How Denominations Vote
Denominational voting, Trump vs. Taylor, how couples met, and more in this week's digest.
Ryan Burge is out with another great piece of analysis, looking at denominational voting patterns in 2020.
It was interesting to me that the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC) voted nine points higher for Trump than the Presbyterian Church in American (PCA). The EPC is generally perceived as a more theologically moderate denomination than the PCA. The PCA is only twelve points ahead of the mainline PCUSA.
It validates my impression that that the PCA is more politically liberal than is generally believed, and the PCUSA much less so. I’ll bet there aren’t many people who were thinking a majority of mainline Presbyterians voted for Trump - but they did. The PCUSA is still a church for “Country Club Republicans.”
Read Burge’s entire analysis on his excellent Substack.
And Darel Paul has an interesting piece in First Things looking at Donald Trump vs. Taylor Swift.
As marriage in the United States becomes both later (median age at first marriage for men is now over thirty and nearly twenty-nine for women) and rarer (the percentage of never-married forty-year-olds in America has risen from 6 percent in 1980 to 25 percent in 2020), the social separation of the sexes inevitably fosters their cultural and political separation. The sociological literature has a term, “gender linked fate,” that captures this phenomenon. Research finds that, compared to unmarried women, married women tend to hold more conservative views on matters relating to gender and feel they share less in common with women as a group. This is especially true for white women. Instead of embracing gender solidarity, married women instead share interests with husbands and children and are, quite simply, less progressive on the whole slate of feminist issues. Relating to the current election, the most significant of these is clearly abortion. Married women support abortion-on-demand less and have fewer abortions. Much fewer. In 2021, around 87 percent of all abortions in the United States were procured by unmarried women, and they had an abortion rate (number of abortions per live births) nearly ten times larger than married women.
On Evangelical Culture
My piece from earlier this week looking at how modern evangelical culture is very different from that of historic Protestantism got a lot of response - mostly positive.
Regarding my observation that modern American culture, and thus the evangelicalism that reflects it, embodies a lot of Quaker values, Nancy Pearcey noted a similar observation she made in her book Total Truth. Here’s an excerpt:
Note that I don’t claim evangelicalism descended from or intentionally adopted the values of the Radical Reformation. Rather, as sociologist E. Digby Baltzell pointed out, America shifted towards those values, and evangelicalism imbibed them from the culture.
Jack Waters had some other very interesting related observations, published independently of my piece.
How Couples Met
X user Andriy Burkov posted this interesting animation showing the changes in how people couples met between between 1930 and 2024. The original video seems to have been made by a LinkedIn user named James Eagle.
I’ve seen this in chart form before, but this is an interesting animation.
Best of the Web
Richard Reeves: Willful ignorance of the male suicide crisis - Reeves is bold here as someone on the center-left to call out a major publication like the New Yorker for bias.
Jacobin: Working-Class Men Are Not Okay - Even this DSA publication acknowledges it.
Ruth Whippman/NYT: We Can Do Better Than ‘Positive Masculinity’ - The Times publishing yet another woman who doesn’t like masculinity very much.
Freya India: The Age of Abandonment - We simply don’t believe anyone will stay
New York Times: Why France’s Most Controversial Novelist Is Also Its Most Celebrated - Michel Houellebecq holds up a mirror to a world we would rather not see.
Scott Alexander: Against The Cultural Christianity Argument
Joel Kotkin: Religious Science - Spiritually inclined scientists are rediscovering a vision imbued with a sense of human values—and mystery.
Perhaps the key turning point was the Big Bang. In the early twentieth century, scientists, including Albert Einstein himself, believed in a steady-state universe that had no beginning or end. Later, theoretical physicist and Catholic priest Georges Lemaître showed how Einstein’s own theory of General Relativity aligned with the astronomer Edwin Hubble’s then-controversial observations that the universe was expanding, and thus—if one followed the process backward through time—had a beginning. Today, Lemaître is known as the father of the Big Bang theory.
As Einstein pondered these and other findings, his views, particularly toward the end of his career, evolved in the direction of acknowledging a belief in a divine force. He looked to the Jewish philosopher/scientist Baruch Spinoza for inspiration and spoke openly of embracing “a cosmic religious feeling.” Einstein’s German contemporary Werner Heisenberg described a similar evolution. “The first gulp of the natural sciences will turn you into an atheist,” he wrote, “but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
Yale Review: Richard Scarry and the art of children’s literature.
New Content and Media Mentions
I was delighted to see that my three worlds model got a mention from Ruslan.
If you haven’t seen me give a presentation of my three worlds model before, you might like this talk I just gave at New St. Andrews College.
New this week:
Is Evangelicalism Really Protestant? - Modern evangelical culture is radically different from the Protestantism of the past
My podcast this week was with AEI Senior Fellow Tim Carney on his book Family Unfriendly.
Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.
I find it interesting that there's a lot of speculative argumentation that the PCA numbers must not be accurate. In my experience, urban PCA churches in the north are full of political liberals. It's very easy for me to believe that a significant share of the PCA votes Democrat, particularly in the Millennial cohort.
Cribbing from some comments responding to to Aaron making this comment on X -- re: PCUSA v. PCA, it's entirely plausible that some of the respondents simply don't know which denomination they're in. I know in my present PCA church, with a membership around 400, I'm surprised when I still encounter ignorance and incuriosity some members have beyond the four walls of our local congregation.