Does Political Ideology Without Religion Beget Violence?

New polls substantiate

I generally distrust polls. As CEO of a small media company I was in a position to order them and it quickly became clear how easily they can be manipulated.

Nevertheless, two recently released soundings—one very recent as in April 9, the date of this writing—have given me pause because they intersect in a disturbing way.

Bluntly, they warn us that atheism and agnosticism can lead to violent ideation and eventually violent behavior.

The Bolshevik Revolution and the Chinese Great Proletarian Culture Revolution—both adamantly atheistic — are two historical events that lend considerable credence to that viewpoint, but these polls bring them eerily close to home.

First, the very recent. It comes to us from the Pew Research Center and concerns religion and party affiliation.

Most of it we already knew instinctively. Catholics and Protestants, actually Christians of all persuasions, lean Republican to one degree or another. Muslims and (sadly, when will we learn) Jews lean Democrat.

But this is the part of the survey that caught my eye, although it too was predictable. In Pew’s words:

“Democrats maintain a wide advantage among religiously unaffiliated voters. Religious ‘nones’ have become more Democratic over the past few decades as their size in the U.S. population overall and in the electorate has grown significantly. While 70% of religiously unaffiliated voters align with the Democratic Party, just 27% identify as Republicans or lean Republican.”

The specifics of this are more dramatic. Atheists identify as Democrats by 84-13%. Agnostics by 78-21%, the most extreme differentials yet.

In probability a fair percentage of the more liberal Jews are also atheists or agnostics, further skewing these statistics. As is well known, the more religious Jews tilt Republican.

Be that as it may, let’s turn to the other poll that comes to us from the website Modernity with the headline “Poll: MAJORITY Of Americans On The Left Say MURDERING Trump Is Justified”.

Modernity adds: “The survey was conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute, which describes itself as ‘a neutral and independent organization whose mission is to identify and forecast cyber-social threats and report on them in a timely fashion.’”

I had not heard of this institute before and cannot speak for their accuracy but their results, even if somewhat off, are chastening to say the least. As reported on x by Libs of TikTok:

“55.2% say it’s justified to kiII Trump. 48.6% say it’s justified to kiII Elon. 57.6% say it’s acceptable to destroy Tesla dealerships.”

This is the breakdown from the pollsters:

All I can say to that is … whoa! And I thought having my car keyed was my biggest worry.

Kidding aside… or is it kidding… putting these two polls together adds up to one frightening cocktail. The size of the atheist/agnostic contingent is telling. We are living in a land of extreme anger and the increasing godlessness, I submit, is greatly to blame.

The apparently diminishing JudaeoChristian tradition upon which this country was founded has had its ups and downs, internally and externally, but at the very least its moral core has put some break on overt hostility over what is approaching two and a half centuries.

Will it hold? We already have had assassination attempts. What next?

We had a civil war over something of substance—slavery. Now it seems we could have a civil war over nothing but a form of projected insanity and knee-jerk hatred.

I’m not convinced that we will, but I’m not convinced that we won’t.. Four years of open borders obviously did not help.

It’s hard to see what the average citizen—”The Barber in Peru”—can do. But at the very least we can all work to dial it down. Nothing on the horizon is worth anything near the level of violence that is fantasized by many, often the majority, of those polled.

Get these people to a church or synagogue—fast.

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Of course there is a good side that has made all the “Hands Off” madness we had to watch last weekend seem all the more pathetic and irrelevant. Just after completing the above entry, the ninety day tariff pause for almost all countries was announced simultaneous with punishing new tariffs on China. In what we could call the political equivalent of a coup de theatre, Donald J. Trump appears to have checkmated The People’s [sic] Republic on the world stage. The Chinese will no doubt attempt a recovery but it is hard to see how they can do this successfully in the long run without tremendous accommodation from Tump, which seems unlikely. This is good news for South Kora, Vietnam and other countries that are cooperating. The market soared. Feel free to go out and buy the American car of your choice. (No more Mercedes or Beemers, sorry.) And don’t be angry at Peter Navarro for being the hardliner. He too may have been necessary.. Remember, he’s the brave man who went to jail to protect the presidency.

NOTE: Please don’t forget, if you haven’t already done so, to have a look at our other Substack The Inoculator that has the intention of diminishing bias in higher education. The administration cannot do this alone. You can participate in the change via the market, choosing colleges and their courses as a consumer. Reports on the various colleges are beginning to come in.

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