Can't pray, clown will eat me.

WAIT YOU ARE NOT A JESUS CLOWN, YOU ARE A DEVIL HAM!

As sure as the earth is 6000 years old, children think clowns are awesome. How dare you question it?

They still run this country.

Do they? Parts of this country, maybe, but they've been completely run out of popular culture, and most of the remaining powerful ones are well into their sixties and seventies. I don't know anyone under the age of 35 who attends church (aside from recent Latino immigrants), and frankly I'd be just as shocked to learn that one of my friends was a Christian, as a 1920s man might have been to learn that someone he knew was an anarchist or a Satanist.

Now this might change from region to region - America's a big place, and hardly homogenous! But I know for me (and I suspect this holds true for most Poesters), I'd have a far easier time accepting someone as a furry, a tranny, a Muslim, or even a pedofork, than I would a Christian.

The culture is secular, yet a vast majority of our elected officials are Christians, and the hardcore cray cray Christians pretty much run one of the two parties.

Wow, where do you live EvilHomer? I guarantee you it's an oddity, as this country is still overwhelmingly Christian and churches, while they are declining in attendance, are still extremely popular. Furthermore, Christian Evangelism is on the rise.

I've lived in Southern California, Southeast Oklahoma, Central Arizona, Central Illinois, and Central Ohio, and every single one of those places 9 out of 10 people I knew were Christians, with the exception of where I first moved here to Ohio. The city I lived in (Bexley) was heavily Jewish, so it was more like every six out of ten were Christians there while the rest were Jews. But the moment I left Bexley I was back in 90% Christian land. I should also add that there's a church on damn near every corner.

And this is why, as Cena_Mark has pointed out, they do still run our country. The vast majority of politicians are Christians. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone in the upper ranks who isn't, or at least, who would admit it. And God help you if you want to be president and you're anything other than a Protestant Christian.

I mean hell, why do you think it is the right stirred the "OBAMA IS A SECRET MUSLIM" stew so enthusiastically? Why do you think even as much as Obama was hated after four years there were red states willingly voting for Obama over Romney who was a Mormon?

Christianity hasn't been cool or hip or trendy as a marketing device in our mainstream pop culture for the last decade or two to be sure, but that doesn't mean it's gone anywhere, and if you poke around the internet it appears to be on the cusp of a massive comeback. Being a critic of Christianity is becoming less and less cool, particularly on the internet.

What the hell are you on about, Homer? Even my parents' generation marginalized clowns as being fucking weird, and the balloon lobby really lost its teeth after their efforts failed to stop the restrictions on commercial helium sales. (Their teeth later turned up, still chattering, in the mouth of the "dogs in funny clothes" PAC)

Is the right stirred by "Obama is a secret Muslim"? And does it ultimately matter? Obama is nominally a Christian, of course, but I don't think anyone - neither his detractors nor his apologists - would claim that Christianity is a significant motivating factor in his work. He's never given any indication that Christianity influences his politics; indeed, in the wake of Jeremiah Wright, he did everything he could to distance himself from his faith, and assure us that his religious connections would not inform his politics! {1} Even those politicians who DO claim to be motivated by The Holy Spriit, their faith tends to be a marriage of convenience - with a voting block - rather than the primary mover which informs their work. Who here would advance the claim that George Dubya and Dick Cheney are "godly men"?

>> if you poke around the internet it appears to be on the cusp of a massive comeback

In which parts of the internet is Christianity "experiencing a massive comeback"? And think about the meaning behind that phrase: saying that something is experiencing "a massive comeback" implies that the thing in question has already gone somewhere, that it is no longer the force it once was. Something that is vibrant and powerful does not have "comebacks", because it never went away to begin with!


>> Wow, where do you live EvilHomer?

I have lived in Europe, Missouri, and in various spots on the East Coast (southern Connecticut in particular), and I guess I could focus on my own personal experiences here... but alas, anecdotal evidence is still just anecdotal evidence. *Statistics* indicate that less than 20% of Americans regularly attend church services (church attendance being, I'd argue, the single best indicator of whether religion plays a significant political role in someone's life). {2} And that is just one metric by which we might judge the state of Christianity; there are many other areas where statistics paint a very different picture from the one which Messrs DQL and Mark are asking us to endorse. For example, Protestants are now a minority in the United States {3}, the number of self-identified Christians have been hemorrhaging by almost 1% each year since 1990 {3}, and almost 40% of Americans report their religion as some form of "none" (ranging from outright atheism to "nothing in particular"). {4} This is just a sampling. Of particular note, in light of Mr Latifah's claims about religious revivalism, are the following two quotes:


___"Mainline denominations have been losing membership for decades in the U.S.; conservative denominations have been growing." {3}

("Christian Evangelism" may be "on the rise", as DQL claims, but the number of Christians overall is still dwindling! DQL admits this, simply choosing to focus on the small detail, and ignore the larger)


___"There appears to be a major increase in interest in spirituality among North Americans. However, this has not translated into greater church involvement." {3}


This ties in to the rising tide of so-called "alternative" religions, such as Wicca, Asatru, and Juggalism. {5} It may indeed be the case that religion and spirituality are experiencing a comeback in some corners of the internet (regardless of their truth-values, atheism and agnosticism are socially unstable memes that tend to degenerate over time), but current trends indicate that mainline Christianity is not the primary beneficiary of this grassroots counter-reformation. Europe has already entered a "post-Christian" phase; it may take North America a little longer to slough off the Old God, but the data unambiguously shows that Christianity is on its way out.


{1} https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_Wright_controversy
{2} http://www.churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-articles/139575-7-star tling-facts-an-up-close-look-at-church-attendance-in-america.html< br /> {3} http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_tren.htm
{4} http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/
{5} http://www.religioustolerance.org/us_rel.htm

Haha, what the living fuck?