Axios’s coverage of a new Public Religion Research Institute survey, headlined “Americans continue to lose their religion as GOP pushes it,” seems to be very strongly suggesting that the Republican Party’s batshittery is singularly responsible for the ongoing decline of religious identity.
“The findings suggest that Republicans who focus on evangelical priorities – such as former President Trump, who’s now hawking Bibles, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La), who flies a flag favored by Christian nationalists outside his office – are preaching to a loyal but dwindling audience,” they write about the collapse of church attendance that is particularly pronounced among Americans from Catholic backgrounds, which would make sense given how the US’s political geography concentrates a lot of its Papists in Blue States. PRRI CEO Melissa Deckman says another major factor is younger Americans turned off by “Christian” hostility to LGBTQ folks, that 60 percent of respondents under 30 “cite the treatments of LGBTQ as a reason they stop going to church.”
That was about as close as the survey’s content itself got to politics. It was Axios that made the connection to Mike Johnson’s Jesus-themed assclownery and Trump’s Bible infomercial bullshit.