Thoughts pulled from a variety of articles
The Religious Right is the problem?https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-christian-right-is-helping-drive-liberals-away-from-religion/
“Politics can drive whether you identify with a faith, how strongly you identify with that faith, and how religious you are...And some people on the left are falling away from religion because they see it as so wrapped up with Republican politics.”
As recently as the early 1990s, less than 10 percent of Americans lacked a formal religious affiliation, and liberals weren’t all that much likelier to be nonreligious than the public overall. Today, however, nearly one in four Americans are religiously unaffiliated. That includes almost 40 percent of liberals — up from 12 percent in 1990, according to the 2018 General Social Survey.
The majority of Democratic voters are religiously affiliated. But the more liberal you are, the less likely you are to belong to a faith; whereas if you’re conservative, you’re more likely to say you’re religious.
Since 1990, the share of liberals who never attend religious services has tripled. And they’re less likely to believe in God: The percentage of liberals who say they know God exists fell from 53 percent in 1991 to 36 percent in 2018.
According to surveys by the Pew Research Center, the percentage of liberals who believe that churches and religious organizations positively contribute to society dropped from nearly half (49 percent) in 2010 to only one-third (33 percent) today. And according to 2016 data from the Voter Study Group, only 11 percent of people who are very liberal say that being Christian is at least fairly important to what it means to be American — compared to 69 percent of people who identify as very conservative.
Recent surveys show that secular liberals are more likely than moderates or conservatives to have spouses who aren’t religious. That’s critical because these couples are then often less likely to pray or send their children to Sunday school, and research shows that formative religious experiences as a child play a crucial role in structuring an adult’s religious beliefs and identity. It’s no coincidence then that the youngest liberals — who never lived in a political world before the Christian right — are also the most secular.
As more liberals become nonreligious, the Democratic Party’s base is growing more secular, complicating the party’s efforts at reaching more religious voters.
How religion impacts Supreme Court selections (Remember the Dogma!)
The recent attacks against Barrett mirror ones she faced during her 2017 confirmation hearing, in which Democratic senators asked pointed questions about her Catholic faith, suggesting Barrett’s religious beliefs disqualified her from serving on the federal bench.
Testing a nominee’s fitness for public office based on their personal faith is barred by Article VI of the Constitution: “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”
The hostility from Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee was not limited to Barrett. In 2018, Hirono and Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., asked Brian Buescher, a nominee to the U.S. district court in Nebraska, about his membership with the Knights of Columbus, a faith-based service organization that supports traditional Catholic teaching on marriage, abortion, and human sexuality.
Democrats have a religious problem
In the 92-page 2020 Democratic Platform document, the word God appears once.
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