An oil crash and some sort of massive church scandal that causes people to leave Evangelical Protestantism en masse, in rapid succession.
Impossible. The whole thing about being an evangelical protestant is that even if your church is torn apart by scandal or schism, you can just go to another one. Not lose your religion entirely. It’s not like the Catholic Church where it’s all centralized; the pastor of every church is like their own Pope basically. And even then, not like the RCC suffered too badly from their own massive scandal. There is no conceivable way to rapidly get all these people to just totally abandon evangelical Christianity, and even if they did, that still wouldn’t guarantee they’d suddenly become socially liberal Democratic voters. Religion in general is on the decline in this country, and that generational change is what might ultimately liberalize some places over time, but it’s happening slower in states like Oklahoma than others. I’d imagine it would be one of the very last holdout states with a strong evangelical presence, in fact.
Oh and the other thing about evangelical Christianity is that it strongly encourages “evangelism,” i.e. converting people. So that’s another reason why it’s declining slower than mainline Protestantism and Catholicism in the US. Even the people they lose can be replaced with new converts, while those churches don’t put nearly as much emphasis on converting people and thus have older populations that are dying out faster. Plus they are less zealous/conservative as it is.
Yes, to flip a state like Oklahoma, a lot of Evangelicals would need to end up in the Dem coalition while remaining in the faith. I personally think it's very underrated how many younger Evangelicals are a better cultural fit for the left than the right in the long run, especially the secularizing post-Trump right. Every day we are moving further and further away from the right wing = traditionalist pro-family alignment of 1980-2010 and there's a significant woke streak developing in certain younger churches.
I would not be surprised at all to see the Evangelical vote snap to something like 60R/40D the day after SCOTUS overturns Roe and starts upholding red state abortion bans. Abortion is the only issue keeping a lot of people in the GOP.
I indeed hope that to be true, but putting anecdotal evidence aside, do you have any sources that'd prove that to be the case? How many single-issue-abortion voters are there which would vote for the Democrat if not for abortion really? Have there been any studies or polls taken?
And how many of these people will fight until abortion is outlawed in California and New York as well?
Moreover, how many of these people will become single-issue something else voters if abortion is outlawed?
It will be really interesting if abortion is overruled. If all the sudden 35 or 40 states ban it, there could be the political capital generated to make there be a "War on Abortion". That could be the next frontier on that issue. On the other hand, if the issue stalls out where roughly half the country has it and the other half doesn't or something like that, or if there is a backlash and abortion becomes generally available again in a few cycles anyways, there will be a lot of energy going into other things. Maybe a "War on Abortion" wouldn't be enough and they will start talking about how bad birth control is or alcohol, or any other form of "secular decadence". Maybe instead of expanding upon the religious dimension, they expand upon the philosophical issue and start going talking about animal rights or something like that.
