Today's Must-Read: Am I Surprised?

Not really: The "Christian" right is turning Americans off to religion:

A few weeks ago, the Democratic National Committee formally acknowledged what has been evident for quite some time: Nonreligious voters are a critical part of the party’s base. In a one-page resolution passed at its annual summer meeting, the DNC called on Democratic politicians to recognize and celebrate the contributions of nonreligious Americans, who make up one-third of Democrats. In response, Robert Jeffress, a Dallas pastor with close ties to Trump, appeared on Fox News, saying the Democrats were finally admitting they are a “godless party.”

This was hardly a new argument. Conservative Christian leaders have been repeating some version of this claim for years, and have often called on religious conservatives and Republican politicians to defend the country against a growing wave of liberal secularism. And it’s true that liberals have been leaving organized religion in high numbers over the past few decades. But blaming the Democrats, as Jeffress and others are wont to do, doesn’t capture the profound role that conservative Christian activists have played in transforming the country’s religious landscape, and the role they appear to have played in liberals’ rejection of organized religion.

It's beyond hope that someone as arrogant and self-absorbed as Robert Jeffress would confess to being the problem, if he could even entertain the notion. However:

Social scientists were initially reluctant to entertain the idea that a political backlash was somehow responsible, because it challenged long-standing assumptions about how flexible our religious identities really are. Even now, the idea that partisanship could shape something as personal and profound as our relationship with God might seem radical, or maybe even a little offensive.

But when two sociologists, Michael Hout and Claude Fischer, began to look at possible explanations for why so many Americans were suddenly becoming secular, those conventional reasons couldn’t explain why religious affiliation started to fall in the mid-1990s. Demographic and generational shifts also couldn’t fully account for why liberals and moderates were leaving in larger numbers than conservatives. In a paper published in 2002, they offered a new theory: Distaste for the Christian right’s involvement with politics was prompting some left-leaning Americans to walk away from religion.

I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that most Americans at least in theory believe in traditional American values: equality under the law, welcoming immigrants (and unless you're a pureblooded American Indian, your ancestors were immigrants -- although, taking a somewhat longer view, every human being in the Americas is descended from immigrants, given that there were no humans here until about 15,000 years ago), generosity, a government that actually does provide for the common welfare, those sorts of things, all of which are diametrically opposed to the Republican-evangelical program.

Do take the time to read the whole report -- it's pretty interesting, if a little soft-pedaled.

Via The New Civil Rights Movement.