The real reason wingnuts are so determined to protect their religious freedoms?
America's growing secularism
by Amanda Marcotte
There's been a lot of ink spilled
about the increasing political polarization in America, which is at
historically high levels. There's a lot of reasons for it, including
changing demographics, women's growing empowerment, the internet, the
economy and cable news. But religion and religious delusion an
important role as well. There's no way around it: America is quickly
becoming two nations, one ruled over by fundamentalist Christians and
their supporters and one that is becoming all the more secular over
time, looking more and more like Western Europe in its relative
indifference to religion. And caught in between are a group of liberal christians that are culturally aligned with secularists and are
increasingly and dismayingly seeing the concept of "faith" aligned with a
narrow and wingnut political worldview.That this polarization is happening is hard to deny, even if it's harder to measure that political polarization. The number of Americans who cite "none" when asked about a religious identity is rising rapidly, up to nearly 20% from 15% in 2007, with a third of people under 30 identifying with no religious faith. Two-thirds of the "nones" say they believe in god, suggesting that this is more of a cultural drift towards secularism than some kind of crisis of faith across the country.
But even this may underrepresent how secular our country really is getting, as many people who say they belong to a cult don't really go to cult much, if at all. While Americans like to tell pollsters they go to cult regularly, in-depth research shows they are lying and many of them blow it off, putting our actual cult-going rates at roughly the same level of secular Western Europe.
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