Losing Religion
I believe that we are living through a deep spiritual crisis; perhaps even a spiritual war. My interest these days is what this means. As we see the consequences of eating the forbidden fruit, of choosing power over humility, separation over communion, the stakes become clearer each day. Surrender or rebellion; sacrifice or conquest; death of the self or triumph of the will; the Cross or the machine. . . the way is narrow and maybe we will always fail to walk it. [emphasis added]
— Paul Kingsnorth, Free Press
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Maureen Dowd was born in 1952, the middle of the Baby Boomer era. She graduated from Catholic University of America in 1973, the year Roe v. Wade supercharged the Feminist Revolution.
The Ranker’s “List of Famous Columnists” has Dowd at #4, behind only a fiction writer (Stephen King), a man who died in 1972 (Walter Winchell), and a famous actress (Joan Collins). Dowd ranks first among active columnists.
After all, Dowd, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, has been columnist since 1995 at the New York Times, the nation’s dominant newspaper with 10.36 million subscribers (9.7 million online).
Boomers like Dowd, active feminists in the aftermath of the 1960s civil rights and anti-Vietnam War struggles, have helped move the Democratic Party away from its ethnic, working class religious roots toward humanism (see blog here).
Some of the Times decline from “All the News that’s Fit to Print” greatness stems from the paper’s reversal on publishing Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-AR) essay at the height of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Cotton urged the federal government to call in troops to crack down on the widespread violence, looting and killing that had broken out in cities across America in the weeks after George Floyd died at the hands of police. The paper’s woke staff erupted against Cotton’s piece.
In the Atlantic, Adam Rubenstein published his own version of what happened after Cotton’s op-ed appeared. Jenny Holland at Spiked! summarizes Rubenstein’s story about Times newsroom intolerance:
Rubenstein, who subedited the essay, initially soldiered on for a few months. In the meantime, he was outed as the subeditor in the Times’s own coverage of the drama, despite his junior role. A “friend” contacted his girlfriend, asking her to repudiate him. These are not the normal interactions of a healthy newsroom – they are 21st-century struggle sessions.
Rubenstein described the orientation session he attended after he was first hired:
When asked, as an icebreaker, what his favorite sandwich was, he mistakenly thought that answering “the spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A” would make him seem relatable to his new colleagues. Instead, all hell broke loose. Rubenstein had not taken into account the prior uproar in liberal American circles over the owner of Chick-fil-A’s stance on gay marriage. Rubenstein writes: “The HR representative leading the orientation chided me: ‘We don’t do that here. They hate gay people.’”
More recently, the Times has turned its focus to “Christian nationalism.” As the Times wrote on July 8, 2022, “Since the Jan. 6 attack, which blended extremism and religious fervor, the term ‘Christian nationalism’ is often used broadly to refer to the general mixing of American and white Christian identities.” (see here).
This year, the Times in-house Christian David French, deeply anti-Trump and an evangelical the way Biden and Pelosi are Catholic, has provided readers a detailed roadmap to “Christian nationalism”:
— Christian primacy in politics
— manifest through ideology, identity, and emotion [projection by identity politics practitioners]
— upend our Constitution and fracture our society
— nation purposes [a] Christian God
— public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision
— immediately relegate non-Christians to second-class status
— belief that Christians should rule
— politics on steroids
— Paula White, Trump’s closest spiritual advisor [she has been a spiritual advisor]
— Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker an adherent [Trump has criticized the Alabama IVF decision]
— Christians called to rule the family, the church, education, the media, the arts, business, and the government
— Christianity as an unofficial but necessary qualification for office
— another form of Christian supremacy
— many of the worst actors in American politics are professed believers
— Scandal and corruption are [] pervasive in the church
— good-versus-evil dynamic can make Christians believe that their opponents are capable of … stealing an election
— represent only 10% of the population … can gain outsize power
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| Apollo |
Where are we, then, in the face-off between Times-like humanists and religion? According to Pew Research, in the 2020 election, among all voters who attend religious services monthly or more often, 59% voted for Donald Trump. Biden got 71% of the unaffiliated vote.
Ryan Burge further explains: “in 2022, 6% of folks were atheists, 6% were agnostics, and another 23% were nothing in particular.” The large bloc of “nothing in particular” voters may lean left, all other things being equal, but they tend to be as uninterested in politics as they are in religion.
In a separate piece, Burge gets into the numbers:
The group that is most likely to contact a public official? Atheists.
The group that puts up political signs at the highest rates? Atheists.
HALF of atheists report giving to a candidate or campaign in the 2020 presidential election cycle.
The average atheist is about 65% more politically engaged than the average American.
And as Thomas Edsall points out in a broader Times column on demographic voting patterns:
atheists really are a solid Democratic constituency, supporting Biden over Trump by an incredible 87% to 9% margin. [T]he less adamant siblings of the emphatically godless, agnostics, also went for Biden by an 80% to 17% margin and are more engaged than “nothing in particulars”. [emphasis added]
New York’s Ed Kilgore adds, however, that there are still three times as many white evangelicals as atheists in the voting population, along with many other varieties of believers.
Gallup has done some of the best work on religion and politics.
From the above, we see that Catholics vote Democrat or Republican in roughly the same numbers. The party breakdowns show Republican Protestants over “none/other” by 56% to 19%, while Democrats “none/others” are over Democrat Protestants by 39% to 38%.
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Gallup’s Frank Newport, now 75, seems to regret the Democrats’ move away from belief in a higher power toward politics as the final battleground. He writes:
Most religions, including Christianity, the dominant religion in the U.S., argue for social cohesion and love for one’s neighbor, while politics carries within it the fundamental structure of disagreement, conflict, argument, and castigation of one’s opponents.
this matters, because religion matters in society. . . more religious people have higher levels of wellbeing and happiness. And religion has . . . influence on morality and pro-social behavior, its influence on charity and giving back to the community, and its contribution to social cohesion and solidarity. A continuing decrease in overall religiosity in American society. . . can have significant consequences for the health and viability of the country going forward.
Weiss concluded:
"I do not know what will come next for America or for the Jewish people any more than the Israelites who left Egypt and stood beneath the fire at Sinai. Things are uncertain.
"What I know is that our tradition teaches us that the seal of God is truth.
"What I know is that the story of the Jewish people is the story of freedom.
"And what I know is that story rings out across space and time in a common struggle against tyranny."
Weiss had earlier written, when Putin murdered his main opponent Alexey Navalny:
The life and death of Navalny insists on the following: there is a free world and an unfree world. There is right and there is wrong. There is better and worse, good and evil. There is truth and there are lies. And heroes, however imperfect, walk among us still.
Let us keep gratitude and hope alive.
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| Martyred Alexey Navalny |
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