Religious right's reign about over

from Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

BONNIE ERBE

Is the rocky reign of the religious right (subverting American politics) finally reaching a much-deserved end? Two new indicators point to a portentous fall from grace.

The first comes in a little-covered aspect of a poll released last week by the Pew Research Center. The Center's "Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987-2007" conducts periodic, comprehensive surveys of Americans' values. The most recent edition finds that religiosity, which grew until the mid-1990s, is starting to decline.

"While most Americans remain religious in both belief and practice, the percentage expressing strong religious beliefs has edged down since the 1990s. And the survey finds an increase in the relatively small percentage of the public that can be categorized as secular," the Pew Research Center's Web site states.

Further, only 45 percent of Americans told Pew researchers that "prayer is an important part of my daily life" this year, as opposed to 55 percent in 1999. Sixty-one percent of Americans told Pew researchers they "never doubted the existence of God," down from 72 percent of Americans making that claim in 1999.

Funny, isn't it, that prayer and certainty about the existence of God reached its apex toward the end of the Clinton administration and has clearly descended during the Bush administration. Bill Clinton was an unapologetically religious president who consulted laity to atone for his "woman" obsession. But President Clinton refrained from injecting his personal religious beliefs into law. George W. Bush has permeated federal government with more authoritarian religious influence than perhaps any U.S. president before him. He continues to appoint religious extremists to prominent government positions and presses on in his mission to take down, brick by brick, the erstwhile-constitutional wall separating church and state.

(Continued here.)