Day By Day

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Believing Anything

Ann Althouse reports on the results of a Pew Forum poll that finds that Americans are increasingly blending Christianity with Eastern or New Age beliefs like reincarnation, spiritual yoga, astrology, etc. Nothing surprising there, but one response is quite interesting:
... Democrats were almost twice as likely to believe in ghosts and to consult fortune-tellers than were Republicans, and the Democrats were 71 percent more likely to believe that they were in touch with the dead....
Read it here.

There is a good reason for this -- Christianity, as practiced by religious conservatives who are overwhelmingly Republican, is a fairly demanding discipline compared to which the exotic supernaturalism to which Democrats seem to be drawn is not. It is religious comfort food, promising significant benefits for little effort. It is religion for people who don't really want to be confined by moral strictures. Althouse calls it "snack food". She's right.