Religion in America is rapidly moving toward extinction. And those responsible? The very people who tried to force it down our throats.

Courtesy of Salon:

 Every piece of social data suggests that those who favor faith and superstition over fact-based evidence will become the minority in this country by or before the end of this century. In fact, the number of Americans who do not believe in a deity doubled in the last decade of the previous century according to both the census of 2004 and the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) of 2008, with religious non-belief in the U.S. rising from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 14.2 percent in 2001. In 2013, that number is now above 16 percent. 

If current trends continue, the crossing point, whereby atheists, agnostics, and “nones” equals the number of Christians in this country, will be in the year 2062. If that gives you reason to celebrate, consider this: by the year 2130, the percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Christian will equal a little more than 1 percent. To put that into perspective, today roughly 1 percent of the population is Muslim. 

The fastest growing religious faith in the United States is the group collectively labeled “Nones,” who spurn organized religion in favor of non-defined skepticism about faith. About two-thirds of Nones say they are former believers. This is hugely significant. The trend is very much that Americans raised in Christian households are shunning the religion of their parents for any number of reasons: the advancement of human understanding; greater access to information; the scandals of the Catholic Church; and the over-zealousness of the Christian Right. 

Political scientists Robert Putman and David Campbell, the authors of American Grace, argue that the Christian Right’s politicization of faith in the 1990s turned younger, socially liberal Christians away from churches, even as conservatives became more zealous. “While the Republican base has become ever more committed to mixing religion and politics, the rest of the country has been moving in the opposite direction.” 

Ironically, the rise of the Christian Right over the course of the past three decades may well end up being the catalyst for Christianity’s rapid decline. From the moment Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980, evangelical Christians, who account for roughly 30 percent of the U.S. population, identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. Michael Spencer, a writer who describes himself as a post-evangelical reform Christian, says, “Evangelicals fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith. Evangelicals will be seen increasingly as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society.”

November will mark the tenth anniversary of The Immoral Minority's birth.

On that day I was fired up about a recent election loss to George W. Bush, a criminal war, and the oppressive environment that I felt the Religious Right Wing had created in our country.

All I wanted to do was educate people about the lies that the Bush administration was telling us, provide hope for my liberal friends that we COULD take back the presidency, and make my case that morality is not determined by the church you attend nor the faith you embrace.

In those ten years I have seen amazing changes take place.

The wars are coming to an end, the country is shifting to the Left, and the religious stranglehold is loosening every day.

There is clearly much more work to be done, but damn the progress has been glorious.

My new goal is to stretch my time on earth out long enough to make it to 2062. I would then be 92 years old, so that would be some achievement. (Update: Oops, make that 102. Well that's certainly not better.)

However if I could live until the scales were tipped, and finally those who make decisions based on logic and fact based research outnumbered the superstitious, that would be blissful indeed. On that amazing day I would gladly breathe my last, knowing the future of mankind, and the future of our planet, were in safe hands.