I don’t mean that literally. Atheists have not started believing in God. But in one respect they have replaced Christians—they are now the group that views all humans as having equal worth. In contrast, universalist Christianity has largely been replaced with Christian nationalism (which of course is a sort of oxymoron.)
Here’s Matt Yglesias:
George W. Bush took up the cause of HIV/AIDS in Africa and created the PEPFAR program with the backing of a bipartisan majority in congress.
PEPFAR is quintessential elite-driven, inside-game policymaking. You could never win a high-profile public argument about how we should help poor people in Africa. That’s why now that Bush is off the scene and it’s no longer a personal priority of anyone important in Republican Party politics, the program is mired in the larger abortion discourse dynamics.
But membership in the cosmopolitan minority is increasingly correlated with other issue positions. The kind of Bush-style politics where Christian commitments drive traditionalist notions of sex and gender, but also universalist beliefs about human value is going out of style. Increasingly, the cosmopolitan-minded people are just the secular people who are also on the left on other issues. This is all part of the larger process of education polarization — politics in western countries increasingly pits the business class not against a labor union left, but against what Thomas Piketty calls the “Brahmin left” of educated professionals and social service providers. Those are the people who are mostly likely to be cosmopolitan, and that’s created a mutually reenforcing cycle in which politics increasingly aligns around views of immigration rather than views of Medicare.
Illegal immigration could easily cost Biden the election.