From The Week magazine: The last acceptable prejudice Peter Beinart TheAtlantic The “war on religion” is a myth, said Peter Beinart. Though you can hardly turn on Fox News without hearing about the liberal elites conspiring to wipe out religion in America, a new Public Religion Research Institute study indicates that the last acceptable bigotry is not against churchgoing Christians. “It’s against atheists.” Voters told the pollsters that they’d be more likely to vote for a Muslim or a gay person or a member of any marginalized group for president than for a nonbeliever. The study also found that most Americans pretend to be more religiously observant than they really are, with liberals exaggerating their religious attendance even more than conservatives. Why do they fib? In our country, faith is seen as a marker of morality and virtue. That’s why both John Kerry and Barack Obama flaunted their Christianity in the 2004 and 2008 elections, and why even today you won’t find Democratic candidates admitting they don’t believe in God. Liberals may challenge the political views of religious conservatives, “but they’re quite sympathetic to religion itself.” Conservatives prefer not to see this distinction, because they’d rather “play the victim.”
Posted on: Fri, 13 Jun 2014 00:22:06 +0000
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