2023 PRRI Census of American Religion: County-Level Data on Religious Identity and Diversity

Stephan: 

This is the best-researched profile of religion in the United States that I have found, and it is quite interesting. Decreasing White Christian religious affiliation but, amongst those Whites who are religiously affiliated, increasing fanaticism about what has become a kind of pseudo-Christianity.  Pseudo because while it endlessly quotes the Bible (interestingly particularly the Old Testament) it advocates almost nothing that Jesus actually taught.

Two-thirds of Americans (66%) identify as Christian, including 41% who identify as white Christians and 25% who identify as Christians of color. Over one-quarter of Americans (27%) are religiously unaffiliated, and 6% belong to a non-Christian religion.[1]

Among the 41% of Americans who identify as white Christians, 13% are white evangelical Protestants, 13% are white mainline/non-evangelical Protestants, 12% are white Catholics, and small percentages identify as Latter-day Saints (1%), Jehovah’s Witnesses (<0.5%), or Orthodox Christians (<0.5%).[2] Among the one-quarter of Americans who identify as Christians of color (25%), one in ten are Black Protestants (8%) and Hispanic Catholics (8%), 4% are Hispanic Protestants, 2% are other Protestants of color, 2% are other Catholics of color, and just 1% are Jehovah’s Witnesses, Latter-day Saints, or Orthodox Christians.[3] Just 6% of Americans are non-Christians, including Jewish Americans (2%), Muslims (1%), Buddhists (1%), Hindus (1%), and Unitarian Universalists (0.5%). More than one in four Americans (27%) are religiously unaffiliated; 5% of Americans identify as atheists, 5% identify as agnostic, and 17% claim they are “nothing in particular.”

The Decline of White Christians

Over the past few decades, the […]

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Trump appoints Project 2025 author to be chairman of the FCC

Stephan: 

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC regulates interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories. The appointment of Project 2025 author Brendan Carr to head the FCC I see as a first step in using federal media licensing power to scare and threaten media that if they criticize Trump it may result in a loss of their license to operate.

Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump attends a campaign town hall event at Macomb Community College in Warren, Michigan, U.S., September 27, 2024. Credit: Rebecca Cook / Reuters

Donald Trump on Sunday announced that he has nominated a Project 2025 author to be the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

Trump, who earlier in the day sought an investigation into a political pollster, said in a statement that he has chosen Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the FCC, to be its head.

“Commissioner Carr is a warrior for Free Speech, and has fought against the regulatory Lawfare that has stifled Americans’ Freedoms, and held back our economy,” Trump said. “He will end the regulatory onslaught that has been crippling America’s Job Creators and Innovators, and ensure that the FCC delivers for rural America.”

Trump’s statement does not mention Carr’s connection to Project 2025, the governance plan from which the former and incoming president has tried to distance himself since polls showed it was […]

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Want to understand why Trump won the election? Look at pop culture.

Stephan: 

I have been thinking a lot, as the media announces Trump’s appointment of one criminal after another to cabinet posts, how it is possible that a blatantly criminal convicted rapist, multiple felon, and multiple bankrupt racist huckster could possibly have been elected President of the United States? And then follow his election win by appointing a cast of fellow creeps and criminals. Culture is created by a consensus of individual choices. It is an expression of mass consciousness. I chose this report because it accurately illustrates very well what we have become.

Singers Post Malone and Morgan Wallen performing at the 57th Annual CMA Music Awards on November 8, 2023
 Credit: Frank Micelotta / Disney / Getty

Earlier this year, conservatives on social media claimed an unlikely new icon. It wasn’t a podcaster with questionable views or a libertarian businessman selling a course or any particular ideology. It was actress Sydney Sweeney, Euphoria star and the recent lead of the rom-com Anyone but You.

Following her Saturday Night Live hosting gig in March, two conservative outlets published columns heralding Sweeney as a return to conventional beauty standards of the ’90s and early 2000s — or as, Bridget Phetasy for the Spectator put it, “the giggling blonde with an amazing rack.” Both pieces postulate that, by wearing low-cut dresses and playing up her sexuality, Sweeney was inviting men to gawk at her, therefore raising a middle finger to “woke culture” and the Me Too movement.

Sweeney hasn’t publicly aligned herself with the right in any way. (Her family’s politics, though, were the subject of controversy in 2022, which […]

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House GOP Moves to Ram Through Bill That Gives Trump Unilateral Power to Kill Nonprofits

Stephan: 

This is truly horrifying. Although this report centers around the Israeli/Palestinian war its implications are much much broader than that. Almost every nongovernmental organization that fosters wellbeing in the United States is a nonprofit entity. Think about the organizations you have received help from or someone you know has received help from, or that you support because they do something to foster wellbeing. Every one of them simply by saying or putting on their website something that Trump doesn’t like can, if he tells his Secretary of the Treasury to do so, lose their nonprofit status. Please contact your Congressional Representative, whether they are Democrat or Republican, and tell them to vote against H.R. 9495.  If this bill becomes law we are going to see a major, and very negative, change in American society.

Donald Trump at the America First Policy Institute Gala on Nov. 14, 2024, in Palm Beach, Fla. Credit: Joe Raedle / Getty

A controversial “nonprofit killer” bill is back on track after it was blocked earlier this week.

A majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives rejected the bill on Tuesday out of fear that it could grant President-elect Donald Trump the legal tools with which to target his ideological foes, but Republicans are swiftly pressing ahead.

The Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, which would empower the secretary of the Treasury to designate any nonprofit as a “terrorist supporting organization” and revoke its tax-exempt status, is set to go before the Committee on Rules on Monday for a hearing that could tee up the bill for a new floor vote.

The hearing was announced Thursday evening, just two days after 144 Democrats and one Republican voted against the bill as part of a fast-track parliamentary procedure that required a two-thirds majority.

The bill, also known as H.R. 9495, has come under withering criticism from a broad coalition of organizations that say its sponsors are pushing it as a means of cracking down on free speech — particularly […]

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Taxpayers Fund Post-Roe Business Boom for For Anti-Abortion Pregnancy Centers in Texas

Stephan: 

This is a trend that I don’t think many Americans are even aware is happening. Although almost every time it comes up for a vote the majority support a woman’s right to control her own body, the movement against women having that right has created a network, of what amount to pseudo-assistance centers. That’s not the news. As this report describes the news is that even though the majority vote for a woman’s rights, the Republicans are working to use your tax dollars to fund these anti-choice centers.

Credit: Shutterstock

If you had the means to provide diapers to a struggling new parent, what would you demand from them in return? 


Would you require that they listen to your parenting advice for an hour before they could take their Huggies home? Would you subject them to a proselytizing lecture on your preferred interpretation of Christianity, or force them to sign up for a group counseling session with strangers? All so they could prove themselves worthy of receiving a few days’ worth of the most essential baby care products?


This is the service model favored by thousands of the anti-abortion pregnancy centers across the country that operate as the public-facing front of the movement to ban abortion both at the state and federal levels. These centers, which bill themselves as judgment-free resources for “vulnerable women and youth,” often present a warm, fuzzy facade that belies a darker mission: using fear, spiritual coercion, and shame tactics to spread lies and […]

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