Looks like wishful thinking, doesn't it?
In America, the relationship among the various religions has never been more harmonious, i.e. amoung the various Christian religions, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddahism, New Ageity, et al. Catholics, Protestants, and Jews get along very well and tend to be mutually supportive.
It is true that anti-Muslim sentiment, in various levels of intensity, is present. This too was non-existent before 9/11.
The real conflict in America is between the American people and the Left.
Secularism--or whatever you want to call it--is the religion of the Left. It is a sinister religion (by definition), based in large measure on atheistic Marxism and offering nothing but half-baked ideas, platitudes, confusion, decadence, a peculiar form of materialism, and suicide.
Maybe that's what these people at The Economist mean by America's intensifying religious wars.
Maybe that's what they're rooting for.
Secularism--or whatever you want to call it--is the religion of the Left.
I think that is exactly what they are looking at. The leftists have been trying to remove G-d for many years. If that doesn't constitute a war against religion, what does?
This is wrong. Most Leftists may be secularists but secularism is much larger than that. It is based on the idea that supernatural phenomena are not a part of our lives. We don't have to create them, or infer their existance, in order to explain natural phenomena or morality or any other aspect of our lives and experience.