In fact, the polling data shows there’s really only one group of Americans that rejects a secular society: white evangelical Christians. And this study is just further evidence that a lot of the political polarization in our country is the direct result of white evangelical Christians realizing that they no longer are the dominant majority and lashing out angrily in an effort to regain the levels of influence they used to enjoy.

For instance, the poll found that while a majority of Americans from all walks of life has come to embrace the rights of gay and lesbian Americans, white evangelicals remains stubbornly opposed to the gay rights movement. White evangelicals are the only category of the population to support business owners who want to discriminate against gay and lesbian customers.

You see similar results concerning the issue of marriage between same sex couples, which has encountered a dramatic rise in acceptance in recent years. Sixty-three percent of the Americans surveyed this year by PRRI said they support marriage for same-sex couples, a rise from 51 percent in a similar 2013 PRRI survey. But white evangelicals, and to a lesser extent black Protestants, refuse to get on board.

“Same-sex marriage now garners majority support among most religious groups,” the study authors wrote. “Roughly two-thirds of white mainline Protestants (66 percent) and Catholics (68 percent), and more than eight in ten (84 percent) religiously unaffiliated Americans and members of non-Christian religious traditions (86 percent) favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry legally. In stark contrast, only about one-third (34 percent) of white evangelical Protestants and roughly half (47 percent) of black Protestants support same-sex marriage.”

When I spoke with Daniel Cox, the director of research for PRRI, about this survey, he emphasized that the gulf between white evangelicals and everyone else goes a long way toward explaining how Donald Trump was able to turn out white evangelicals at the polls, despite his seedy personal history and inability to put on a persuasive display of individual religiosity.

“Yes, there were a lot of feelings of economic insecurity, but there [were] also pervading and pervasive cultural fears that the U.S. was changing, not just racially and ethnically, but religiously as well,” Cox said. 

The trends that are making white evangelicals nervous, Cox explained, are real enough. “We’re seeing, just during the Obama era, a significant drop in Americans who identify as white Christian,” he said. Instead, the number of Americans who claim to have no religious affiliation or who align themselves with a non-Christian religion is rising. 

Trump didn’t need to convince conservative Christians that he was one of them to receive their votes for his presidential bid, Cox suggested. All he needed to do was to assure them that he saw that they represented a privileged category and he would treat them as such. 

“At a time when white evangelical Protestants were really feeling under assault culturally, you had someone pugnaciously saying, ‘You know, we’re going to turn back the clock to a place where you were so much more comfortable and you had more influence,'” Cox said. He observed that Trump won an even bigger share of the white evangelical vote than even George W. Bush, even though the latter was indisputably a person of faith who was fluent with white evangelical traditions. 

The PRRI survey shows that many white people, especially white conservatives, are confusing the loss of cultural dominance with oppression. While nearly every other group of Americans believes that Muslims face more discrimination than Christians in the United States, white evangelicals hold the reverse to be true.

Here’s another symptom of growing secularism in America: The religious right is finding it harder than before to whip the public into some kind of social panic about cultural change. When the issue of marriage for same-sex couples first emerged onto the public radar, Cox said, the majority of Americans bought into religious right claims that legalizing it would somehow damage the institution of marriage. Now the religious right is trying to do the same thing with transgender people, painting them as a threat to society, but the public isn’t biting.