Something old, something new.

Something red, something blue.

We started with something new and something blue during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). But, as you will see, the “something old” turned out to be blue, as well.

“Blue,” of course, refers to the liberal/progressive half of the starkly divided American political scene, which also reflects, of course, divisions on moral, social, cultural and religious issues.

Oceans of mass-media ink have been poured out in recent decades by journalists covering the Religious Right and its scary impact on the Republican Party. What about the religious left — no capital letters, of course — and its impact on the Democrats?

That isn’t an important story, of course. At the start of the podcast I quoted some numbers retrieved at mid-week from some Google searches. A basic search for “Religious Right” yielded 6.5 million hits and a Google News search found 77,500 items. Do the same thing for “religious left” and you get 196,000 in the first search and 3,680 in the news search. Amazing, that.

This brings us to a New York Times op-ed essay by the increasingly omnipresent (and that’s a good thing) political scientist Ryan Burge (@ryanburge), who contributes charts and info here at GetReligion. The headline: “A More Secular America Is Not Just a Problem for Republicans.” Here’s an early thesis statement:

Today, scholars are finding that by almost any metric they use to measure religiosity, younger generations are much more secular than their parents or grandparents. In responses to survey questions, over 40 percent of the youngest Americans claim no religious affiliation, and just a quarter say they attend religious services weekly or more.

Americans have not come to terms with how this cultural shift will affect so many facets of society — and that’s no more apparent than when it comes to the future of the Republican and Democratic Parties.

The impact on the GOP is rather obvious. While conservative religious groups remain strong in America (evangelicals are not vanishing, for example), the number of religiously unaffiliated (“nones”) continues to rise and the vague middle of the religious spectrum continues to shrink. Meanwhile, conservatives face an increasingly “woke” corporate culture and fading support on the left for old-fashioned First Amendment liberalism (think “religious liberty” framed in scare quotes).

Things get interesting — especially in the context of theTimes op-ed world — when Burge discusses complications now facing Democratic Party leaders. Read this carefully:

The Democratic coalition increasingly relies on a hodgepodge of groups, religious and nonreligious, that are often at odds with one another on key social and cultural issues.

For instance, there’s no more politically unified religious group than Black Protestants, with more than 90 percent of them voting for Mr. Biden in 2020. But while Black Protestants are often supporters of a more liberal approach to economic issues, they are still conservative Christians who oppose many progressive social policies. Over 60 percent of Black Protestants said in 2018 that homosexual sex was always wrong, the same percentage as evangelicals.

At the same time, Democrats must not take for granted the increasing number of atheists and agnostics in their coalition. Atheists provide a particularly difficult problem for Democrats. When asked to place themselves in ideological space, the average atheist sees the Democratic Party as becoming more conservative over the last three years, while they themselves have become more liberal.

Yes, the Democratic Party still contains some cultural/social moderates.

You can see this in a recent Gallup poll on abortion (click here to see that). While 50% of the party supports what amounts to abortion on demand, a mere 8% opposes abortion in all cases. But note that 41% of Democrats believe that abortion should be legal under “some circumstances.” Thus, on many “life” issues — think third-trimester abortions — the party is painfully divided at the grassroots level.

Meanwhile, the intensely secular wing of the party — atheists and agnostics, for example — is growing. And Burge notes:

Data indicates that atheists are the most politically active religious group in the United States in recent years. In a 2018 survey, atheists were twice as likely to donate money or work for a political candidate as white evangelicals. Atheists want the Democratic Party to become more progressive and are unlikely to remain silent if they don’t see changes.

So Democrats have to find ways to pull off a very tricky balance on policy priorities between the concerns of the politically liberal Nones and the more traditional social positions espoused by groups like Black and mainline Protestants. 

Well now. Have you read many stories about these tensions? Have you read, for example, much coverage (other than here at GetReligion) focusing on how these factors have complicated efforts to retain key Latino voters?

Now, some of these Burge observations may sound familiar to GetReligion readers, in part because of posts with headlines like this: “Millions of Americans have decided that 'religious' equals 'Republican'.”

But let’s flash back (again) to the 2012 release of this seminal work from the Pew Forum pros, which launched a million headlines: “‘Nones’ on the Rise.” At that time, I interviewed John C. Green, another candid voice on polling issues of this kind. That “On Religion” column ended with this:

The unaffiliated overwhelmingly reject ancient doctrines on sexuality with 73 percent backing same-sex marriage and 72 percent saying abortion should be legal in all, or most, cases. Thus, the "Nones" skew heavily Democratic as voters — with 75 percent supporting Barack Obama in 2008. The unaffiliated are now a stronger presence in the Democratic Party than African-American Protestants, white mainline Protestants or white Catholics.

"It may very well be that in the future the unaffiliated vote will be as important to the Democrats as the traditionally religious are to the Republican Party,” said Green, addressing the religion reporters. "If these trends continue, we are likely to see even sharper divisions between the political parties."

Now, those observations didn’t surprise me, because of observations Green had made during a Washington Journalism Center seminar for international journalists back four years earlier.

I have written about that event several times (such as “The day after: The prophet John Green, revisited “), but here is the key material:

On the right side of the American religious marketplace, defined in terms of doctrine and practice, is a camp of roughly 20 percent (maybe less) of believers who are seriously trying to practice their chosen faith at the level of daily life, said Green. Then, on the other end of the spectrum, there is a growing camp of people who are atheists, agnostics or vaguely spiritual believers who define their beliefs primarily in terms of the old doctrines that they no longer believe. This is especially true when it comes to issues of salvation and sex. …

In recent national elections this growing camp of secularists and religiously unaffiliated people have formed a powerful coalition with Catholic liberals, liberal Jews and the declining numbers of people found in America's liberal religious denominations (such as the "seven sisters" of oldline Protestantism). …

The bottom line: This coalition was emerging as the dominant voice in the modern Democratic Party on matters of culture and religion. Just as Republicans have, in recent decades, had to wrestle with the reality — the pluses and the minuses — of the energy found on the Religious Right, leaders in the Democratic Party will now be faced with the delicate task of pleasing the Religious Left and its secular allies. This could, to say the least, shape the party's relationships with the Catholic Church, Orthodox Jews, Muslims and other major religious bodies.

Thus, saith Green. Now, thus saith Burge.

There could be news stories there, for reporters willing to bend or even break a few news templates.

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FIRST IMAGE: With apologies, for using this again. It’s still the best illustration out there.