Unchurching

Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life. That role appears to be fading.

Rafael Contreras at Axios:

The U.S. is undergoing its fastest religious shift in modern history, marked by a rapid increase in the religiously unaffiliated and numerous church closures nationwide.

Why it matters: The great unchurching of America comes as identity and reality are increasingly shaped by non-institutional spiritual sources — YouTube mystics, TikTok tarot, digital skeptics, folk saints and AI-generated prayer bots.
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Nearly three in 10 American adults today identify as religiously unaffiliated — a 33% jump since 2013, according to the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI).That's quicker than almost any major religious shift in modern U.S. history, and it's happening across racial groups, an Axios analysis found.

About four in ten Americans ages 18 to 29 identify as religiously unaffiliated (38%), an increase from 32% in 2013, PRRI said.

Driving the news: The religious shift has made it harder for political parties and candidates to reach voters, Sisto Abeyta, a Democratic political consultant based in New Mexico with the Nevada-based firm TriStrategies, tells Axios."We have to find (religiously unaffiliated voters), engage them and answer their skeptical questions, rather than just go to a church and pass out campaign literature," Abeyta said. "And they're growing in numbers."
It costs campaigns about $1.40 to reach out to a single religiously unaffiliated voter, compared to $ 0.45 per faith-based voter, he said.

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Between the lines: The racial makeup of Christians within each party is vastly different, and that is shaping the influence of faith voters on Democrats' and Republicans' platforms.Within the Republican party, the largest group is white Christians (68%) and only 12% identify as religiously unaffiliated, per PRRI.

Among Democrats, Christians of color (35%) and religiously unaffiliated (34%) make up the bulk of the party.

Zoom out: The shift in religious activity also is leaving behind a trail of "church graveyards," or empty buildings that are now difficult to sell or have been abandoned.These churches once served as community gathering places for Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, voting precincts, or town halls, leaving a void.Megachurches show signs of stability but not enough to reverse overall declines.

Reflecting on Covid

Many posts have discussed COVID and pandemic preparedness.

Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, In COVID's Wake:  How Our Politics Failed Us (Princeton University Press, 2025), 197, 199, 294.

The central message of this book is that several tenets of basic rationality evaporated under the stress of the Covid onslaught. One of the greatest failures, as we have shown, was the failure to weigh the expected costs of policy against the expected benefits. Such failures were evident in government advising processes, as well as outside government in news media coverage and academic analysis. These failures occurred despite the public health field’s substantial investment in developing pandemic plans before 2020.  These pre-2020 pandemic plans correctly anticipated many of the costs and ethical dilemmas that emerged during the Covid pandemic response. But such considerations played  little role in informing discussion about what to do in 2020. Previously untested, unproven policies were implemented  wholesale across society in earnest hope of benefits, heedless of costs.

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 The pandemic response also raises some other troubling concerns about the quality of democratic deliberation involved. Pandemic policy seems to have been driven by a profound form of short-term bias. Any benefits of the policies in delaying infection and death were top of mind for policymakers. For many months, national newspapers, cable news outlets, and even local news led their daily coverage with the latest num-bers of Covid infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. Meanwhile, in almost all cases, the costs were much less vis i ble and experienced at some delay. Many of  these second-  and third-order costs—for education, mental health, cancer diagnoses, social disorder—unfolded only over lengthy timelines and emerge clearly only in hindsight. Clearly, democracies are likely to struggle with any policies having  these features, as political incentives for elected officials are to attend predominantly to the short term and to discount the long term.

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Experts, including scientific experts, play an important role in the policy  process, but it is also of necessity a  limited role. Experts must stay in their lane, so to speak. We must be more willing to engage in  political deliberation, including or especially with  those on the other side of the political spectrum. American democracy is defined deeply by polariza-tion based on having (or not having) a four-year college degree; educational polarization, in turn, has the unfortunate but unmistakable effect of placing the weight of the experts on one side of the partisan divide. A rebalancing of the role of experts could help address that tendency. At minimum, we have relearned that it is important to listen to more than one kind of expert in formulating policy on complex, society-wide issues. We must also not forget that experts tend to come from well-off positions in society and can be oblivious to their class biases

Religion and Christmas Messages

Many posts have discussed Christmas.

 Ashley Ahn at NYT:

The Trump administration celebrated Christmas on Thursday by posting a series of religious messages from official government accounts, using language that drew criticism from those who pointed to the country’s separation of church and state.

While many lawmakers in both parties posted universal messages of love, joy and peace on the holiday, a number of cabinet members and agencies made references to Jesus and the religious meaning of Christmas.

“Today we celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote. “May His light bring peace, hope, and joy to you and your families.”

Posts by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Homeland Security Department and the Labor Department followed in a similar vein.

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One of the most extensive Christmas messages was posted by the Homeland Security Department on Christmas Eve. It read, “We are blessed to share a nation and a Savior,” and included a video that featured images including the American flag, Christmas trees, Santa Claus, President Trump and a Nativity scene, along with the words “Remember the miracle of Christ’s birth.”

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The Homeland Security post also drew strong responses online. Alex Nowrasteh, senior vice president for policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said: “Americans don’t share a religion. Our state is secular.”

Timothy Sandefur, the vice president for legal affairs at the conservative Goldwater Institute, said, “Whatever this department of the federal government may say, I appreciate and respect my Jewish fellow Americans.”

Laura Kennedy, a former ambassador who worked in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, said: “I am a Christian. I am also a proud American because our laws were designed to prohibit a national religion.”

Flat Fees and California Public Defenders

Many posts have discussed the American legal system.

Anat Rubin at CalMatters:

Nearly half of California counties pay private lawyers and firms to represent poor people in criminal cases, and most of them, like San Benito, do it through what’s known as a “flat-fee” contract, meaning they pay a fixed amount, regardless of how many cases the attorneys handle or how much time they spend on each case.

It’s a far cheaper alternative — at least in the short run — to operating a public defender office with government lawyers, and it’s created a second-tier justice system in rural stretches of the state: Seven of the eight counties with the state’s highest jail and prison incarceration rates have flat-fee contracts.

These arrangements so clearly disincentivize investigating and litigating cases that they’ve been banned in other parts of the country. But they have flourished in California, which provides no funding or oversight of county-level public defense.

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The nation’s first public defender office opened its doors in Los Angeles in 1913, the result of a decades-long advocacy effort led by Clara Shortridge Foltz, the first woman to be admitted to the bar in California. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court established a right to an attorney in state court criminal proceedings in 1963, more than a dozen California counties were operating their own public defender systems.

But as other states funneled money to government-run public defender offices, California left its system in the hands of the counties. Elected officials in many of those counties would eventually opt for the cheapest path — a flat-fee contract.

In 1984, only nine of California’s 58 counties relied on contractors for their primary public defense systems, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report published that year. Today, that number is 25.

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Much of the effort to ban flat-fee contracts has focused on the ways in which the model discourages investigations, one of the most critical components of criminal defense.

Defense investigators review police reports, visit crime scenes, chase down video surveillance footage and interview witnesses — work that most attorneys are not trained to do. They often find evidence that challenges the prosecution’s case and affects the outcome of a trial or the terms of a plea deal.

A recent CalMatters investigation found that poor people accused of crimes in California are routinely sent to prison without anyone investigating the charges against them, significantly increasing the likelihood of wrongful convictions.

Why DOGE Failed

 Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt. Like previous efforts to reduce the deficit by cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse," DOGE was a failure.

Emily Badger, David A. Fahrenthold, Alicia Parlapiano and Margot Sanger-Katz at NYT:

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency said it made more than 29,000 cuts to the federal government — slashing billion-dollar contracts, canceling thousands of grants and pushing out civil servants.

But the group did not do what Mr. Musk said it would: reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October. On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up.

How is that possible?

One big reason, according to a New York Times analysis: Many of the largest savings that DOGE claimed turned out to be wrong. And while the group did make thousands of smaller cuts, jolting foreign aid recipients, American small businesses and local service providers, those amounted to little in the scale of the federal budget.

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' To sort DOGE’s bogus cuts from its successes, The Times looked at federal records for the 40 largest items on the “Wall of Receipts.” In at least 28 cases, DOGE got it wrong.

Its errors included:

Double-counting. DOGE took credit for canceling the same Department of Energy grant twice, adding $500 million in duplicate savings.

Timeline errors. One contract that DOGE claimed credit for ending had actually been terminated by the Biden administration, weeks before DOGE began its work. Three more items on DOGE’s list had simply expired. These were pandemic-era contracts with pharmacies that provided free Covid-19 testing for the uninsured. They were originally allowed to spend up to a combined $12.2 billion, but they never came close to that level. Then, in May, the three contracts ended on schedule.

DOGE still claimed credit for killing them, highlighting $6 billion in savings.

Misclassifications. Seven programs that DOGE claimed to have terminated are not dead, including four that were resurrected by court rulings.

Exaggerations. In 16 cases, DOGE greatly exaggerated its cuts. Many, including those two large Defense Department contracts, relied on an accounting trick that produced “savings” with little real-world effect. DOGE lowered the official “ceiling value” of contracts — reducing the theoretical limit on what the government could eventually pay — without changing its actual spending.

LA Reported

Many posts have dealt with media problems such as ghost newspapers and news deserts.

At The Wrap, Michael Calderone discusses a new initiative by Claremont McKenna College alumni David Dreier and Scott Woolley:

What has transpired in Los Angeles is part of the national crisis, as large city dailies once flush with advertising dollars have contracted, while many smaller papers and muckraking alt-weeklies have shuttered or shrunk. The number of news deserts, communities lacking reliable and timely information, climbed from 206 to 213 this year, according to Medill’s latest study, and this phenomenon isn’t relegated to large, rural expanses. In Los Angeles, a major metropolis where Hollywood and Big Tech are covered from all angles, there are communities, or news “islands,” as former Los Angeles Times executive editor Kevin Merida put it, “without coverage to serve them.”

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With nearly 10 million people living in Los Angeles County, there will always be stories untold. Even the Times at its most robust, with a newsroom of roughly 1,200 staffers two decades ago, couldn’t comprehensively cover every community at every moment. But the cutbacks at the Times, and elsewhere, have revealed significant gaps in coverage that journalists and civic leaders are hoping to fill through a variety of models, both for-and-non-profit.

 Forbes veteran Scott Woolley is co-founding and editing LA Reported, which launches on Jan. 8, and will utilize Substack as its primary distribution model. “Our plan is to publish a small number of deeply reported stories, written as lively and engaging narratives,” he told TheWrap. Woolley expects the outlet, which will rely on freelance writers, to cover housing, affordability, political malfeasance, transportation and public safety policy, as well as “some lighter pieces that don’t deal with such weighty topics but are just damn fun to read.”

Online Sleuthing Gone Wrong

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.  It is easier than ever to spread lies at scale.

Zachary Basu at Axios:

As police scoured New England this week for the gunman who killed two people at Brown University, a parallel manhunt erupted online, falsely targeting a Palestinian student.Authorities say the real suspect, a Portuguese national also linked to the slaying of an MIT professor, was found dead Thursday in New Hampshire.

Why it matters: Social media influencers who play detective after tragedies are getting it disastrously wrong — falsely accusing innocent people of crimes with little evidence, massive reach and virtually no accountability.

The speculation often is stoked by ideological accounts that seize on "clues" reinforcing their worldviews. Corrections are exceedingly rare — and seldom travel as far as the original claims.

Zoom in: Mustapha Kharbouch was never named by police as a suspect in the shooting that killed two Brown students, including the vice president of the college Republican Club.

But he was targeted online after his student profile disappeared from the university's website — a move MAGA-aligned accounts seized on as supposed evidence of a cover-up.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said Tuesday there were many reasons the pages could have been taken down — including to prevent doxxing — and warned that online vigilantes were heading down a "really dangerous road."

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Even Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, a senior Justice Department official, amplified claims that Brown's removal of Kharbouch's student pages was suspicious.