America’s religious shift

As it turns out, Barack Obama seems to have won the election, in part, by garnering support from evangelical Christian voters in key states like Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania and vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan‘s home state of Wisconsin, which is also, by the way, home to the Madison-based Freedom From Religion Foundation.

This article, “The Great Religious Realignment,” provides a detailed explanation of the religious restructuring that is currently taking place in America.

Here is a summation of the trend from Sarah Posner:

The exit polls, like I have said, are imperfect: some states were not subjected to exit polling, and on religion questions, there’s so much inconsistency between how questions are asked in different states that it’s hard to compare two states where one includes data on evangelicals and the other does not. But given what we’ve learned recently about religious realignments—declining numbers of Catholics, declining numbers of mainline Protestantsdeclining numbers of evangelicals in the 18- to 29-year-old age group, and increasing numbers of unaffiliated voters, and in particular, atheists and agnostics in the 18- to 29-year-old age group—it seems like a significant shift is underway.

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