Research: fear of racial diversity, not economic anxiety, at the heart of evangelicals' overwhelming support for Trump - Entrepreneur Generations

It's well-known that white evangelical Christians--who are disproportionately rural--tend to strongly support President Trump, but the reason why is up for debate. A new book, Immigrants, Evangelicals and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change, says evangelicals' fear of increasing racial diversity may be at the heart of it.

The book's author, Janelle Wong, details in The Washington Post how her research led her to that conclusion. She teamed up with other social scientists from the University of California at Los Angeles, Baylor University and Arizona State University to conduct a nationwide public opinion study on the internet a few months after the 2016 election.

Their research showed how much different white evangelicals are from not only the general population, but from other whites and other evangelicals. Election Day exit polls showed that 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump, while 59 percent of non-evangelical whites voted for Clinton, Wong reports. Part of that discrepancy is because white evangelicals are more conservative on many issues, even more so than Latinx, Asian American and black evangelicals.

At the same time, white evangelicals are declining steeply as a proportion of the population; almost all evangelical growth comes from Latino and Asian Americans--and that's making white evangelicals nervous, Wong writes. Some pundits have conjectured that economic anxiety is the primary reason for evangelical support of Trump, but Wong's research doesn't bear that out. Instead, her team's research found that "white evangelicals’ perceptions they’re the targets of discrimination – more so than other groups" is at the heart of evangelical votes for Trump, and that the fears that drove those votes will drive their votes long after Trump leaves office.

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2yvCg1k Research: fear of racial diversity, not economic anxiety, at the heart of evangelicals' overwhelming support for Trump - Entrepreneur Generations

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