https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/d ... the-church
Some excerpts ...
The bottom line is that the percentage of white Americans identifying as Evangelical grew from 25 to 29 percent between 2016 and 2020, powered mainly by the fact that 16 percent of Trump supporters who didn’t identify as Evangelical in 2016 started considering themselves Evangelical by 2020.
Even more evidence here that "evangelical" is not a religious term anymore.
Among self-identified evangelicals in 2008:
16.1% reported never or seldom attending.
58.6% reported weekly or more attendance.
2020:
26.7% never or seldom (+10 pts)
49.9% weekly or more (-11 pts)
There isn’t a meaningful branch of Evangelical orthodoxy that is truly church-optional. Disconnection from the church doesn’t just mean disconnection from Christian community, it also frequently means disconnection from biblical literacy and Christian ethics.
At the risk of oversimplifying, let’s put Evangelicals in three buckets:
First, there is the universe of self-described Evangelicals of any race or ethnicity. This group is racially diverse and also politically and religiously heterodox. They share a self-definition, but they don’t necessarily share either a political or a theological worldview.
Next, there are self-identified white Evangelicals, who are the core constituency of the Republican Party. This group of Americans is religiously heterodox and ideologically uniform. This is the group of Evangelical Americans who receive the lion’s share of the nation’s attention, precisely because they represent the key to Republican power in the United States. Without white Evangelicals, the GOP would effectively cease to exist.
Finally, there is the much smaller group of Americans who are theologically Evangelical. They’re part of the Bebbington Quadrilateral, or those who satisfy the Barna test. They’re racially diverse, more politically heterodox than white Evangelicals alone, and religiously orthodox. They’re also the smallest of the three groups, by far, and—as a practical matter—don’t exercise decisive political power. They’re a minority of a minority.
It is vitally important to understand these distinctions, in part because it can explain why Evangelical political action can be so cruel and often so disconnected from biblical ethics. Why? One answer is found in the simple reality that not only are vast numbers of white self-described Evangelicals unmoored from scriptural truth, they don’t know biblical ethics at all.