It’s both. Here’s a little experiment: The next time someone’s ranting to you about how such-and-such isn’t Christian, or that so-and-so is violating the Bible, or whatever, ask them what their pastor talked about at church last Sunday. “Oh, I wasn’t able to make it this week, because, um, I had something more important.”
Lots of people like using religion as a cudgel, and that number may well be increasing. Few people actually care about their religion itself, and that number is decreasing.
Accusing Catholics of an inordinate amount of fealty to the Pope, and referring to them as “papists,” isn’t terribly common now (though I suppose I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some extremely conservative Protestants who still feel this way), but it dates back to the Church of England in the 16th Century. Apparently it was a not-uncommon prejudice for various non-Catholics to hold, up through the 19th century.
More recently (relatively speaking), it’s the kind of accusation that was made against Al Smith (1928 Democratic nominee for president), as well as JFK.
In the light of history, “inspired by Christian values” is a frightening concept.
The current secular trend is not anti-Christian. The goal of the secular community is to see the last gasp of politicized religion. Unfortunately some folks equate being ignored with a war on their beliefs, but individual beliefs are not in any danger.
The “Christian values” part is supposed to be about stuff like the Works of Mercy and the Beatitudes, rather than the “let’s go hit people with hardcover Bibles until they convert”. You know: “I was an outsider in your land, and you gave me shelter; I was naked, and you dressed me,” etc. and paraphrasing from memory. I was very surprised to watch a video on “how come Spain is getting so little in the way of fascistoid crap right now” which credited Catholicism as one of the reasons*: it was because the RCC itself has, for the last 50 years, focused more on the “peace, love, social justice” side than the “convert or burn” side.
And I don’t think any of them is a confessional party. We begin by only knowing people’s religious affiliation if for some reason they decide to mention it. I can tell you that gee, with that lastname, PP politician Andrea Levy is sure to have Jewish ancestry on the paternal side, but I have no idea what her actual religious affiliation is.
Last time I encountered this in person was near Nashville, in October of 2017. The speaker jumped from kneeling for the anthem to immigration and from there to Catholicism, in a room which hosted two dozen foreign visitors of whom the only non-Catholic was a Muslim. My Belgian colleagues weren’t sure whether to die, crawl under the floor or explode; the Latin Americans and I had heard it before so we were used to ignoring it.
And, they should continue - just not as the political party in power.
Out of curiousity, are you psychic?
Yeah, that seems unlikely. True atheists are pretty rare, despite what the internet would have you believe. Humans seem pretty wired to believe in the transcendent. Even in the Czech Republic which is arguably the least religious society on Earth, atheism is likely no more than 25% of the population and actually on the decline. What we see with the non-religious is more of a reaction against the religion rather than a complete rejection of the transcendent. I don’t know if leaders tend to be more or less atheist than the population as a whole. They tend to be whiter and wealthier than the population as a whole, so that trends toward atheism, but atheists tend to be more trusting of government and you wonder then if politicians truly trust themselves or not. Certainly there are more atheists than admit it in politics, but I think that hundreds at least at the federal level seems fairly unlikely. There are what 550 or so top-level politicians/appointees at the federal level? Pew says about 3% of Americans are atheist, so that’s about 16 politicians? Probably higher because they are wealthy, white men which skew atheist (although they are also older which skews religious), but not by a lot. I think that 25 or so is a reasonable guess.
As an aside, in answer to the question. It’s a false dichotomy. Religion will likely play some role in politics for quite some time, but American religion is too fractured to ever really take control of anything. American religious people are all very different with very different views on the role of religion in public life and what the goals of government should be or how Christianity should impact those goals. As an example, during a protest walk against family separations, the majority of the attendees were religious. Bible verses dominated the placards. The people hurling insults at us were also religious. American religion is extremely distributed and non-monolithic. Even during the heyday of the Moral Majority, the leaders didn’t ever speak for the majority of Christians, maybe the loudest, but never the majority. Even within denominations, the leadership rarely if ever speaks for the political views of their members. American Protestantism post-2nd Great Awakening is characterized by its non-hierarchical nature and the belief that God speaks to individuals rather than organizations or leaders.
I don’t know how you would tell, since there is still a social stigma attached to being atheist, albeit a mild one. I would guess that people whose family or social circle is religious would not admit in a survey to being atheist. I would believe that the outspoken self-righteous atheists might amount to 3%.
In the UK, non-religious people are almost in the majority
Maybe only a few of these are hardline atheists; most are probably like me- metaphysically open-minded.
I don’t believe in anything- but it is interesting to speculate. Maybe there is no God; maybe there are an infinite number of them.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apeirotheism
That seems to be what most surveys say (of course, you can take the above argument that all of the surveys are flawed.) The majority of non-religious don’t necessarily reject the existence of ‘god’ in some sense, but they don’t accept it in a specific sense as defined by codified religious beliefs. More like vague spiritualists or people who think that ‘there is something more than the physical out there’ but don’t necessarily have firm beliefs upon what that is. A lot of them are simply ‘apathists’ in that the concept of the transcendent doesn’t particularly matter that much to them so they neither reject nor accept it, nor take an ‘agnostic’ view of not knowing. Closer to simply just not caring one way or the other.
Absolutely. Even with apeirotheism (a belief in the existence of an infinite number of gods), in an infinite universe it is possible that there might be less than one god per Hubble Volume. If the closest god to Earth is outside our effective event horizon, then he, she or it may as well not exist.
Coming back to the potential appeal of European-style Christian Democracy, it has been a way for the conservative-minded in mostly Catholic countries to walk away from authoritarianism and nationalism, without identifying as “liberals” (which, depending on the country, implied anti-clericalism or what we now call neo-liberal and pro-business deregulation) or social democrats (or of course communists).
But in today’s US, how many conservatives would be willing to buy into a moral scepticism about capitalist values, or to a thoroughgoing rules-based international order?
You’re applying physical limitations to (a) transcendent being(s). c may not be a limiter for him/her/it/them. It’s like a two dimensional paper being who says it’s impossible to cross the line drawn on the sheet of paper. For him, he’s right; for us, it’s trivial. Not that I’m saying that the transcendent is a 4th physical dimension, but simply that laws that exist in a physical 3 dimensional universe are not necessarily the rules of any transcendent being(s). Just by simply postulating that time doesn’t exist in this theoretical transcendent universe changes essentially every physical law to the point of nonsense. A being(s) that exist in a timeless universe that are somehow able to interact with this one could essentially be three of the four omni-s.
I think that the appeal would be more to the liberal religious than to the conservative. The religious left really feels lost in the two party system. Both sides encourage if not require them to deny part of their core beliefs in order to ‘side’ with them. It’s an uncomfortable place to be.
Liberal Christians are the majority of the American left. What are they asking themselves to deny?
The European conservatives PatrickLondon mentioned tend to be to on the left side in the US whether we’re talking about religion or politics, but even within that “on the left side” there are variations.
Yet when actually having to address religion in his life he kept failing – the whole thing about not needing to pray for forgiveness would be a sin of pride of the highest proportion.
But if there is no risk of a specifically confessional theocracy, there is rather of a redefinition of what is conservative Christianity by which the point is the conservatism itself rather than the Gospel, and policies become propelled by satisfying factions thereof. It’s “Prosperity Churches” supporting pro-big-business anti-worker legislation; it’s community fundamentalist churches supporting legislation making life hard for “outsiders” (LGBT, immigrant, college students, whatever); it’s “you don’t have to do your job for people your church disapproves of;” it’s America = New Chosen People nationalists excusing hegemonic militarism; it’s the “there should be no public welfare, just church charities” pseudolibertarianism then followed with “…and the church charities should not have to support sinful lifestyles”.
I’m also hoping for an answer to this one.