The New York Times headline was straightforward: “Study Finds That Percentage of Protestant Americans Is Declining.” We knew this was coming; trend lines have been moving in that direction for years. As Laurie Goodstein wrote in that NYT piece about the Pew survey, “For the first time since researchers began tracking the religious identity of Americans, fewer than half said they were Protestants, a steep decline from 40 years ago when Protestant churches claimed the loyalty of more than two-thirds of the population.” (MORE: Empty Pews: Everyone Is Misreading the New Numbers of Religiously ‘Unaffiliated’) There are two points worth noting in this news. One is how the numbers confirm the end of what the late Washington columnist and Georgetown fixture Joseph Alsop called “the Wasp ascendancy,” the era in which white Anglo-Saxon Protestants held so much of America’s political and economic power in their hands. This year, the two national tickets doing battle for the presidency and vice-presidency of the U.S. are made up of an African American, a Mormon and two Roman Catholics — and, wonderfully, most people don’t seem to care much about tribal distinctions that for so long divided us. The arguments are about fixing the economy, not professions of faith. And that’s as it should be. (MORE: How Mitt Romney’s Faith Could Help Him Win) The Roosevelt and Bush families are usually seen as exemplars of the Wasp category, but Carter, Reagan and Clinton were also Wasps, narrowly defined. What people tend to mean when they use the term is a white guy who comes from privilege and is not unaccustomed to the use of summer as a verb. It seems fairly safe to say that a figure from that world would have quite a fight on his hands to win a national election today. That’s one reason George W. Bush emphasized his evangelical Texas creed. His father may prove to have been the last classically Wasp President we’ll have. Nothing’s impossible, of course, but the prevailing demographic and cultural climate is hardly conducive to![]()
