Weekly Digest for July 25
Election post-mortem, the vibe shift, and more in this week's short digest.
Just a short digest for this week since we are on a family vacation.
The Wall Street Journal just ran a major story on how Atlanta’s growth streak has come to an end, or at least certainly slowed.
I wrote an article noting that this was starting to happen for City Journal back in 2019.
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Election Post-Mortem
Ryan Burge has a 2025 election post-mortem looking at age and faith. Some interesting findings:
“The share of young non-white evangelical women who voted for Trump went from 22% in 2020 to 43% in 2024. That’s insane!”
“For non-white Catholics, the result is staggering. In 2016, 15% of young men voted for Trump and 12% of young women. In 2024, it was 56% of young non-white Catholic men and 16% of women. That’s a forty-point jump for males. Just staggering.”
“If you are a Democrat, I just don’t know how you can look at these results and feel anything but despair.”
One bright spot for the Dems: “A young Mormon was nearly twice as likely as an older one to vote for Harris in 2024.”
Also, Ryan Burge shared some moving thoughts on the one year anniversary of the closing of the church he pastored.
It’s been almost a year since we closed the doors for good at the First Baptist Church of Mount Vernon, Illinois. I’m still not over it.
…
There was another type of email I got. These almost always came from religious leaders — pastors, church planters, denominational administrators and so forth, people who have had a long history in the church. Every email in this category came from an evangelical male and they all had the same tone: “Just let me in there, and I can fix the problem.” They wanted to know if they could use our church building to plant a new congregation or if they could partner with us for a revitalization effort.
For many of them, I know that their heart was in the right place, but that pile of messages stoked an anger in me that felt entirely foreign. They all had an air of superiority about them — the writers were sure they understood the problems facing First Baptist Church better than I did, when I served as the pastor of that congregation for more than 17 years.
I’m sure we all say things that flop when we are trying to be nice from time to time. I know I do.
But evangelicals seem to be uniquely boorish in their behavior.
Vibe Shift
Nike’s new ad featuring the golfer who just won the British Open:
Best of the Web
The Guardian: Leftists are determined to date each other - and not settle for liberals - “Hot commie summer”
NYT: Heterofatalism - The Trouble With Wanting Men - All I can say is, Wow!
One of the reasons my marriage ended was that I fell in love with another man — whom I’ll refer to by his first initial, J. Spontaneously graceful, with a soft voice and an inordinate, sad-eyed smile, J. made me laugh, stopping my breath. Being a “good guy,” he intimated from the jump that he did not know how to “do” relationships, giving me to understand that if I expected one with him (or, as he may have conceptualized it, from him), I did so at my peril (which was his peril, too, since he would hate to hurt me). Still, he pursued me; we seemed to be “doing” something together.
Janan Ganesh/Financial Times: The unspoken truth about the baby bust - Why is it so hard to accept that it is happening out of choice?
Consumption, selfhood, the pursuit of happiness: all the things that are said to be not enough, seem to be enough. How telling that even the most widely heard argument for pronatalism — that we need more workers to support the old — is itself materialist. What an odd fate is that of the modern liberal, to lose all battles except the grandest.
New Content and Media Mentions
Why Complementarian Gender Theology Is New - How complementarianism, far from being a timeless biblical truth, emerged as a reactive response to evangelical feminism and cultural shifts
My podcast this week was with Rick Reinhard on what will happen to the 100,000 empty churches we are projected to see in the coming years.
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We just went through Mt. Vernon, IL last weekend. Had lunch, took the grandchildren to a park, and got gas on the return trip. Seems like a decent town or small city. I'm sure Burge did everything he could to "save" the church, whatever that means, and unlike some, I'm reluctant to second-guess his efforts.
One related thought did occur to me. This was how frustrated Gary North's Tyler (TX) bunch was with the churches there. Tyler is considerably bigger than Mt. Vernon, but is similarly the main city in an otherwise rural area of East Texas. It's a very nice, small city, in a bastion of the Bible belt, and you'd assume the churches are mostly pretty solid, but apparently they suffered from the same foibles and growth struggles American churches seem to encounter everywhere.
The data Burge compiles is certainly interesting (his stuff almost always is), but too much can be made out of it. For pretty much all of my adult life we've seen the elecvtiral tides slosh back and forth, and with decreasing magnitude, every two or four years. Parties that proclaim "Permanent" or "emerging" majorities end up looking quite foolish the after the next time at the polls disabuses them.
Re: Why is it so hard to accept that it is happening out of choice?
Sure, but choice is not random and generally not based on mere caprice. Our choices are motivated by external influences and limits. For example, I would love to travel to Europe, but I cannot afford to. I would love to visit Russia but the current tensions between the US and Russia make that seem quite ill-advised (a guy at my church, married to a Russian immigrant, has said the same thing, although his wife has gone back for some visits). And given current trends it appears that the biggest reason birth rates continue to fall is because partnering in relationships has also fallen off, especially for the young. "There's too few good women/men out there" or "I never meet the right guy/woman" has become a common complaint.