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From 2010 to 2015, religious people have had an average of 2.45 children per woman, while the unaffiliated gave birth to 1.65 children on average.
On October 16, 2017 Pew headlined “A growing share of Americans say it’s not necessary to believe in God to be moral”, and reported that, “Most U.S. adults now say it is not necessary to believe in God to be moral and have good values (56%), up from about half (49%) who expressed this view in 2011. This increase reflects the continued growth in the share of the population that has no religious affiliation, but it also is the result of changing attitudes among those who do identify with a religion, including white evangelical Protestants.”
This development represents a basic change in American culture. No previous Pew poll had found that a majority of Americans believed this way—believed that no religion (not theirs, nor anyone else’s) possesses the authority to define ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’
Americans are deeply religious people—and atheists are no exception. Western Europeans are deeply secular people—and Christians are no exception.
These twin statements are generalizations, but they capture the essence of a fascinating finding in a new study about Christian identity in Western Europe. By surveying almost 25,000 people in 15 countries in the region, and comparing the results with data previously gathered in the U.S., the Pew Research Center discovered three things.
First, researchers confirmed the widely known fact that, overall, Americans are much more religious than Western Europeans. They gauged religious commitment using standard questions, including “Do you believe in God with absolute certainty?” and “Do you pray daily?”
Second, the researchers found that American “nones”—those who identify as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular—are more religious than European nones. The notion that religiously unaffiliated people can be religious at all may seem contradictory, but if you disaffiliate from organized religion it does not necessarily mean you’ve sworn off belief in God, say, or prayer.
The third finding reported in the study is by far the most striking. As it turns out, “American ‘nones’ are as religious as—or even more religious than—Christians in several European countries, including France, Germany, and the U.K.”
This development represents a basic change in American culture. No previous Pew poll had found that a majority of Americans believed this way—believed that no religion (not theirs, nor anyone else’s) possesses the authority to define ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’
In order to explain the connection to politics, a landmark masterpiece of U.S. political reporting, Jane Mayer’s 23 October 2017 “The Danger of President Pence”, is especially relevant, not only because of what it reveals about Vice President Mike Pence, but because of what it reveals about President Donald Trump—and, indirectly, because of important confirmatory evidence that Mayer’s article provides: additional confirmation for the only scientific study which has ever been done of whether or not the U.S. Government is a democracy or a dictatorship, a study that was done of a mass of empirical evidence and which found that we live under a dictatorship by the super-rich and their agents, and that the U.S. government does the bidding of only the super-rich.
Those findings, of an American dictatorship by wealth, are narratively exemplified in Mayer’s account of Trump and of Pence. Her article is a stunning narrative demonstration of those massive empirical findings. Her description—both of the persons of Trump and of Pence, and of the process by which these two men came to lead this country—portrays an American president, and an American vice president, who despise the majority of Americans, despise the American public, who are neither wealthy, nor (especially in the latest polled figures) religious; and, what that empirical scientific study had found was that the U.S. government represents only the super-rich, not at all the poorer 99% of the U.S. population.
If the October 16 Pew finding is correct, then also the majority of the U.S. population (which used to be religious) is no longer even religious; and, so, America’s two top political leaders are then not representative of the American people, either economically or religiously—they are unrepresentative both in their own persons (their respective two systems of values), and also in regards to the persons whom they feel themselves obligated to serve in their respective positions as U.S. public officials. Portrayed in Mayer’s report are a libertarian and a theocrat, who are leading a nation of individuals who are neither libertarians nor theocrats.
Precisely at this moment of all-time-low fundamentalist Christianity, the most Christian-fundamentalist person perhaps ever to occupy national elective office, Mike Pence, is now the U.S. vice president—and the person above him, President Donald Trump, is possibly even more unrepresentative, in his worshipping money instead of ‘God.’ Although “Greed is good” was first elected to the presidency in 1980 (even if it was a minority viewpoint at that time), CBS News issued on 5 November 2014 their poll on the question of whether the American public agree with the view (the basic libertarian belief, and which Ayn Rand championed for the most famously) that “Greed is good,” and the finding was 78% “Disagree” and 19% “Agree.” And yet, at a time like this, we’ve got extreme representatives of both of those very unpopular value-systems—fundamentalist Christianity, and libertarianism—occupying our nation’s two highest elective offices.
Mayer’s article documents that Pence is a fanatic fundamentalist Christian—a literalist interpreter of the Bible and of biblical laws—who thinks that he has been chosen by God to lead the American people, and she makes clear that Trump instead measures a person’s worth by how much wealth the individual controls. There is a strong crossover between those two viewpoints (both of which worship The Almighty, but Trump thinks money is the physical manifestation of it and is the measure of an individual’s worthiness, and Pence thinks that Scripture is).
The crossover between the two viewpoints is comprised by fundamentalist Christian libertarians, such as the economist and historian Gary North, but neither of those two traditions (libertarianism, and fundamentalist Christianity) constitutes anything like a majority, nor even close to a majority, of the U.S. voting population; and, so, a question naturally arises as to what the reason is why those two men (each exemplifying a decidedly minority viewpoint) happen now to stand at the top of the U.S. government today; and the answer to this question likewise seems to be clearly indicated in Mayer’s article: neither Trump nor Pence could have won their high governmental posts but for the ideologically strongly libertarian U.S. aristocrats, the Koch brothers, and their extensive libertarian network of billionaire and centi-millionaire donors to political campaigns; plus the ideologically theocratic clergy, the “evangelicals,” and their biblical-law-respecting congregations. This fusion of the aristocracy with the theocracy, is a fascinating story, and Mayer managed to obtain amazing access to principals, and to their aides and confidants, in telling it.
Here are what I consider to be the core passages from Mayer’s fine article (this is a 574-word summary of her 13,400-word article, stated in its own words, by means of 6 passages in it):
Full Article, longer read: http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/22498
Also At: https://www.strategic-culture.org/ (link appears broken at the moment, was working earlier today)
#Politics #Religion #Trump #Pence #Koch #DictatorhipOfTheRich #YouHaveOwners