No Religious Revival

Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.

A release from the Public Religion Research Institute:

The annual PRRI Census of American Religion finds no evidence that Americans are returning to church in higher numbers – and little change in Americans’ religious affiliation in the past year.

Surveying a random sample of 40,000 adults throughout 2025, PRRI finds that two-thirds of Americans (66%) identify as Christian, including 41% who are white Christians and 25% who are Christians of color. Roughly three in ten Americans (28%) are religiously unaffiliated, and 6% identify with a non-Christian religion. All percentages closely mirror those from 2024.

“Despite anecdotal claims of a religious revival, our data show that Americans’ religious affiliation held steady in 2025 while worship weekly attendance did not increase,” said Melissa Deckman, CEO of PRRI. “Looking at young adults, there is a shift happening – but it’s not Gen Z men becoming more religious, as some suggest. Instead, young women’s declining religiosity has brought them on par with their male counterparts for the first time.”

Young women (18-29) have shed religious labels steadily since 2013, when 29% identified as religiously unaffiliated. By 2024, that figure grew to 40%, and in 2025, it increased to 43%.

While there has been a slight pause in the overall rate of religious disaffiliation, religious affiliation did not grow in 2025. The percent of Americans who identify as members of white Christian traditions saw little change between 2024 and 2025.

In 2025, 13% of Americans identify as white evangelical Protestants, 13% as white mainline/non-evangelical Protestants, and 12% as white Catholics — all unchanged from 2024. Fewer than 1% of Americans identify as Orthodox Christian in 2025, also unchanged from 2024. Among Americans ages 18-29, the percentage of white Christians has remained stable between 2024 and 2025 (28% both years).

“Today, white evangelical Protestants comprise just 13% of the American population, and all white Christians together only account for four in ten Americans today,” said Robert P. Jones, president and founder of PRRI. “These changing demographics help explain why — in a desperate gambit to hold onto power — white evangelicals have been willing to give themselves over to the MAGA movement and to turn against the principles of a pluralistic democracy.”

There is little evidence that Americans are returning to church in higher numbers. In 2025, 26% of Americans attend church weekly (unchanged from 2024). More than ten years prior, in 2013, 31% of Americans attended church weekly. The share of Americans who seldom or never attend religious services has increased substantially in the past decade, rising from 42% in 2013 to 53% in 2025.

Just one in five young women (21%) and men (20%) attended church weekly in 2025, which matched their rates of weekly church attendance in 2024. Rates of church attendance among younger Americans have remained largely unchanged since 2013. Younger Americans continue to be less religious than older Americans, in terms of both religious affiliation and regular church attendance

After years of consistent growth, the percentage of religiously unaffiliated Americans has plateaued. In both 2024 and 2025, 28% of Americans did not identify with a religious tradition. Among young Americans (ages 18-29), there is a significant gender gap: 43% of young women identify as unaffiliated in 2025, compared with 35% of young men.

The religious makeup of the two major political parties differs dramatically. White Christians account for a much larger percentage of the Republican Party (68%) than the Democratic Party (23%). Around one-third of Democrats are Christians of color (34%) compared with 16% of Republicans. Democrats are more likely to identify as religiously unaffiliated (34%) or with a non-Christian religion (8%) than Republicans (13% and 4%, respectively). Independents are 36% white Christian, 33% unaffiliated, 24% Christians of color, and 7% non-Christian.

Fake AI Quotes

Artificial intelligence is an increasingly important topic in politics, policy, and law.

Benjamin Mullin at NYT:

The author of a nonfiction book about the effects of artificial intelligence on truth acknowledged on Monday that he had included numerous made-up or misattributed quotes concocted by A.I.

The author, Steven Rosenbaum, whose book “The Future of Truth” was released this month to great fanfare, incorporated more than a half-dozen misattributed or fake quotes in sections of the book reviewed by The New York Times.

The Times asked Mr. Rosenbaum about the quotes on Sunday and Monday. On Monday night, Mr. Rosenbaum acknowledged in a statement that the book had “a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes” and said that he had started his own investigation.

He said that the inclusion of the incorrect quotes was an accident and that he had “no intention of fabricating any viewpoints” while writing the book.

IN AN AI PROMPT, ALWAYS INSIST ON SOURCES AND LINKS. 

Alexandra Samuel at WSJ: 

Whenever you use AI as a research assistant, subject-matter expert, or souped-up search engine, you need to grapple with the risk of hallucination—AI’s tendency to make up its own facts. Your first line of defense against these fabrications? More AI.

I now make a point of getting AI to check every fact it gives me. It still isn’t foolproof, and it is wise to use an actual flesh-and-blood human to fact-check anything you must get right. But using AI for a round of fact-checking can make the human fact-checking process go faster.

To start, before I even read AI-generated research, I get another AI to check its accuracy. I might use the same platform that generated my initial report, but I always start a brand-new session; otherwise the logic that influenced the initial report can influence the fact-checking process.

I set up this new session by harnessing the same sycophantic, people-pleasing tendencies that can make AI hallucinate in the first place. If the first AI created its own facts to please me, my AI fact-checker needs to please me by finding everywhere the first AI went wrong.

To unleash that nitpicking second AI, I start my fact-checking prompts with instructions like “You are a professor of journalism on your university’s ethics board, and it’s your job to investigate the work of a research team that’s been using AI to generate reports.” Or “You’re an auditor who has been hired to check the work of an internal data-analytics team that’s been using AI to compile customer data and sales prospects.” You get the idea. I want the second AI to be every employee’s nightmare.

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You can also set up your AI tools to accelerate the fact-checking process, for example by turning your favorite nitpicking prompt into an AI assistant (like a custom GPT or a Claude Project), so that you can give any first-draft AI research to that assistant, and get back a list of checked facts and a revised memo.

Or use Claude Code (or Claude Cowork) to spin up a whole team of fact-checkers: Tell the AI that once it has built a list of facts to check, it should assign those facts in small batches to a team of fact-checkers so that each fact gets checked by at least two different AIs, and where needed, a third tiebreaker. When an AI fact-checker hands out this work in simultaneous batches to its many virtual helpers, even a detailed research brief can get verified (and corrected) quite quickly.

Swedish Capitalism

Many.posts have dealt with international perspectives.

Tom Fairless at WSJ:

For decades, Sweden was shorthand for the brand of high-tax, high-spend government that managed people’s lives from cradle to grave through state-run hospitals, schools and care homes.

No longer. With little fanfare, this Nordic country of 11 million has embraced capitalism.

Today, nearly half of primary healthcare clinics are privately owned, many by private-equity firms. One in three public high schools is privately run, up from 20% in 2011. School operators are listed on the stock exchange.

Sweden’s experience has lessons—good and bad—for other rich countries, including the U.S., where New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is looking to emulate parts of the state-centric model such as universal child care and city-run stores.

The capitalist makeover has allowed Sweden to do what few industrialized countries have managed in recent years: shrink the size of the state. That has enabled the government to sharply lower taxes and, economists say, sparked a surge in entrepreneurship and economic growth.

Its total public social spending bill—which includes healthcare, education and all welfare payments—has fallen to 24% of gross domestic product, similar to the U.S. and well below the over 30% for nations like France and Italy.

Ebola

 Many posts have discussed COVID and pandemic preparedness.

Helen Regan at CNN:

An international effort is underway to contain an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Uganda that has infected hundreds of people and caused dozens of suspected deaths, as the United States looks to relocate a “small number” of its citizens affected.

On Sunday, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Ebola epidemic a “public health emergency of international concern.” The latest outbreak does not yet meet the criteria of a “pandemic emergency,” but WHO warned the high positivity rate and increasing number of cases and deaths across health zones point toward “a potentially much larger outbreak than what is currently being detected and reported.”

More than 100 suspected deaths have been linked to the outbreak in the DRC, the director-general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), Jean Kaseya, told CNN on Monday.

Trump withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization. 

A little more than a year ago, Emily Mullin reported at Wired:

A research facility within the US National Institutes of Health that is tasked with studying Ebola and other deadly infectious diseases has been instructed by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to stop research activities.

According to an email viewed by WIRED, the Integrated Research Facility in Frederick, Maryland, was told to stop all experimental work by April 29 at 5 pm. The facility is part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and is located at the US Army base Fort Detrick. It conducts research on the treatment and prevention of infectious diseases that are deemed “high consequence”—those that pose significant risks to public health. It has 168 employees, including federal workers and contractors.

Are America's Best Days Behind Us?

Many posts have discussed civic culture.

In his 1992 address to the Republican National Convention, Ronald Reagan said:

Now let’s not dismiss our current troubles, but where they see only problems, I see possibilities — as vast and diverse as the American family itself. Even as we meet, the rest of the world is astounded by the pundits and finger pointers who are so down on us as a nation.

Well I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — America’s best days are yet to come. Our proudest moments are yet to be. Our most glorious achievements are just ahead. America remains what Emerson called her 150 years ago, “the country of tomorrow.”

Alas, most Americans no longer see it that way. Blen Wondimu at Pew:

Ahead of the United States’ 250th anniversary, 59% of Americans say the country’s best years are behind us, while 40% say its best years are ahead.

Americans are also much more pessimistic (44%) than optimistic (28%) when asked to think about what things will be like in the U.S. 50 years from now. Another 27% are neither optimistic nor pessimistic, according to a December 2025 Pew Research Center survey.

This research is part of an effort to study public perception on the direction of the U.S. ahead of the 250th anniversary of its founding. It coincides with our analysis about how the U.S. has changed since the country’s bicentennial in 1976.

Views on whether the country’s best years are behind or ahead of us differ somewhat across demographic and political groups.

Race and ethnicity: Majorities of Black (66%), Hispanic (64%) and White adults (57%) say the country’s best years are behind us, as do 53% of Asian adults.

Income: Majorities of adults with lower and middle incomes say the country’s best years are behind us (61% each). Upper-income adults are evenly split: Half say the nation’s best years are behind us and half say its best years are still to come.

Party: Democrats and those who lean toward the Democratic Party are more likely to say the country’s best years are behind us (64%) rather than ahead (34%). Republicans and Republican leaners are more evenly divided: 53% say the country’s best years are behind us, while 46% say they’re ahead.

 

Social Media Influencers in the CA Governor Race

Many posts have discussed social media. 

An unusually large number of social media posts support billionaire CA gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer.  Ben Wieder at LAT:

The posts include direct-to-the-camera appeals, with personal details interwoven into messages of support for Steyer. An influencer goes for a stroll as onscreen text touts Steyer’s policies. Some seek to convey authenticity, if occasionally ham-fistedly; one influencer mispronounces Steyer’s last name.

What they do not include is a disclosure that their creators were paid by the Steyer campaign to produce the videos, according to a complaint filed this week with California’s Fair Political Practices Commission and a Times review of the posts.

The complaint alleges that the Steyer campaign failed to notify the influencers it hired of their obligation to inform their audience when their posts have been sponsored by the campaign.

California passed a law in 2023 requiring that influencers disclose if they have been paid to create promotional content for or against a candidate or ballot measure, one of the few jurisdictions in the country with such a requirement. There is no such requirement at the federal level.

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Steyer’s campaign appears to have relied on paid influencers more than any candidate for governor, according to the most recent campaign finance filings.

That spending represents only a small fraction of the massive campaign war chest Steyer has seeded with nearly $180 million of his own money. But the complaint highlights the growing degree to which political candidates have come to seek out the authenticity that social media influencers seem to offer.

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While many of the new Steyer influencers have few followers, Steyer’s campaign disclosed in its most recent campaign finance report that it had paid thousands of dollars to numerous social media influencers with massive audiences, the Sacramento Bee reported.

Several of the videos produced by these popular social media personalities also failed to disclose that they had been paid by the campaign, according to the complaint and The Times’ review of the content.

But even accounts with few followers can still have a big impact if they are producing a steady stream of content supporting Steyer, said veteran California political strategist Mike Madrid.

“What they’re trying to do is trip the algorithm,” he said. “It looks like it has a bigger audience than it really does. It’s taking the concept of astroturfing into the digital age.”

ICE Loses in Court -- A Lot

Many posts have discussed immigration.

 Kyle Cheney at POLITICO:

Ten thousand losses.

That’s the Trump administration’s track record in court as federal judges grapple with the way ICE agents have swept through major U.S. cities and detained thousands of people in support of President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda.

More than 10,000 times, judges have said those detentions, typically carried out with no opportunity for detainees to plead their case, were illegal. That’s roughly 90 percent of all cases — a staggering rejection of a core piece of Trump’s immigration agenda.

Trump’s unprecedented detention policy, which is almost certainly headed to the Supreme Court, infuriated lower courts in ways no other modern issue has. It ruptured the relationship between the Justice Department and the judiciary; pitted the administration against itself; and upended innumerable lives — not just of the people swept up by immigration agents, but of their spouses and children, many of whom are U.S. citizens.

POLITICO is tracking the tens of thousands of detention cases that have flooded the system since ICE adopted its detention policy last July. Today we are releasing a full database of those rulings, giving the public an opportunity to see under the hood of our reporting — which has documented the courts’ lopsided results, ICE’s tactics for defying judges’ orders and the rising tensions between the judiciary and the Trump administration.