(June 24, 2007 -- 05:28 PM EDT)

Ross Douthat has an interesting [link|http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200707/religion|item] on American religiosity in the Atlantic.

In the United States, the Bush era has summoned up -- arguably for the first time in this country\ufffds history -- a mass secularism that looks to Europe and sees a model for America to follow. [...]

America\ufffds secular turn actually began in the 1990s, though it wasn\ufffdt until 2002 that two Berkeley sociologists first noticed it. In a paper in the American Sociological Review, Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer announced the startling fact that the percentage of Americans who said they had \ufffdno religious preference\ufffd had doubled in less than 10 years, rising from 7 percent to 14 percent of the population.

This unexpected spike wasn\ufffdt the result of growing atheism, Hout and Fischer argued; rather, more Americans were distancing themselves from organized religion as \ufffda symbolic statement\ufffd against the religious right. If the association of religiosity with political conservatism continued to gain strength, the sociologists suggested, \ufffdthen liberals\ufffd alienation from organized religion [might] become, as it has in many other nations, institutionalized.\ufffd (emphasis added)

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