Posted on 04/26/2015 11:56:15 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
New research reveals we're not the nation of Bible thumpers Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee like to tell themselves.
The 2016 presidential campaign has really and truly started now, and already the religious pandering is getting silly. Despite wanting voters to think of him as a “libertarian” Rand Paul was recently bleating about how this country needs a religious revival, specifically “another Great Awakening.” Ted Cruz made a big fancy speech at Liberty University where he highlighted his defense of state promotion of religion, which he erroneously called “religious freedom,” even though having the state push faith on you is the opposite of that. Mike Huckabee claimed that Christians in the military are being persecuted. Marco Rubio is so desperate to be seen as a religious right savior that he spread himself out, claiming formally to be Catholic but attending a Bible-thumping holy roller church that believes in young earth creationism and demons. He’s also done his time as a Mormon, to cover all bases.
Looking over these men’s statements and histories, it’s clear that they’re plugged into the myth that defines the religious right. This myth is that America is fundamentally a religious nation and always has been, but it’s been hijacked by a minority of back-stabbing secularist elites—and that the country can be restored to its rightful Christian dominance by electing a Republican.
It’s a narrative that is fundamentally wrong. Yes, the majority of Americans identify technically as Christians, but a deeper look at how our people act, believe, and think shows that we’re not at all a “Christian nation,” but a largely secular nation that suffers a small but vocal minority of theocracy-minded conservatives. And not just that, but that the secular-minded majority is getting even bigger and more secular all the time.
Since many of the most prominent defenders of secularism are atheists, it’s easy to assume not only is secularism an atheist thing , but that it’s therefore only important to the 20 percent of Americans that are non-believers. But most people who believe in God are also basically secular. They don’t believe that religion should dictate public policy, for one thing. For another, they don’t really think religion should dictate their own lives. While most Americans are believers, that doesn’t mean that they believe that religion should have the power over our personal lives, our government policies, or our own consciences that the religious right believes it should.
Take the issue of birth control and abortion, for instance. To hear Republicans speak of it, legal abortion and easily accessible contraception are affronts to our supposedly Christian nation. Marco Rubio, for instance, declared the HHS requirement that insurance plans cover contraception an assault on “the fundamental tenets of their faith” of believers. It’s easy to picture, from this rhetoric, a nation of devout people being tyrannized by a minority of elite secularists who want to “impose” our lurid sexual health care on the God-fearing.
In reality, most Americans, regardless of religious affiliation, are pro-choice and pro-contraception. Despite church teachings, Catholics don’t differ from the general public on their opinions on abortion. A report by Catholics for Choice, in fact, showed that only 14 percent of Catholics agreed with the Vatican’s belief that abortion should be completely illegal. And despite efforts by conservative media to treat the contraception mandate like it’s an affront to all Christians and especially Catholics, research shows that 63 percent of Catholic women and 66 percent of Protestant women supported the contraception mandate.
None of this is a surprise. Just because people say they’re a member of a church doesn’t mean they fit the image of pious sheep following lockstep with the instructions of conservative religious leaders. The sexual behavior of religious people isn’t measurably different than the sexual behavior of the non-religious. Catholics and Protestants get abortions and use contraception at the same rate as non-believing women. When it comes to sex, we’re a secular country with just a few religious trappings for ornament.
Indeed, the moral teachings of various religions, particularly the conservative ones, don’t have nearly as much impact on how Americans think and behave as they would if ours were truly a Christian nation. Most Americans believe that divorce, birth control, premarital sex, single parenthood, and homosexuality are morally acceptable behaviors. Not exactly the picture of a secular elite imposing its will on a conservative and pious majority.
It’s not just about these moral questions, either. One of the ways that the religious right claims that we’re a deeply religious country unlike our secular counterparts in Western Europe is by pointing to our supposedly much higher church attendance rates. While the French and English spend their Sundays snoozing in bed, Americans supposedly get up and get to praying. And it’s true that if you ask Americans how often they go to church, they report putting their butts in pews on a regular, often weekly basis.
Those Americans, however, are not telling the truth. Research shows that pews are about half as full as they would be if Americans were telling the truth about church attendance. When researchers actually record Americans’ day-to-day activities, they find that they don’t go to church much at all. In fact, we don’t go anymore than our Western European counterparts. The religious right likes to claim we are a “Christian nation”, but we are a bunch of secularists who only show up for weddings and holidays, just like the Europeans. We just lie about it, possibly because we buy into this myth that we are a religious country, which makes some people feel pressure to front like they have more faith than they actually do.
So when we see that the numbers of admitted non-believers are rising, it’s not because masses of religious people are suddenly choosing to become secular. It may just be people who were only nominally Christian feeling freer to admit that they don’t really believe in any of that stuff at all. Add to that the masses of Americans who may still believe on some level but who don’t live their lives by religious rules and don’t really care much about what religious leaders think, and you start to get what looks very little like a “Christian nation” and very much like a secular one.
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Amanda Marcotte is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and journalist. She's published two books and blogs regularly at Pandagon, RH Reality Check and Slate's Double X.
“you start to get what looks very little like a ‘Christian nation’ and very much like a secular one”
Does the writer truly miss that her words demonstrate her view that in its transition into a secular nation, America necessarily comes from Christian origin?
or 12.....
these people WORSHIP youth! and... immaturity
I think I saw it on TV once. ;’)
John Edward’s?
OH THAT GUY!!!>../
did she inspire him to post selfies of his HAIR??
shes flyin in the stratosphere of the intellectual elite there she is!!
Thanks, I knew there had to be a formal diagnosis.
More media word play with bogus assumptions and conclusions. There’s LOTS of home-schooled ‘Bible-thumpers’ who don’t go to church, and even more shy of the ‘thumper’ level who are Christians nonetheless!
I never bother reading her hatefull spew, because it accomplishes nothing.
So here’s the deal Amanda:
There is nothing more violent in the meme’s of human thought than secularism.
If the 20th century had anything cogent to say to us all here in the 21st century it is this:
Secularism kills!
The idea that theists of various stripes owe you or some facsimile of the Enlightenment an apology is to pretend that the world was not created 5000 years ago, but yesterday.
When we think about the fadish death as text beheading, let’s remember who invented the guillotine.
It was your bigoted hate filled anti-christian intellectuals of the French Revolution.
Mao and Stalin killed over 100 million people this past century on the intellectual and academic premise that religion is primitive and archaic.
Public sensational killings are not simply tolerated by the secular— they are the celebrated signature.
Christianity uniquely critiques the killing of the innocent and says a Resurrection stands between the statist fantasy of genocidal fed obedience and a world of human liberty.
Rule one of Creation which these self important are too blind to see: You will serve Heaven or you will serve Hell. There is no in between.
Plenty of choices, one seems to stand out from the crowd.
My late father has #6 on his headstone.
Why not be closed on Friday or Thursday or any other day... is being closed on Sunday an endorsement of Christian religion?...
With Saturday close second endorsing the judeo-christian days of rest and worship....
You don't see as closed on Islam Friday to you?
and what's the atheist official day of rest... Wednesday?
we gotta change these days of the week the government's close otherwise it's an endorsement of the Christian and Judeo Christian religion can't have that
It's just not happening.
Is she going to tell Asian Americans to stop whining about not being let into prestigious universities at a rate commensurate with their high school accomplishments?
Is she going to tell African Americans to stop blaming everything on The Man use and riots to extort money from the public trough?
Is she going to tell Muslims to stop their Halal practices that cause animals to suffer?
What does she have to fear from this ever-shrinking minority of Christians? That one or two insurance companies might not help her pay for condoms? That a few schools might not hire her as a teacher? That a few churches might not allow her to marry her girlfriend? That one or two bakeries might not supply cupcakes for her gay cousin's wedding reception?
The horrors!
you know what’s funny about the atheist headstone...symbol?... it an “Atom”....vs ...Adam.. I know if you read definitions they don’t seem to come from the same root but I find that very hard to believe... given their meanings
This writer pretty much phones it in, with her loose *facts*...of which she obtains from sources such as Slate (lib taking the word of another lib as a source), American Sociological Review (from 1998), and, of course, herself.
NO THANKS!
vs
Just because I no longer attend church regularly does not mean I am not a believer. My church has gone left and left me.
I now spend my Sunday mornings at what I jokingly refer to as “The Church of John Moses Browning”.
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