly drop the label entirely, rather than continue to call themselves Catholic and just not do anything, then Catholicism will become more meaningful as a signal.
Yes, I think this is right. I also think there are a lot of people in the Catholic church who are very left-wing (...even on positions like abortion) and who want to reform the church from within.
Whereas as you say evangelicals who are dissatisfied with, say, the evangelical teachings on abortion just leave.
I think this is likely. My guess is that in the US over the next 40 - 50 years, Catholic numbers drop considerably (or if they hold steady, it's due to immigration) but the remnants are more dedicated and more "conservative" as far as such things go.
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Thanks for the blunt takes! Interesting views here, very realpolitik. I do agree with most of your take on the Protestant denominations in the U.S., seems as if their cultural moment is fading. Sometimes I wonder if a new religion will come in to pick up the slack, like the "western folk religion" @Stefferi mentioned above, but more formalized.
I hope it's clear that I don't consider political influence within the United States to be any reflection of the merits of a tradition. I'm in the devout rump of mainline Protestants - I am, on my typology here, definitely one of the losers. Meanwhile many of the churches that I think will be relatively strong in the future - Mormons, Baptists, and so on - are in my eyes either heretics, or borderline-heretics. There is, I think, probably an interesting book to be written on Christian heresy and its contours in America. (And not the Ross Douthat book. A different one.)
At any rate, that the Orthodox have no political influence is not a criticism of them. The position I suspect the Orthodox are in, and will continue to be in going forward, is the one from an aside in this old article:
That is, the ideal Orthodox political order, historically, has been one in which the church is to some extent integrated with the state - as in the Byzantine empire, or the Russian empire. Spiritual and temporal authority are intertwined. However, when one practices Orthodoxy in a state where there is zero realistic chance of such integration occurring, Orthodox communities in practice engage in a kind of 'retreat', focusing on internal cultivation. If there is a visible surge of interest in Orthodoxy at the moment, my hope is that much of that interest relates to that question of spiritual cultivation or maturation, especially as a community, within a political order that grows increasingly impious.
I wonder if it might be interesting there to look at the experiences of Orthodox communities in the Ottoman empire. I know very little about that, but it springs to mind as a good case study for how to maintain Christian faith intergenerationally while living in a proudly non-Christian political order.
It is my hope, at least, that there is more of a turn towards the obligations of personal Christian moral formation. My tradition is Methodist and I have noticed, at least among more traditionalist Methodists, some interest in the counter-cultural disciplines of the early Methodists. Maybe we need more Holy Clubs. Whatever church context it occurs in, though, I think there is a desire for more rigorous moral formation among some younger Christians, epsecially the more intellectual types.
You mention the growth of a kind of 'Western folk religion'. I'm not sure how far I want to go with that. There's a sense in which there are already Western folk religions like that, especially in America, which has long had both a civic religion and an implicit set of American spiritual norms that cross multiple denominations and religious traditions. Those religions are evolving as the cultural terrain changes, but I don't think a new one is coming into being from nothing. There will be some sort of spirituality - nature abhors a vacuum, including a spiritual vacuum - but I suspect more of a modification of what is already present, rather than something brand new.
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My understanding is that the situation with American Orthodoxy is that there's a fair amount of new fervent converts, at least compared to the previous baseline, but the general trend of secularization is also causing people from traditional immigrant communities (Greeks, Russians, Serbs) to drop out, and that they thus far balance each other out. However, if this continues, at some point the growth in new convert-run parishes could be expected to overtake the secularization process, especially if there are marriages and natural growth (though that might require appeal beyond the current category of young men...)
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Right, interestingly it mirrors a longstanding trend in England of edgier intellectuals (of both the right and left) who want something a little more esoteric and different converting to Catholicism, which has been a thing for a couple of hundred years.
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