Scholar: America Is Still Reacting to the Religious Right, in More Ways than One

The shadow of the religious right is long, and may be hindering the ability of modern-day Christian conservatives to stifle radicalism.

A religion scholar believes major trends in religion and politics can be traced back to the rise of the religious right in the 1990s, a sea change moment that set in motion an array of phenomena ranging from an uptick in religious disaffiliation to the radicalization of some Christian conservatives.

The sweeping theory is outlined in a new paper penned by Ruth Braunstein, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut. Her paper, titled “A Theory of Political Backlash: Assessing the Religious Right’s Effects on the Religious Field,” published late last year in Sociology of Religion, offers an unusually broad-based examination of the interplay between the religious right, the religiously unaffiliated and the power of political backlash.

Braunstein grounds her study in a trend well known to scholars and everyday religious practitioners alike: The number of “nones,” so called because of the answer they give to the question “what is your religious affiliation,” has increased dramatically in recent decades. In 1972, the General Social Survey reported that 5% of Americans did not claim a religious affiliation. But that number shot up during the 1990s and again in the 2010s: According to the Public Religion Research Institute, the religiously unaffiliated represented around 23% of the country as of 2020 — a larger percentage than white evangelical Protestants, white mainline Protestants or white Catholics. Read More