Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) just released its 16th American Values Report surveying over 5,000 Americans on the most pressing social and political issues of our time. What was revealed was an asymmetric polarization between Republicans and Democrats, and white Christians and those who are not.
Robert P. Jones, president and founder of PRRI, joins Jen to break down the key findings of the report. Most significant is white Evangelicals continued retreat from the center to the more radical. But, because a majority of people don’t have these extreme ideologies, white nationalists can’t achieve their political ends through democratic means and must embrace authoritarian policies in order to achieve power.
As explained in an earlier PRRI report referenced by Dr. Jones in this interview:
Perhaps the most disturbing finding in the religious landscape is this one: A majority of white evangelical Protestants believe both that immigrants are invading the country and replacing real Americans (57%) and that the government should place immigrants into militarized internment camps until they can be deported (56%).
Make sure to subscribe to Dr. Jones’ substack White Too Long so you don’t miss out on more crucial analysis.
Robert P. Jones, Ph.D. is the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). He is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future, as well as White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which won a 2021 American Book Award. He holds a Ph.D. in religion from Emory University, an M.Div. from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a B.S. in computing science and mathematics from Mississippi College.
The transcript below has been edited slightly for clarity.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, Editor-in-Chief of The Contrarian. I’m delighted to have back my friend, Robby P. Jones. He is the CEO of PRRI, and they are out with their annual survey of values of Americans, of their views on just about everything. It’s an enormous survey, and it’s just stuffed with interesting information. Welcome, Robby, great to see you.
Robert P. Jones
Oh, thanks, Jen, glad to be with you again.
Jen Rubin
How big is this survey, just to give people a sense of the proportions?
Robert P. Jones
Yeah, it’s a fairly big survey, so this is our 16th annual survey. We’ve been doing this since 2010, so we’ve got a nice, long trend line to look at. This survey is a survey of over 5,000 Americans, so just to put that into context, you know, your typical political survey you may see from a newspaper is usually about 1,000, so this is about 5 times that size, and it’s among a random probability sample of all Americans.
Jen Rubin
The polarization in America has gotten even worse over time, but I think the polarization that you point to is, in one sense, white Christian evangelicals and then everyone else. There seems to be remarkable consensus if you take that group out of it, and I don’t mean to suggest they’re not Americans, or they should be taken out of, but to give people a lay of the land.
Robert P. Jones
Yeah, you know, in social science circles, the term you hear a lot is asymmetric polarization. You know, you hear just in jargon, polarization, we’re polarized, but that doesn’t really tell the story. And increasingly in the Trump era, what we’re seeing, is that’s exactly right. Some groups of Americans pulling away from the center right? And so what we see today, if you look at it through a religious lens, as you said, it really is white Christian groups, and not just evangelicals, so it’s white evangelicals predominantly, but it is also white non-evangelical Protestants and white Catholics that are kind of pulling away from the center, and there’s a big gap between them and, like, everybody else. So, Christians of color, for example, this is kind of stunning. There are no two groups that hold more different views, really, when it comes to voting. Many views, like immigration. than white evangelical Protestants and African American Protestants, who share a faith, share a lot of, you know, the Bible, a lot of hymns, all of that, worship practices, and yet through political lenses, look very, very different. But it is evangelicals moving more away from the center. And we see the same thing in political, lines here, and that’s one of the things this survey shows over and over again is that we see Republicans, self-identified Republicans, pulling away from the center, and a huge gap between them and independents, and a much smaller gap between independents and Democrats. So it’s really Democrats and Independents over here, and Republicans well, over here. So whether you’re looking at it through a religious lens or a political lens.
That’s one of the problems we have. It’s not just that we have one group on the left, one group on the right, pulling everybody apart. It really is that we have these two groups that are becoming more and more extreme on the right, and leaving the center and the left.
Jen Rubin
You would think that for all of their political weight and their importance, they’d be like 50% of the American people, but that’s really not the case. They’re very small as a percentage of the whole. Talk to us about that, and why they have, then, such disproportionate influence in one party and in our political life.
Robert P. Jones
Yeah. Well, as you know, because we met when we first…when I first wrote this book called The End of White Christian America, where I was plotting, you know, some of these demographic changes here, and these are largely still true. I mean, you wouldn’t know it from the political power that we’re seeing being exercised in space today, but demographically speaking, and from a democracy point of view, it is the case that white evangelical Protestants that we hear so much about, right, and have so much power in the Trump administration for example, only make up 13%. Now, make sure you hear me right. That’s 1 and a 3, 13% of the population today. You know, and then if you put all white Christians together, so, Protestant, Catholic, non-denominational, all of them together who are white, non-Hispanic, and Christian, it’s still only 4 in 10 Americans, today. But this is actually part of the issue that we’re seeing, is that as these groups have become smaller, and they literally don’t have the numbers, right, that we do see these more extreme policies being embraced by them. So when democracy, and just counting votes won’t lead to those ends. We do see these groups becoming more and more extreme, fostering things like Christian nationalism, authoritarian policies, and all kinds of anti-democratic means to achieve political ends, because the numbers just really aren’t there. And of course, we get the electoral college, gerrymandering, all of these things tend to kind of amplify these voices. And the last thing is just the fact that we have a binary political system, right? And they’ve essentially taken over. So we’ve got, you know, this kind of group that makes up well less than a majority, but it’s taken over one of our two political parties, which also gives them outsized political power.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. Now, they are not necessarily well represented among younger Americans. You hear a lot about Democrats’ problems with turning out or appealing to younger Americans. But this group of disproportionately powerful white Christian evangelicals are not highly represented among young people. Tell us about that, and why that is, why they are not, refilling the ranks, if you will.
Robert P. Jones
Yeah, this is a trend we’ve been… has been with us since the 90s, right? So we’re now, like, 3 decades into this trend, and it really has been an acceleration of younger people leaving, organized religion, and it’s been disproportionately happening among white Christian groups. So what we’ve seen over time is white Christian groups, shrinking and graying. Graying as in aging, here. So, for example, the median age among white evangelical Christians is around 57 years of age, you know, whereas in the country it’s less than 50. So you do see this kind of disproportionate thing, and just to kind of make it really concrete, even in a survey this size we sometimes have not a big enough sample of younger evangelicals to really do a lot of complex analysis on them, just because they’re really not there. Young people today are still nearly 4 in 10 unaffiliated, so if you look at Americans under the age of 30, it’s nearly 4 in 10 of that group that claim no religious affiliation, at all. That trend has stabilized a bit, but it is, it’s certainly not… it’s not reversed in any way.
Jen Rubin
A provocative question, which is, when did white evangelicals get to be so mean? A lot of the positions they hold, are rather cruel. They’re in favor of deporting people to third world countries. It doesn’t bother them that, a lot of folks are being deported who shouldn’t be. They don’t mind having a disproportionately strong executive. It used to be that Christianity was associated with the poor, the dispossessed, but this is something very different going on. What is it, and what has changed in Christianity itself in America?
Robert P. Jones
Yeah, you know, I would say there’s… so, as you know, I mean, for your listeners, I grew up Southern Baptist in Mississippi, so deep in the heart of the South, and that’s the largest evangelical denomination, Protestant denomination in the country. So I grew up very much in the heart of this, and I would say that there’s, like, there have been… there’s a through line that hasn’t changed, and there has been something that has changed. The through line that hasn’t changed painfully, is that there has always been this strong strain of white supremacy inside of white evangelicalism, right? So, we Southern Baptists, were on the wrong side of the slavery question, we were on the wrong side of the segregation question, and fought it all the way through. So there’s still this through line of that that can be tapped, I think, that’s very, very old and deep in the DNA of white evangelicalism. I will say that this newer thing, I would say that that’s accurate in the way I understand it, that it does seem like today that the that world is meaner than the world that I grew up in. And, you know, you can’t really survey exactly on meanness, but the things you point to… I’m going to give you just a couple of examples here.
You know, I actually wrote a piece on my substack, whitetoolong.net, about… and I basically concluded, I said, look. Today, it is actually hard as a pollster to write a question on immigration that is too harsh, or too cruel for evangelicals to support. And so, you know, we’ve asked about internment camps, we’ve asked about rendition to foreign countries without due process. Like, even we specify due process, and the newer things, like, whether ICE should be able… ICE agents should be able to conceal their identities and abduct people off the street with, with, with an unmarked cars, right? And we find, again, this kind of outliers, that white evangelicals agree with all of those things. I mean, it’s really shocking. You know, so even when we say, like the U.S. government deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons in El Salvador, Rwanda, and Libya without allowing them to challenge their deportation in court. And we say it that way, we get majorities of white evangelicals supporting that, and majorities of Republicans supporting that.
And just to give you this asymmetric polarization, look at independents, 25% support that, right? And it’s 62% of Republicans, right? So it’s really stark when you think about this, yeah, internment camps. Again, we have 69% of Republicans, saying that they would support, the federal government detaining immigrants in internment camps until they can be deported, and 59% of white evangelicals supporting that. If you look at, again, independents, it’s only 32% of independents that support that. So they’re very much outliers, you know, from the rest of the country on these questions.
Jen Rubin
There were some positive trends, maybe for the wrong reasons, but there seemed to be a decline in number of people who are willing to resort to violence for political change, and that comes among Republicans. Is that because their guy is in the White House?
Robert P. Jones
You know, you’re right, we saw that number, and I immediately thought, oh, this is good news, right? And I think you’re right, that the bigger decline is among Republicans, and the way we ask the question probably has something to do… we say that things have become so bad.
That we may need to resort to violence in order to save the country, and now they don’t think things are so bad, right? So the premise of the change… so we… I don’t think we can outright celebrate.
You know, those, those numbers, for those, for those reasons. I’m all for violence, political violence going down, but unfortunately, I think it, it’s mostly because what they see going on is what they want, at this point, yeah.
Jen Rubin
There is a trend that you have followed, for many, many more years than I think it has come into the public awareness, and that is this relationship about gender norms, gender identity, and white Christian nationalism. That this belief that men are losing out, that society has become too feminized. That seems to be a very core part of this identity, and you see it in… you’ve asked questions now about pronatalism, that is, the government should be having people, you know, helping people have more kids. What, about that, do you think has changed over time, and do you think that is as core a identity as is white nationalism, for example, or other factors?
Robert P. Jones
That’s a great question. It is… so the question we’ve been tracking, it’s actually from the General Social Survey, so there’s a long, long trend going back, but the question reads this way, society as a whole has become too soft and feminine. We have a long trend on that question. We haven’t seen a lot of change, like, overall on that question, but the party differences have gotten bigger, on this question. There is now a nearly 50-point gap between Republicans and Democrats on this question. So, it is two-thirds of Republicans that agree with that question. It’s only 20% of Democrats that agree with that question, and it’s only 39% of independents, again, who agree with that question. So, that’s really remarkable. 50-point gap between the two political parties, and this one question, even when we put it into statistical models where we’re controlling for all kinds of other covariance, this stands out as an independent predictor of Trump and the MAGA movement on its own. And I think one of the reasons for that is because in that world, like, we’ve been talking about race already, right? The kind of white supremacy and the kind of racial hierarchies that that world really assumes.
But it also assumes gender hierarchies, and it… so the idea of hierarchy is what holds all this together, right? That there is a world in which God created genders and races in this worldview, right, to be in certain places, right? White people are at the top, non-white people are under that, men are at the top, women are under that, and if you don’t identify as men or women, there’s literally not even any place for you on the chart, right? On the org chart in that world. I mean, these are the only two categories possible, but it’s notable that that one question has been, really, since we’ve been measuring support for Trump and the MAGA movement, an independent predictor of support for Trump and the MAGA movement. The one ray of maybe good news here is that we did ask a new question about whether people saw it as a zero-sum game, that the gains of women come at the expense of men. We actually don’t see a lot of support for that, right? So it really is more about hierarchy and less about a kind of zero-sum game where, you know, men are resentful of women. We see that more on race, but actually, it doesn’t seem like that’s so much the case for gender.
Jen Rubin
Oh, there’s hope in small places, perhaps.
Robert P. Jones
Right, right.
Jen Rubin
One of the questions, that you ask a lot in various different ways, which is fascinating, is kind of what it means to be an American. And, there are lots of things that we agree upon, but there is certainly a segment of the population, disproportionately white Christians, who think that part of being an American is being white, and is being a Christian. That, is not reading literally from our founding, documents, what I think the founders had in mind, and yet it’s very ingrained. Is the percentage of people who hold each view, one a pluralistic democracy and one a monoculture, has that changed over time?
Robert P. Jones
You know, again, the overall numbers haven’t shifted that much, but we do see this gap between the two parties opening up, here, and we asked about a dozen different attributes, like, what does it really mean to be an American? You know, and you’re right, there is some great news, like believing in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. Or respecting political institutions and laws, or individual freedoms. There’s, like, across-the-board agreement on that, so I, you know, that’s good.
But then there is this, you know, what I call, like, I mean, you know, put the… I think the term that’s accurate, like, a kind of faith, blood, and soil, kinds of ways of thinking about it, that you have to be Christian. You have to have been, kind of, your ancestors have to have been here. We have a question. You may have heard this term called heritage Americans floating around on the right from J.D. Vance and others, and there is this kind of growing sense of kind of saying… I mean, it’s essentially like a new version of the grandfather Clause that was used, right, to prevent African Americans voting, but that’s what it really means. And here, for example, we had 55% of Republicans saying to be truly American, you had to have ancestors who served in the military during the World Wars or the Civil War, right? To be truly American, you had to be born in America. To be truly American, you need to believe in God and be a Christian. These are things only Republicans believe in majority, right? Independents don’t… majority of independents don’t believe that, a majority of Democrats, don’t believe that. So again, we have this kind of separation, and it’s around these lines of, yeah, moving away from America as a place where you are American because you believe in certain principles, right? That’s the thing that holds you together, and more about you believe you’re American because of who you are, right? Because of your attributes. And this is really worrisome, right? That we really do have now strong majorities of Republicans really on this kind of faith, blood and soil version of America, and I think we, you know, we know where that’s going to lead.
Jen Rubin
Right, alright. One of the things that struck me about this is that many of the positions for which there is a very large majority happen to be positions that Democrats have favored. And yet they’ve been so spectacularly you know, unsuccessful, perhaps, in getting some of these, positions through, whether it’s term limits for the Supreme Court, the pathway to citizenship, really big majorities.
Which does kind of, speak to, perhaps what’s going on in elections is not so much a list of issues, but something else. Is there a way of measuring what really matters to me? In other words, is the strength of these, Blood, faith, and soil, issues so overwhelming that it outweighs things like term limits, positions on the economy, and another, you know, laundry list of positions.
Robert P. Jones
Yeah, it’s a great question. I do want to just hammer the path to citizenship question here. Like, this is a question we’ve probably asked more than any other question in our history. We started asking this question in 2013, right? So, well before Trump enters the scene, and back when we were talking about things like a bipartisan bill, right, for a path to citizenship, the Gang of Eight and all of that stuff, we had Republicans and Democrats working on this. And sure enough, like, in 2013, the gap between Republicans and Democrats, it was there, but it was less than 20 points, right, in the public. Again, that point today is 40… 42% point, gap between Democrats and Republicans.
But still, we have 6 in 10 Americans, we’ve had all along, 6 in 10 Americans. If you had put this in a vote in any year between 2013 and 2025, it would have passed 60-40, right? Offering… and we offered 3 options. What should we do with the undocumented immigrants here in the country? Should we allow them a way to become citizens, provided they meet certain requirements? Should we provide them some kind of a second-tier thing? Maybe don’t let them have citizenship, some other legal status, or should we identify and deport them and even giving all 3 of those questions, 6 in 10 Americans all the way across the board have said we should allow them to pass the citizenship, and yet we can’t get it done, right, in our political thing.
To your bigger question, you know, we’ve done some analysis on this, and this is actually a warning, I would say, to the Democratic Party, that if they think they’re going to kitchen table their way out of this problem we’re in, they are sorely mistaken. They really are going to have to engage on the cultural and identity questions here. This is the way that the MAGA movement has kind of gained its momentum and force, and Democrats are going to have to engage on that issue, because when we did the analysis of kind of what’s pulling people to Trump, and we looked at things like, is it economic anxiety, or is it cultural anxiety, right, that he’s playing on? And it turns out it is both, right? There’s no doubt about it, and the when things are bad economically, it accelerates things here and makes it worse. But if you were making a kind of recipe for the MAGA cocktail, it would be two parts cultural anxiety and one part economic anxiety. Every analysis we’ve done has shown that that cultural identity piece and that’s why it’s MAGA, right? It’s Make America Great Again, and that again part is where all the power is, because it’s harkening back to this kind of cultural tropes, here, and…
So I think that’s the real danger here, is that it really isn’t about these in particular issues, it is about this identity thing, and we gotta figure out how to tell a story about who we are as Americans, and how we can all live together in a pluralistic democracy, right? And why everybody’s got a stake in that. And we’ve got to get better at telling that story, I think. And that’s gonna be the way to really save the democracy.
Jen Rubin
And I think your emphasis on story is correct. You don’t really win arguments on debating points. You tell narratives, you engage people at a very emotional level. There’s one thing that’s also very curious, and it’s been so apparent, with this president, with the crudeness, the vulgarity. It used to be that the right and the religious right was very concerned with a kind of, decline of civilization, of manners, of speech. They were opposed to violence in the media, and kind of the over-sexualization of children and the rest. You now have a president who seems to revel in degrading the culture and our sensibilities.
How do you explain that kind of disconnect, and does it have anything to do with the fact that people now see, or on the right see, it’s okay to have people who are morally bad people in office, whereas they didn’t used to think that way?
Robert P. Jones
Yeah, I, you know, well, you know, I’m old enough to remember IVoteValues.com, right? And ivoteValues.org, right?
In the second Bush era. I mean, and that was the brand. So, I mean, it is really… it’s one of the starkest, you know, U-turns I’ve, you know, I’ve seen in my career, is to kind of go from a party that was brand… literally branding itself as the party of values, right, to be the party of MAGA. And so that tells you, like, okay, something… something interesting is happening here, if they’ve been able to kind of do a 180 on that. And I still think the kind of hermeneutical key for me is seeing this question about.
Whether, a politician, and we didn’t ask it in this survey, but we’ve asked it in multiple other surveys.
you know, whether a public official could commit immoral acts in their private life and still behave ethically in their public life. And back in that I Vote Values era, the values voter era, white evangelicals and Republicans would say, no, they can’t do that, right? If they behave immorally in their private life, they’re going to behave immorally in their public life. And that’s what you’d expect from people who
say they take value seriously. But as soon as Trump became the nominee, we asked that question again back in 2016, and as soon as he became the Republican nominee for president.
they flipped, on the question, and they went from, like, 72%, saying that, yes, you know, that our… that, yeah, you, if you behave immorally, privately, you’re gonna behave immorally, publicly, to only, like, 30%, saying that. All about Trump.
it is this combination of realizing, again, that I do think there is a realization that they’re going to need anti-democratic means to achieve the ends of power.
And so when you… once you make that turn, it really does mean that what you need is someone who’s gonna wield raw power, right? And I think there’s a way of thinking about this where,
Trump is, they think, is going to lead them to a place they want to go.
Right? But it’s all about kind of a white Christian country, and it’s not democracy. That’s where their, you know, thing is going to lead them. I think they’re mistaken about that, actually. But nonetheless, I think that’s it. But it does mean that white evangelicals, Republicans, have really…
Moved away from a political ethic of principle, which is what you might, if you take them at their word, a values voters platform would be, and just move to a political ethic of expediency, kind of utilitarian.
And, you know, and every time we’ve seen that happen, it leads to all kinds of violence, all kinds of oppression, all kinds of unspeakable.
things, because you really have thrown all the guardrails, all the morality, all the values out the window, right? And it really is just about the pure exercise of power in your interest. And there’s nothing left to check in with.
Jen Rubin
24:59
Absolutely.
One of the things that distinguished the Founding Fathers, and we’re all thinking a lot about them because we’re coming up on the 250th anniversary, Ken Burns is coming out with a new series on the American Revolution, which we hope
boost some public awareness of what this country was founded on, is that the Founding Fathers cared a lot about science, knowledge.
They put in copyrights in the constitution. It’s kind of an odd thing when you think about it. The crown jewels of America have always been our higher education system, and yet you now have this bent on the right that is, frankly, wildly anti-intellectual.
How do those two things jive? Is that simply because they see that the left is overrepresented in these institutions? Is it something that, clashes, ideologically with, modern science and
their faith? What explains this kind of departure from science, from intellectualism, from universities, from education?
Robert P. Jones
26:15
Yeah, I think there’s… there’s some of that. We have seen an erosion in support for universities over… before all this happened, like, over the last decade, we’ve seen… and it’s been, again, it’s been a partisan…
shift, with Republicans having less trust in, public educational institutions. You know, we had, like, Turning Point USA and other things, like, on college campuses, literally to, like, put professors on watch lists, you know, for supposedly, like, liberal professors that would get attacked on social media and have their universities
You know, overrun with phone calls asking for their resignation, like, those kinds of things.
So I think there has been this sense of this kind of attack on these institutions as being, you know, quote-unquote, liberal. But we do have some, I think, good news in the survey about this, is that we asked about whether the federal government should have the authority to control student admissions, faculty hiring, and curriculum at U.S. colleges and universities.
to ensure they do not teach inappropriate material. We only have about a quarter of the country agreeing with that. And we had, like, it is 70% of the country, saying, absolutely not. That’s not, you know, consistent with American values, so I think that’s actually good news. We’ve had a majority of Republicans rejecting that premise, here, so I’m hoping that, you know, we’ll have some
kind of berm here, you know, setting up some protections at our universities. And we are seeing, by the way.
MIT, 8 other universities stayed.
Jen Rubin
27:42
Yes.
Robert P. Jones
27:42
saying, no, no, no, we’re not going to sign off, because Columbia, for example, when they signed that agreement, they agreed to have a government monitor installed inside the university, right, to report on whether they were or not… and they’re no longer a public… an independent institution. Once you have a government monitor embedded in your
institution, and that’s where all of this was heading. So I’m happy to see that bright line being kind of drawn and held, at least for now. And the public is actually behind that.
Jen Rubin
Well, that is a very positive note to end on. The survey is always fascinating. You can literally spend hours just pawing through it, looking at all the breakdowns and the, the information in it. Where can people find it if they want to go directly online to look through it themselves?
Robert P. Jones
Yeah, you can find it right on the homepage at PRRI.org. I’ll also be writing a little series over on my Substack at whitetoolong.net, over the next few weeks.
Jen Rubin
Excellent. Well, it’s always great to talk to you, Robbie, and we’ll look forward to having you back soon.
Robert P. Jones
Thanks, Jen.
