Something old, something new.
Something red, something blue.
We started with something new and something blue during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). But, as you will see, the “something old” turned out to be blue, as well.
“Blue,” of course, refers to the liberal/progressive half of the starkly divided American political scene, which also reflects, of course, divisions on moral, social, cultural and religious issues.
Oceans of mass-media ink have been poured out in recent decades by journalists covering the Religious Right and its scary impact on the Republican Party. What about the religious left — no capital letters, of course — and its impact on the Democrats?
That isn’t an important story, of course. At the start of the podcast I quoted some numbers retrieved at mid-week from some Google searches. A basic search for “Religious Right” yielded 6.5 million hits and a Google News search found 77,500 items. Do the same thing for “religious left” and you get 196,000 in the first search and 3,680 in the news search. Amazing, that.
This brings us to a New York Times op-ed essay by the increasingly omnipresent (and that’s a good thing) political scientist Ryan Burge, who contributes charts and info here at GetReligion. The headline: “A More Secular America Is Not Just a Problem for Republicans.” Here’s an early thesis statement:
Today, scholars are finding that by almost any metric they use to measure religiosity, younger generations are much more secular than their parents or grandparents. In responses to survey questions, over 40 percent of the youngest Americans claim no religious affiliation, and just a quarter say they attend religious services weekly or more.
Americans have not come to terms with how this cultural shift will affect so many facets of society — and that’s no more apparent than when it comes to the future of the Republican and Democratic Parties.
The impact on the GOP is rather obvious. While conservative religious groups remain strong in America (evangelicals are not vanishing, for example), the number of religiously unaffiliated (“nones”) continues to rise and the vague middle of the religious spectrum continues to shrink. Meanwhile, conservatives face an increasingly “woke” corporate culture and fading support on the left for old-fashioned First Amendment liberalism (think “religious liberty” framed in scare quotes).
Things get interesting — especially in the context of the Times op-ed world — when Burge discusses complications now facing Democratic Party leaders.
