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With ideological crusades replacing theological battles, we will again have to learn to live and let live.
Religion, we’ve been warned, divides us and leads to conflict. It stands to reason, then, that as the country becomes less religious, conflict should fade away. Instead, it’s clear people are eager to fight one another at all costs, and they’ll find new reasons to do so if the old ones become irrelevant. Forget religious wars; Americans now wage their fanatical crusades over politics.
As in the past, to avoid endless strife we’re going to have to learn to peacefully coexist.
“Religion poisons everything,” warned the late Christopher Hitchens. He was perfectly willing to respect the right of the faithful to celebrate their traditions, he said, but he argued that believers were incapable of “the polite reciprocal condition—which is that they in turn leave me alone.”
So, life should be growing more peaceful as the years pass, right? After all, “Gallup finds the percentage of Americans who report belonging to a church, synagogue or mosque at an all-time low” and “as older, more religiously observant generations die out, they are being replaced by far less religious young adults,” Pew Research tells us.
But anybody who has even accidentally glanced at recent headlines knows that life is not growing more peaceful. Americans are as divided as ever and engaged in increasingly violent conflict not just to win, but to destroy perceived enemies. Religion may be going away, but new causes have arisen to excite the passions of true believers.