Rhetoric Race and Religion
When commended for being a “pillar of the Church,” Winston Churchill supposedly once replied that he was “not a pillar of the Church but a flying buttress, supporting it from the outside.”
There are more and more Americans taking this Churchillian approach to religion. A new Gallup poll found that 75 percent of Americans believe the country would be better off if religion had more influence—including many who themselves aren’t religious:
Over half of those who seldom or never attend [church] and close to one in three Americans who say religion is not important to them personally still say it would be positive for society if more Americans were religious.
In other words, many lukewarm or non-believing Americans agree more with Churchill than with Christopher Hitchens. Far from believing that “religion posions everything,” they want to to see religion’s influence increase. This is, in a way, an attitude with deep roots in American history; Benjamin Franklin played an active role in raising money to build several churches even though he was a deist without strong personal ties to institutional Christianity.
But while the tradition is old, the increase in its prevalence is new. What can account for the fact that people think religion is a force for good but increasingly want nothing to do with it?
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