Yes, Americans are very, very divided ...

But the numbers get complex when anyone asks specifics about faith, culture, technology and, yes, politics

Let’s start with a few important cultural questions.

Do you embrace the Disney era of “Star Wars”?

Are you worried about an Incredibles 3 movie or not?

Are you comfortable with the Disney+ take on “Doctor Who”?

Were you looking forward to Disney’s “Captain Marvel 3” or dreading it?

Planning any future trips to Disney World?

While I called these questions “cultural,” I imagine that some readers may think that I asked these questions for nasty “political” reasons.

In a way, that’s true. However, at the start of the Rational Sheep project I promised (as a registered third-party voter) that I am not all that interested in partisan politics. But we live in a nation that is so radically divided — here is the “signal” in this post — that choices people make on cultural issues will often be interpreted as taking “political” stands. For example, when a mini-van pulls up and four or more kids hop out, what will most Americans assume about that family’s church, synagogue or mosque status? And, these days, what if those kids don’t have smartphones?

In other words, my questions at the top of this post assume that Disney has, for millions of consumers, become a “condensed symbol” of (many would say “woke”) cultural change. This has religious and political implications and pastors/priests, parents and teachers need to know that if they are going to address faith issues in popular culture. Can you say “Jesusland”?

Here is a chunk of my 2023 Religion & Liberty essay “The Evolving Religion of Journalism” that makes this clear, quoting material from an evangelical scribe who has become a “condensed symbol” for many:

The well-known First Amendment lawyer and evangelical pundit David French described the crisis in his book Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation. The bottom line: Americans are divided by their choices in news and popular culture, choosing to live in protective silos of digital content. America remains the developing world’s most religious nation, yet its secularized elites occupy one set of zip codes, while most religious believers live in another. These armies share no common standards about “facts,” “accuracy,” or “fairness.”

“It’s time for Americans to wake up to a fundamental reality: the continued unity of the United States cannot be guaranteed,” wrote French. At this moment, “there is not a single important cultural, religious, political, or social force that is pulling Americans together more than it is pulling us apart.”           

This brings me to some political-news information that I think Rational Sheep readers may want to read, or maybe not. I offer it as a “signal” about the culture in which we live, since cultural signals are crucial at Rational Sheep.

For starters, I was struck by this Axios headline, which offered a rare glimpse of life in an American that is not strictly divided between deep red and deep blue believers: “Understanding the ‘double haters’ who dislike Trump and Biden.” Here is the overture for this punchy Zachary Basu piece:

President Biden and former President Trump are in hot pursuit of a big — and possibly determinative — group of voters who loathe both men.

Why it matters: This bloc of "double haters" has ballooned in size thanks to the surge in Biden's unpopularity since 2020, with polls suggesting they now represent 16% to 20% of the electorate.

* That makes 2024 more similar to 2016 — when exit polls showed 18% of voters disliked both Trump and Hillary Clinton — than 2020, when Biden and Trump's dual unfavorables amounted to just 3% of the vote.

* The behavior of double haters — whether they stay home, vote third-party or bite the bullet in favor of Biden or Trump — could be the X-factor in swing states where a few thousand votes could decide the winner.

The big picture: In this year's historically unpopular rematch, the double haters represent an extraordinarily broad range of views. None is a monolith, but several powerful identity groups stand out above the rest.

The Axios piece presents this picture, of course, in strictly political terms — even though many of America’s most polarizing debates (consider the recent White House bombshell on gender and Title IX) center on issues of culture, morality and, yes, religion.

If you want to take another deep dive into this, check out this new poll from the Pew Research Center: “Voters’ views of Trump and Biden differ by religion.” As you would expect, the data is framed primarily in terms of believers who embrace Orange Man Bad.

Most registered voters who are White Christians would vote for Republican Donald Trump over Democrat Joe Biden if the 2024 presidential election were held today, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis. More than half of White Christians think Trump was a “great” or “good” president and don’t think he broke the law in an effort to change the outcome of the 2020 election.

In stark contrast, most registered voters who are Black Protestants or religious “nones” — those who self-identify as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular” — would vote for Biden over Trump.

The emphasis (I am #ShockedShocked) is mostly on Trump and evangelicals. But, for me, the most interesting numbers here focus on the complexity of viewpoints among voters who are NOT evangelicals. For example, note the information in the following Pew Research chart about “White nonevangelicals” and “White, non-Hispanic” Catholics, as well as the complex Hispanic Catholic numbers.

If you want a choir singing in unison, look at “atheists” and “agnostics.”

Yes, once again we do see the most infamous number in all of contemporary American politics — 81%. Spot it here?

While most White Christian voters say they would vote for Trump over Biden … there are some differences by religious tradition. Trump draws support from:  

* 81% of White evangelical Protestant voters

* 61% of White Catholics

* 57% of White Protestants who are not evangelical

The bottom line: Is American culture really as “red” and “blue” as the Jesusland memes?

I think the answer, in broad paint-brush strokes, is “Yes.” However, I think this has more to do with divisions defined — as described by French — in terms of lifestyle and, yes, the niche media that provide Americans with radically different visions of what truly matters in this life (and the next).

But if we must talk about Trump and evangelical voters, let me point Rational Sheep readers back to a Christianity Today and Lifeway poll that underlined the terrible, agonizing choices voters (some of them “double-haters”) had to make in 2016. Here are some bullet points from a 2019 post at GetReligion:

The bytes that jumped out at me:

* Only half of the evangelicals polled voted for the candidate that they truly wanted to support in the White House race.

* One out of three said that they voted AGAINST Hillary Clinton or AGAINST Donald Trump.

* One in four white evangelicals said that they voted AGAINST Trump. One in three black evangelicals said the same thing.

* At least 20% of evangelicals didn’t vote (and I’ve seen figures as high as 40% elsewhere).

Does that look like an 81% monolith to you?

Now, let’s go back to the questions I asked at the top of this post. I truly believe that there are pastors/priests, parents and teachers who are afraid to take stands on ANYTHING linked to popular culture and technology because they think (and in some cases their fears are justified) they will be accused of being “too political.”

Remember how the press framed all COVID-19 debates in religious groups in terms of partisan politics? Careful news consumers will see the same simplistic judgments in coverage of mental health and gender dysphoria. I believe this will affect debates about Big Tech and the smartphone era.

Yes, America is very, very divided today. But that does not mean that pastors/priests, parents and teachers can avoid asking those pushy Rational Sheep questions: How do you spend your time? How do you spend your money? How do you make your decisions?

Hang in there, folks. There are wild times ahead of us and I am not just talking about partisan politics.

FIRST ART: A Jesusland button featured at the Epistle of Jim blog.