In his new book, “The End of White Christian America,” Robert P. Jones details the demographic and cultural changes in religion and ethnicity in this country. Jones is CEO of Public Religion Research Institute.

Earlier this week, The Washington Post published an interview with Jones by John Sides, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University. The following excerpts are Jones' words from the interview.

Among Jones’ findings:

- An aging white Christian population: Today, young adults ages 18 to 29 are less than half as likely to be white Christians as seniors age 65 and older. Nearly 7 in 10 American seniors (67 percent) are white Christians, compared to fewer than 3 in 10 (29 percent) young adults. Although the declining proportion of white Christians is due in part to large-scale demographic shifts ... young adults are three times as likely as seniors to claim no religious affiliation (34 percent versus 11 percent, respectively).

- Fear of losing clout: Falling numbers and the marginalization of a once-dominant racial and religious identity — one that has been central not just to white Christians themselves but to the national mythos — threatens white Christians’ understanding of America itself.

- Declining membership across liberal and conservative churches: Up until about a decade ago, most of the decline among white Protestants was confined to mainline Protestants, such as Episcopalians, United Methodists or Presbyterians, who populate the more liberal branch of the white Protestant family tree. But over the last decade, we have seen marked decline among white evangelical Protestants, the more conservative part of the white Protestant family. White evangelical Protestants comprised 22 percent of the population in 1988 and still commanded 21 percent of the population in 2008, but their share of the religious market had slipped to 18 percent at the time the book went to press. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest evangelical Protestant denomination in the country ... has now posted nine straight years of declining growth rates.

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- Rising unaffiliated ranks: As recently as the 1990s, less than 1 in 10 Americans claimed no religious affiliation. By 2014, the religiously unaffiliated rivaled Catholics’ share of the religious marketplace, with each group making up 22 percent of the American population. By 2051, if current trends continue, religiously unaffiliated Americans could comprise as large a percentage of the population as all Protestants combined.

- Why they are leaving: When PRRI surveys have asked religiously unaffiliated Americans who were raised religious why they left their childhood religion, respondents have given a variety of reasons — stopped believing in teachings, conflicts with science, lack of time, etc. — but one issue stands out, particularly for younger Americans. About 70 percent of millennials (ages 18-33) believe that religious groups are alienating young adults by being too judgmental about gay and lesbian issues. And 31 percent of millennials who were raised religious but now claim no religious affiliation report that negative teaching about or treatment of gay and lesbian people by religious organizations was a somewhat or very important factor in their leaving.

- Changing attitudes on LGBT issues: Attitudes are shifting. For example, 45 percent of young evangelicals (ages 18-29) and 43 percent of young Mormons favor same-sex marriage, compared to only 19 percent of white evangelical seniors and 18 percent of Mormon seniors. Most notably, the data show that young Republicans have passed the tipping point: 53 percent of young Republicans now support same-sex marriage.

- Many still believe in God: The rising number of religiously unaffiliated Americans has more to do with people being less likely to claim a formal connection with organized religion than it does with widespread doubts about the existence of God. Many unaffiliated Americans, for example, still believe in God, even as they are happily unconnected to any church and show little interest in seeking out institutionalized religion.

- Racism and religion: White evangelicals have themselves started disentangling Christianity and racism, albeit slowly and recently. For example, the Southern Baptist Convention did not get around to apologizing for the role slavery played in the denomination’s founding and for its consistent failure to support civil rights until 1995. And only this year, 2016, did the SBC vote to officially disavow the display of the Confederate battle flag. There are important leaders, such as Russell Moore, the president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, leading the way here, but there is a long road ahead toward anything like racial reconciliation.

- Evangelicals’ attraction to Donald Trump: I first identified the roots of this unlikely alliance back in a February column for The Atlantic (magazine), just after Trump won the GOP South Carolina primary, where nearly 7 in 10 voters were white evangelical Protestants. Trump’s appeal to evangelicals was not that he was one of them but that he would “restore power to the Christian churches” if he were elected president. This explicit promise, along with his anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric, signaled to white evangelical voters that when he crowed about “Making America Great Again,” he meant turning back the clock to a time when conservative white Christians held more influence in the culture. Trump has essentially converted these self-described “values voters” into “nostalgia voters.” But even if Trump somehow manages to pull off a win by bringing out unprecedented numbers of white Christian voters, the patterns in the electorate are clear. Every four years, there is a shrinking pool of white Christian voters; if current trends continue, 2024 will be the first year white Christians will not make up a majority of voters nationwide.