There's a new power in America- atheism

...This is not, one hastens to add, an intellectual form of faith. It is a highly emotional and spontaneous variety of American Protestantism and theologically a blend of self-help, biblical literalism and Republican politics. This is, in many ways, how George W Bush reframed conservatism in America – and with one in three Americans now calling themselves evangelical, you can see the political temptation. The problem was that the issues the evangelicals focused obsessively on – abortion, gays, stem cells, feeding tubes for those in permanent vegetative states – often came to seem warped to many others. Those who might once have passively called themselves Christian suddenly found the label toxic, if it meant identifying with such a specific political agenda. And so as evangelicalism rose, atheism and nonaffiliation emerged as a reaction...

There’s a new power in America – atheism, Andrew Sullivan Sunday Times