America is a multi-ethnic, multi-faith, and deeply religious republic. If one or both parties can embrace each element of that reality, then we have a chance to make sure that seismic shift moves our politics towards the respectful pluralism that America requires. 

There’s talk of realignment in the air. If you think all the way back to 2012, you might remember a certain phrase—the coalition of the ascendant. This was the Obama coalition, the collection of all of America’s growing demographics, from nonwhite voters to single women. The Romney voters, by contrast, were fading. White, Christian, and married, they were the demographic losers in a population that was becoming both more diverse and more secular. Democratic dominance was inevitable.
That analysis should have caused us to feel a certain looming dread. Nations that use race or ethnicity as the organizing principle of politics are often quite unstable, and quite violent. This is true across the world, and it’s true in our own land. Systematic racial division and oppression fractured the country once. It’s foolish to think it couldn’t fracture again—especially when the political class intentionally mobilizes voters to vote as a racial bloc.
Optimistic Democrats didn’t see Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 so much as a refutation of the coalition of the ascendant theory as a quirk of the electoral college and a reminder that Hillary Clinton wasn’t Barack Obama. The nation wasn’t quite majority-minority yet, and thus that the white majority could still win races when identity politics reign supreme.
But 2020 told a different tale. The Democrats got whiter, the Republicans got more diverse, and now all the assumptions are scrambled. Donald Trump lost the popular vote by a far wider margin than he did in 2016, but he did materially better with Hispanic, Asian, and black voters. In fact, Trump did better than Romney with nonwhite voters in 2016 (an improvement then mainly attributed to Hillary Clinton’s weaknesses), and he improved on that showing in 2020. What was once seen as an aberration now looks like a trend.
The trend continues. Last week Axios’s Josh Kraushaar described an ongoing “seismic shift” in the two parties’ coalitions. As outlined in a New York Times/Siena College poll, “Democrats now have a bigger advantage with white college graduates than they do with nonwhite voters.” The Democratic Party’s losses with Hispanics are remarkable. Whereas Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2012, and Biden won 65 percent in 2020, now the Hispanic vote is “statistically tied.”
Moreover, there are good reasons to believe that Hispanic voters will continue to migrate to the GOP. As Ruy Teixeira described this week on his Substack, comprehensive issue polling from Echelon Insights demonstrates that strong progressives have substantially different political and cultural views from Hispanics.
Hispanic voters are far more likely to believe that America is “the greatest country in the world,” far less likely to support defunding the police, far less likely to believe “racism is built into our society,” and far less likely to believe that transgender athletes should play on sports teams that match their current gender identity. In most cases, the polling gap is just immense.
What accounts for such monumental differences in beliefs in values? As my colleague Jonah Goldberg often (and rightly) says, we should reject monocausal explanations for complex social phenomena, but here’s a factor that simply isn’t discussed enough. The Democratic Party has a huge “God gap,” and that God gap is driving a wedge between its white and nonwhite voters.
Let’s look at the data. A 2018 Pew Research Center survey on American religious beliefs provides us with a picture that’s worth a thousand words:
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Written by R. A. Miller |
Saturday, November 19, 2022
In one short paragraph, we see a great portrayal of Christ’s kingship. The Hodges’ main idea points to Christ’s rule over all the world. Since God cannot lie (quoting Numbers 23:19) and the reign of Jesus is promised, the children reason that the people should not be working against Christ. Instead, they should work to establish the Lord’s Kingdom in India by throwing out their idols and loving the true God. This depth of theological understanding is not only remarkable for a child to have but also foreshadows the theological prowess that the Princeton theologian would later exhibit.

If you know anything about A.A. Hodge, it’s probably that he was a Princeton theologian like his father, Charles Hodge. Being the son of such a notable Christian scholar, A.A. had a sharp yet Christ-centered mind, even at a young age. When he was just a boy, he wrote a touching letter with his sister addressing people of the great mission field of India. The letter was titled “Friends of the Heathen,” and was featured in the July 1887 edition of The Homiletic Review. The article is as follows:
The following is a most touching reminiscence of the late Dr. Hodge and his sister, when they were children: “A letter, yellow with age, lies on the table. It bears date June 23, 1833, and was sent to India in the care of Rev. Dr. James R. Eckard, then a missionary in that far-away land. It was written by a boy ten years old. That boy became a missionary himself—was a pastor in this country—and was esteemed the most eminent theologian of his day. Recently he heard the summons to a higher service; and “was not, for God took him.” Subjoined is the child’s note—suggestive of the impressions which youthful minds are capable of receiving:
“DEAR HEATHEN: The Lord Jesus Christ hath promised that the time shall come when all the ends of the earth shall be His Kingdom. And God is not a man that He should lie, nor the son of man that He should repent. And if this was promised by a Being who cannot lie, why do you not help it to come sooner, by reading the Bible, and attending to the words of your teachers; and loving God, and, renouncing your idols, take Christianity into your temples? 
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Reformed experiential preaching explains how things ought to go in the Christian life (the ideal of Romans 8), how they actually go in Christian struggles (the reality of Romans 7), and the ultimate goal in the kingdom of glory (the optimism of Revelation 21–22). This kind of preaching reaches people where they are in the trenches and gives them tactics and hope for the battle.

Perhaps you have heard preaching that fills the head but not the heart. You come away better informed and educated, but little moved by God’s glory to do God’s will. In the worst case, such preaching puffs people up with knowledge. At its best, it is light without heat. You may also have heard preaching that touches the heart but not the head. Hearing it can be an emotionally moving experience. People leave the service excited, fired up, and feeling good. But they have zeal without knowledge. Like cotton candy, such preaching has lots of flavor but no nutritional value. It might bring people back for more (until they get sick), but it will not nurture life or develop maturity.
The greatest tragedy about these two abuses of preaching is that they sever the vital connection between truth and love in Christ: “But speaking the truth in love, [we] may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ” (Eph. 4:15). It’s not just that we need both truth and love.
Therefore, the truth of Christ must be brought home to the heart by the Holy Spirit in order to produce love. That’s the kind of preaching we need.
Reformed experiential preaching is not merely aesthetic, causing people to walk away thinking, “What a beautiful idea!” It is not merely informative, imparting knowledge about the Bible and theology. It is not merely emotional, warming hearts and producing strong feelings. It is not merely moralistic, instructing and exhorting in what is right and wrong. All of these elements are present in good preaching, but none of them is the heart of the matter.

It breaks us and remakes us. It is both exhilarating and humbling. Such preaching brings us face to face with the most glorious and delightful Being in the universe, and also face to face with our own profound wickedness.
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