• virtually every speaker at Trump’s marathon rally. One after another, they looked at a seething, conspiracy-addled crowd and indulged, fed, and stoked every element of their furious worldview. I didn’t see a single true leader on Trump’s stage, not even Trump himself. I saw a collection of followers, each vying for the affection of the real power in Waco, the coddled populist mob.
• To understand the social and political dynamic on the modern right, you have to understand how millions of Americans became inoculated against the truth
• every time Trump faced pushback, he and his allies called critics “elitist” or “fake news” or “weak” or “cowards.” It was much easier to say the Trump skeptics had “Trump derangement syndrome,” or were “just establishment stooges,” than to engage with substantive critique
• Thus began the coddling of the populist mind
• Disagreement on the right quickly came to be seen as synonymous with disrespect. If “we the people” (the term Trump partisans apply to what they call the “real America”) believe something, then the people deserve to have that view reflected right back to them by their politicians and pundits.
• Repeatedly, Fox leaders and personalities who did not seem to believe the 2020 election was stolen referred to the need to “respect” their audience by telling them otherwise. For these Fox staffers, respecting the audience didn’t mean relaying the truth (a true act of respect). Instead, it meant feeding viewers’ insatiable hunger for confirmation of their conspiracy theories.
• Politicians are always tempted to pander, but rarely do you see such a complete abdication of anything approaching true moral or political leadership as what transpired at the Waco rally
• It’s common to critique the Trumpist movement as a Donald Trump cult, but that’s not quite right anymore. He’s still immensely influential, but do true cultists boo their leader when he deviates from the approved script? Yet that’s what happened in December 2021, when parts of a Dallas rally crowd booed Trump when he said he’d received a Covid vaccine booster. And does anyone think that Trump is a QAnon aficionado? Yet in 2022 he boosted explicit Q content on Truth Social, his social media platform of choice.
• There may have been a time when Trump truly commanded his movement. That time is past. His movement now commands him. Fed by conspiracies, it is hungry for confrontation, and rallies like Waco demonstrate its dominance

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• in 1900, about 80 percent of the world’s Christian population lived in the Western world and about 20 percent in the majority world. By 2000, only 37 percent lived in the Western world, and nearly two-thirds lived in the majority world
• Sub-Saharan Africa had the most striking growth of Christianity, growing from around 9 percent Christian at the beginning of the 20th century to almost 45 percent at the end of it. There are around 685 million Christians in Africa now.
• “Christianity at the beginning of the 21st century,” said George, “is the most global and most diverse and the most dispersed faith.”
• the most explosive growth has been in Indigenous, independent Pentecostal churches
• we ought to start talking about a new family of “spiritual” churches that have no historical ties to Western church traditions. These “spiritual” churches are largely not a result of colonial missions.
• we tend to associate Christianity with white Westerners and European influence. At this point, our assumptions about this need to change. The largest church congregation in the world belongs to Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, an Assemblies of God church, which has around 480,000 members
• even conservative estimates guess there were around 98 million evangelical Christians globally in 1970. Now, there are over 342 million.
• as Christianity booms overseas, more Christians are migrating to the United States. But there’s also evidence that migrants who come to here are finding immigrant-led churches and converting to Christianity after they arrive. These trends, George told me, are “globalizing American Christianity.”
• Today, the three largest Protestant churches in Paris are Afro-Caribbean evangelical megachurches of a charismatic or Pentecostal bent
• Immigration has been a huge factor in the demographic growth of the United States over the past decade. Much of that growth is attributable to Latinos, who now number around 62 million and represent just under 20 percent of the United States population. Some projections estimate that by 2060 there will be 111 million Latinos in the United States, constituting 28 percent of the population.
• Latino evangelicals are the fastest growing segment of evangelicals in the country. It also said that “Latino Protestants, in particular, have higher levels of religiosity”
• as of 2021, Pew reported that 29 percent of all adults identified as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular.”
• alongside that trend, the changing demographics of Christianity promise to transform faith and religious discourse. We cannot assume that America will become more secular so long as the future of America is less white
• it is difficult to provide definite statistics on how many evangelical and Pentecostal churches in America are led by Latinos, immigrants or other nonwhite or non-English-speaking pastors because many of these churches are small, non-organized and grass roots.
• the standard American religious survey categories no longer account for the realities expressed in the church in America. “White evangelicalism,” “Protestant mainline” and “progressive” are categories that are largely defined by a white majority.
• This “browning” of the church in America, as some scholars call it, scrambles all the categories. What we are seeing isn’t simply that white evangelicalism is changing; it’s that something new is emerging.
• most hold convictions that overlap with traditional evangelicalism in substantial ways. They are by and large traditionally conservative about sexuality and marriage. They hold an authoritative view of the Bible and believe in miracles and supernatural occurrences.
• But they tend to be more committed to social justice and, in George’s words, “communitarian” than many white evangelicals.
• when he visits churches in Brazil and Argentina, “Sometimes the Catholics are more evangelical and Pentecostal” than even typical white evangelicals in America.
• This influx of nonwhite believers will challenge white religious conservatives to choose between xenophobia and building alliances with immigrants who share their views on social issues.
• These trends will also challenge them to unbundle their religious views on social issues from a kind of libertarian economics that harms those who are less wealthy
• The future of American Christianity now appears to be a multiethnic community that is largely led by immigrants or the children of immigrants. And that reality ought to change our present conversations about religion in America.

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