Fareed Zakaria is one of our most perceptive pundits. I have purchased his most recent book, Age of Revolutions, and am about halfway through it. Thus far, I’ve found it illuminating.
Zakaria’s recent essay in The Washington Post was similarly illuminating, connecting America’s increased secularization to the growing religious zealotry of the GOP and Trump’s supporters. Here’s his lede:
Trump is a shrewd reader of his supporters and has clearly seen what the data show. White evangelicals, who make up about 14 percent of the population, made up about one-quarter of voters in the 2020 election. And about three-quarters of them voted for Donald Trump. Even more striking, of those White voters who attend religious services once a month or more, 71 percent voted for Trump in the 2020 election. (Even similarly religious Black Americans, by contrast, voted for Joe Biden by a 9 to 1 ratio.) The key to understanding Trump’s coalition is the intensity of his support among White people who are and who claim to be devout Christians.
The decline in the nation’s religiosity is one of the many cultural changes that have upset so many Americans. For a number of years, America was an outlier among modern Western nations, most of which had secularized far earlier. (Ironically, scholars mostly attribute this country’s greater religiosity to the Separation of Church and State so despised by Christian Nationalists.) In the 1990s, that began to change, and it has plunged since 2007.
As the scholar Ronald Inglehart has shown, since that year, religious decline in America has been the greatest of any country of the 49 surveyed. By one measure, the United States today is the 12th-least-religious country on Earth. In 1990, according to the General Social Survey, less than 10 percent of Americans had no religious affiliation. Today it’s around 30 percent.
Zakaria considers some of the reasons for the decline, and then turns his attention to what has taken the place of fundamentalist religious dogma: politics. He quotes Walter Lippmann for the observation that modern life has deprived men of the “sense of certainty as to why they were born, why they must work, whom they must love, what they must honor, where they may turn in sorrow and defeat” and notes that Americans who are trying to cope with the loss of that “sense of certainty” have increasingly replaced religious dogma with political extremism.
Over the past few years, this process has been extended even further with those who consider themselves devout Christians defining their faith almost entirely in political terms — by opposing abortion, same-sex marriage and transgender rights. This in turn has led to a great Democratic dechurching: According to Gallup, Democratic church membership was 46 percent in 2020, down from 71 percent two decades prior. The scholar David Campbell of the University of Notre Dame told the Associated Press, “Increasingly, Americans associate religion with the Republican Party — and if they are not Republicans themselves, they turn away from religion.” This phenomenon — of the right using, even weaponizing religion — is not unique to America or Christianity. You can see it in Brazil, El Salvador, Italy, Israel, Turkey and India, among other places….
This is the great political challenge of our time. Liberal democracy gives people greater liberty than ever before, breaking down repression and control everywhere — in politics, religion and society. But as the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” Modern society gives us all wealth, technology and autonomy. But for many, these things cannot fill the hole in the heart that God and faith once occupied. To fill it with politics is dangerous. But that seems to be the shape of things to come.
Those of us who embrace life in secular America, who find the wide diversity of opinions, philosophical commitments and religious beliefs stimulating and thought-provoking, confront a political movement powered by people who find the loss of certainty terrifying, and who have compensated for the loss of religious fundamentalism by turning politics into a (similarly fundamentalist) religion.
The problem is, the essence of productive political engagement and governance is negotiation and compromise. Political engagement doesn’t work when one party sees policy disagreements, but the other sees those same disagreements as a battle between good and evil.
MAGA is a religion, and in religion, battles between good and evil are non-negotiable.