The growing trend that's got the religious right thoroughly rattled (Click here to read more)
The real reason conservatives are so determined to protect their religious freedoms? America's growing secularism
.Amanda Marcotte, AlterNet
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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 belief plays 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 conservative political worldview.
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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.
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But even this may underrepresent how secular our country really is getting, as many people who say they belong to a church don't really go to church much, if at all. While Americans like to tell pollsters they go to church regularly, in-depth research shows they are lying and many of them blow it off, putting our actual church-going rates at roughly the same level of secular Western Europe.
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