Religion and the Election

Pete Blackwell has a great analysis of the challenges faced by moderate Christians and liberals. I highly recommend his analysis on religion in modern America and the need to retake the idea and practice of Christianity from the extremist fundamentalists.

From the article:

The slander that liberals in America are frothing-at-the-mouth atheists who "despise" Christ is, it seems, a common one. I have heard similar comments on Rush Limbaugh's radio show amongst other places (and who could forget Jerry Falwell's rant blaming the 9/11 attacks on "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians..., the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America"?). It is an often-repeated fact that America is the most religious country in the west. A poll from none other than Fox News found that 92% of Americans believe in God (compare that to 61% in Britain).

Let's take what Fox says at face value (wow, I never thought I would say that) and have a look at the election numbers. There were 117,897,556 votes cast for president in the 2004 election. If 8% of the voters don't believe in God, that makes 9,431,804.48 votes from atheists (we'll assume the half vote came from Florida). John Kerry got 57,288,974 votes. Let's assume all atheists voted for Kerry and none voted for either Bush or Nader (an obviously false proposition). That would mean atheists made up 16.46% of Kerry's vote total. Therefore, fully 83.54% of those who voted for Kerry believe in God.

The article only gets better from there.