“This hostility has provoked a shift in the goals and outlook of traditionalist Christians. Where once they thought of themselves as a ‘moral majority’ that might retake political and cultural institutions and transform them in their image, now they merely want to ensure that the government’s power to persecute them is restrained.”
Americans are abandoning religion in droves.
That’s the clear takeaway from two crucially important polls released earlier this week — one from the Public Religion Research Institute and another from the Pew Research Center.
The Pew poll shows that since 2012 the share of Americans who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” has surged from 19 percent to 27 percent, while the share of those who call themselves “religious and spiritual” has declined from 59 percent to 48 percent. That’s a dramatic change for a mere five years, and it builds on longer-term trends.
The PRRI poll, which is far more ambitious, places the Pew findings in a broader context, showing that white Christians now comprise less than half of the population; that the relative size of the white evangelical Protestant, white mainline Protestant, and white Catholic populations is declining rapidly; that 24 percent of the country is religiously unaffiliated; that the share of young people (aged 18-29) in that unchurched group is 38 percent; and that nearly all of the growth in the numbers of the religiously unaffiliated has taken place since the early 1990s, when their share of the population consistently averaged a comparatively paltry 8 percent.
Add up the findings and assume current trends continue and we’re left with a picture of the United States as a country in which established religious traditions and institutions are in sharp decline — and therefore in which culture and politics are rapidly secularizing.
Liberals, who are often secular in orientation, will likely respond to the news by rejoicing. With the religiously unaffiliated flocking in much greater numbers to the Democratic Party than the GOP, this would seem to be another confirmation of the “emerging Democratic majority” thesis that has captured the imaginations of so many on the left over the past decade and a half.
But the enthusiasm is unwarranted. Whatever the left’s electoral gains following from the increasing secularization of the country, they are likely to be balanced out by other changes that may well prove to be far more pernicious. There is no guarantee that the transition to a more purely secular culture and politics will proceed smoothly — or that the resulting post-religious culture and politics will even end up being especially liberal.
More traditional religious believers already feel under siege from the federal government and an often overtly hostile surrounding culture. Liberals tend to dismiss this as paranoia and whining. But as we saw with Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s harsh questioning on Wednesday of judicial nominee Amy Barrett, a devout Catholic, the impression isn’t wholly without foundation in reality. (Back in June, Bernie Sanders posed similarly accusatory questions to a conservative evangelical nominee for the Office of Management and Budget.) The message conservative believers hear from liberals and the left is clear: If you hold traditionally religious views, you will be treated as an unwelcome outsider in American public life.
This hostility has provoked a shift in the goals and outlook of traditionalist Christians. Where once they thought of themselves as a “moral majority” that might retake political and cultural institutions and transform them in their image, now they merely want to ensure that the government’s power to persecute them is restrained. (Hence the emphasis of the dwindling religious right on religious liberty protections.)
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