As an atheist, I disagree. The power of the church has been dying at the same time as the availability of other, non-religious "third places". Thirty years ago you not only had a stronger church, but you also had more shopping malls, community centers, diners, and parks. Superficial electronic socializing and personal isolation is killing the concept of community across the board.
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That shows the power that a politician has over churches, not the power that churches have over society.
Furthermore, I think one reason he has that power over them is they are desperate to regain power and influence they've been losing in society. That's why they're willing to make this deal with the devil (so to speak).
Why do you think religious people embracing someone like Trump says anything at all about the relative power of religion? Would a stronger church not demand greater conformity in its supported candidates, not less? In twenty years, the percentage of Americans who are members of churches has dropped from 70% to 47%. In 1991, 87% of Americans ages 18-35 identified as Christian. In 2019 it was less than fifty percent.
I don't know. I live in the American South and it seems like Christianity is so universal that it's simply taken for granted. And I don't think you get a repeal of Roe v. Wade, then half the country banning abortion outright, in a truly secular society.
Why not? The secular French Revolutionary government abolished slavery in 1794; the abolition of abortion represents essentially the same scientific, non-theistic recognition of human beings, no matter their ethnicity or stage of development.
Really, they are independent axes: a religion can preach that some kinds of human being should be enslaved and/or killed; a religion can preach that no human beings should be enslaved and/or killed; an atheist can support enslavement and/or homicide of some human beings; and an atheist can oppose enslavement and/or homicide of some or all human beings. As a general rule, the vast majority of atheists think that it should be illegal to kill a 5-year-old; I believe that the vast majority think that it should be illegal to kill a 5-minute-old; it wouldn’t surprise me if a fair number think that it should be illegal to kill a negative-five-minute-old.
>the abolition of abortion represents essentially the same scientific, non-theistic recognition of human beings, no matter their ethnicity or stage of development.
It really doesn't. Opposition to abortion in the US is entirely premised on Christian ideology and the belief that a human is ensouled by God at the moment of conception, thus making abortion at any stage equivalent to murder, whereas scientific consensus is that abortion is a perfectly valid and sometimes necessary medical procedure, not fundamentally different than removing an appendix. Science certainly doesn't support outlawing abortion outright, or banning contraceptives or forcing women to carry nonviable pregnancies to term, all of which anti-abortion states have now made law, often with politicians directly citing the Bible while doing so.
> Opposition to abortion in the US is entirely premised on Christian ideology and the belief that a human is ensouled by God at the moment of conception
Historically, many Christians (e.g. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas) opposed abortion from the moment of conception, yet didn’t believe in ensoulment until later in pregnancy. This is because they accepted Aristotle’s belief that ensoulment only happened at around 6-12 weeks gestation; but they classified abortion from the moment of conception as a form of contraception, and they believed contraception was a sin. This was arguably the mainstream Christian position from time immemorial up until the 19th century. Maybe a rare position today (especially if you are limiting your consideration to American Christians), but it demonstrates that time-of-ensoulment and morality-of-abortion are (at least partially) logically independent questions
> Science certainly doesn't support outlawing abortion
Whether to outlaw anything isn’t a purely factual question, it is a value judgement. And the question of whose values are correct is fundamentally beyond the scope of the natural sciences. So, science really doesn’t support outlawing or not outlawing anything. It is true that, if we agree on what are the right ethical principles, then science can (sometimes) resolve factual disputes that arise in trying to apply those principles; but if we don’t agree on which set of fundamental ethical principles to adopt, that is a dispute for which science cannot help us
> Opposition to abortion in the US is entirely premised on Christian ideology and the belief that a human is ensouled by God at the moment of conception, thus making abortion at any stage equivalent to murder
‘Entirely’ is a strong word: the existence of a single non-Christian American opposed to abortion refutes your contention.
Anyway, abortion isn’t (necessarily) murder: it’s homicide. Homicide can be legal, e.g. in the cases of capital punishment and self-defense.
> scientific consensus is that abortion is a perfectly valid and sometimes necessary medical procedure, not fundamentally different than removing an appendix
I think that you are confused here. The universal scientific consensus is that neither a blastocyst nor an embryo nor a fœtus is an organ of his mother, but a separate organism. That is, there is a fundamental scientific difference between removing an organ from a human being and removing a human being from another human being.
> Science certainly doesn't support outlawing abortion outright, or banning contraceptives or forcing women to carry nonviable pregnancies to term
‘Science’ doesn’t support any particular policy decision all, but only deals in facts; it doesn’t support outlawing abortion and it doesn’t support mandating it, and likewise with anything else. All science can do is provide estimates of facts, and predictive estimates of outcomes: it can’t say whether those outcomes are good or not, because good and evil are not intelligible to science.
I suspect that you think they are, because you assume that whatever makes the most people the happiest is the best outcome, but that’s a moral call, not scientific: someone who wanted to make one single human being the happiest possible could just as easily use scientific means to achieve that goal instead.
I would not even agree with your contention that science says that abortion is a necessary procedure, because it begs the question of what ‘necessary’ means. Science says if that an ectopic pregnancy is not aborted, the mother will almost certainly die; some (most? all?) moralities say that it’s wrong to prevent taking action to prevent that outcome — and probably a few say otherwise. Certainly it cannot address ‘validity,’ because again that doesn’t even make sense. Science says if one achieves a certain physical arrangement of items in a certain condition then one can release a tremendous amount of energy; it can predict what the effects will be; it can’t say anything whatsoever about whether or not bombing Hiroshima is ‘valid.’
All of that is true but it has no bearing on whether the power of religion is waxing or waning, or whether religious institutions have discouraged non-religious community gatherings.