Left behind

I mentioned yesterday that an article in the Times had claimed Biden's victory for religious people who were convinced to turn away from Trump. This was reassuring after someone in a webinar of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion I attended on Friday claimed that, contrary to what people may wish, statistics suggest there is no religious left in America. While most Democrats are indeed religious by SSSR measures, their political and ecological values aren't articulated in religious terms. Indeed, we don't think these values need to be articulated in such terms, and perhaps shouldn't be either. As my erstwhile adviser Jeffrey Stout has argued, this pluralistic commitment to secular democratic discourse thins and weakens the arguments of progressive religious folk, who downplay the deeper roots of their convictions even to themselves. Meanwhile the shrill religious voices which dominate the public square, disdainful of complexity, increasingly reject the value of democracy as a shared project. Perhaps having a truly religious person in the White House will change this but it's hard to be optimistic.