For years, the dominant story about religion in American politics concerned the religious right. White evangelical Protestants aligned themselves with the Republican Party and formed a large part, maybe a fifth or a sixth, of the Republican coalition. Evangelicals thought of themselves as outside the mainstream, alternatively disgusted by it and called upon to change it. So when religious concerns emerged in the public sphere, they seemed to present a clash between evangelicals and the rest of America, all mediated by intra-Republican-Party politics. This view is looking more and more dubious. Increasingly, the defining political-cum-religious conflict in America is between aggressive Republican evangelicals on the one hand and an equally aggressive Democratic group of secularists on the other. Yet at the same time, the manner in which people worship, and their attitudes towards their faith, are becoming more important in determining people's politics than their denomination alone (whether they are evangelical, or Catholic, or whatnot). In politics, these trends are pulling in opposite directions.
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