Going Out of Style

IT IS WELLKNOWN that white Christian Americans, as a percentage of the general population, are declining in number. Two reasons. Immigration, and encroaching secularism. And, to name a third, white Christian Americans just aren't reproducing like they used to. This fact of white Christian decline explains nearly every aspect of the current virulence of the white conservative evangelical Christian pro Trump movement; the perception that white Christianity is declining, or, as its frightened adherents often put it; that white heterosexual Christianity is under assault of some sort.What's really happening, obviously, is that millions of Latin Americans, immersed in the grinding poverty precipitated largely by decades of exploitative corporate United States foreign policy, and their hope of its alleviation, are desperately seeking asylum in the U.S., and are often being met with the usual racist hatred so prevalent among white Christian conservative America. Then too, Americans in general are losing their religion. Americans who self identify as Christian are at a percentage of sixty five percent, down from eighty five percent a generation ago. One half of millennials have no religious identification. White Christians, essentially, are being outnumbered. They are reacting to this bey becoming panicky, angry, and by electing to office angry gangster demagogues like Donald J. Trump. The phenomenon is similar, sociologically, to the behavior of Germans in the nineteen thirties, reacting to the perceived takeover of German society by Jews, socialists, and communists. Studies indicate that caucasians are less tolerant of minorities, as minorities, including gays, become more prominent in American society.As the Hispanic percentage of the population increases,, a decreasing proportion of the white demographic is willing to think of Hispanic people as being "white". It is as if a privileged club with an elite membership is trying to further contract its exclusive membership, to achieve an ever greater elitism, which is a counter intuitive process. One might expect that, as the white demographic declines in numbers, it might seek adopt a more inclusive definition of"whiteness", to expand its numbers, but, that is not the case. As the inevitable discrediting and collapse of Trumpism and resentment base white supremacy proceeds, it may eventuate that the movement contracts into a hardened core of its former self, like the NAZI movement in the final days of World War Two, defending itself and its values to the bitter end, while history moves on, without it.