After the Culture War, Peace, Right?

There was a piece in “The Atlantic,” April 2017, a respected national magazine with a moderate worldview, with the catching title, “Breaking Faith – The culture war over religious morality has faded; in its place is something much worse,” by Peter Beinart.  I am sharing a synopsis of his article in order, 1) to ask those who think religion creates problems for our society, to reexamine that view, and 2) to ask those with the opposite view to assert themselves in the cultural debate.  
Here are Beinart’s observations. To no one’s surprise, he notes that Americans are rapidly fleeing organized religion.  Many leaning left predicted that this secularization would ease cultural conflict, as society came to consensus on issues such as pot legalization and gay marriage.  However, while the secular view is correlated with greater tolerance on divisive issues, secularization is making America’s partisan clashes more brutal.
People sleeping in on Sunday conjure up thoughts of the those on the left side of the aisle, but these are also Republicans, with three times as many not attending church since 1990, helping to explain Trump’s appeal to believers, Beinart asserts. “Why did these religiously unaffiliated Republicans embrace Trump’s bleak view of America more readily than their churchgoing peers? (per Pew Research, Trump trailed Ted Cruz by 15 points with those who attended church, but led Cruz by 27 points among those who did not). Has the absence of church made their lives worse?
“Or are people with troubled lives more likely to stop attending services in the first place? … (W)e know that culturally conservative white Americans, who are disengaged from church, experience less economic success and more family breakdown than those who remain connected, and they grow more pessimistic and resentful. Since the early 1970s, according to W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, rates of religious attendance have fallen more than twice as much among whites without a college degree as among those who graduated college. And even within the white working class, those who don’t regularly attend church are more likely to suffer from divorce, addiction, and financial distress. … As Wilcox explains, ‘The culture and economy have shifted in ways that have marooned them with traditional aspirations unrealized in their real-world lives.’”
“The worse Americans fare in their own lives, the darker their view of the country. According to PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute), white Republicans who seldom or never attend religious services are 19 points less likely than white Republicans who attend at least once a week to say that the American dream ‘still holds true.’”
Trump not only articulated their despair but their resentments. Per University of Iowa research,  “When conservatives disengage from organized religion, however, they don’t become more tolerant. They become intolerant in different ways. They are less hostile to gays but more hostile to African-Americans, Latinos, and Muslims. They de-emphasize morality and emphasize race and nation.
The Left
Secular transformation is also taking place on the left. Again, according to PRRI, somewhat more than half of the white liberals seldom or never attended religious services in 1990; that is now 73 percent and fueled Bernie Sanders’ rise.
“Sanders, like Trump, appealed to secular voters because he reflected their discontent. White Democrats who are disconnected from organized religion are substantially more likely than other white Democrats to call the American dream a myth. Secularism may not be the cause of this dissatisfaction, of course: It’s possible that losing faith in America’s political and economic system leads one to lose faith in organized religion. But either way, in 2016, the least religiously affiliated white Democrats—like the least religiously affiliated white Republicans—were the ones most likely to back candidates promising revolutionary change.”
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In conclusion, the author of the article turns to MSNBC host Chris Hayes’ book, “Twilight of the Elites,” where Hayes “divides American politics between ‘institutionalists,’ who believe in preserving and adapting the political and economic system, and ‘insurrectionists,’ who believe it’s rotten to the core. The 2016 election represents an extraordinary shift in power from the former to the latter. The loss of manufacturing jobs has made Americans more insurrectionist. So have the Iraq War, the financial crisis, and a black president’s inability to stop the police from killing unarmed African Americans. And so has disengagement from organized religion.
“Maybe it’s the values of hierarchy, authority, and tradition that churches instill. Maybe religion builds habits and networks that help people better weather national traumas, and thus retain their faith that the system works. For whatever reason, secularization isn’t easing political conflict. It’s making American politics even more convulsive and zero-sum.
“For years, political commentators dreamed that the culture war over religious morality that began in the 1960s and ’70s would fade. It has. And the more secular, more ferociously national and racial culture war that has followed is worse.”
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From the Bible:  The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I (Christ) have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. John 10:10