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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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a slow and steady trend downwards in roughly all aspects of religiosity/Christianity in America, up to 2026

On the whole, what's been remarked on in the most recent years isn't that this trend reversed, but rather that it slowed or stopped, and you can see it in this data. For instance, there's a five point drop in importance of religion between 2012 and 2016, but only a two point drop between 2021 and 2025, and the trend basically stops after 2022. The number of people saying that religion's importance was increasing actually spiked massively in 2025; the past-seven-days question numbers have roughly returned to pre-COVID numbers, etc.

I worry that you're taking me as overstating things – I'm optimistic on this, not triumphalist. I recommend Ryan Burge on this, he tends to have decent takes that I think don't overstate the evidence.

This doesn't seem like the vital aspect that can save the West.

The goal of Christianity isn't to "save the West" today it's to save souls forever. The beneficial effects on civilization are a byproduct of this, not an end goal. Twisting it to political ends is (I think) likely to fail at both (for instance, Catholicism triumphed very briefly in Ireland; a few decades of formal authority did what the British never could). If you want Christianity to save the West, let it start by saving you.

Furthermore, if in 25 years electricians, shipbuilders, engineers and so on haven't been automated, then it follows that AI was not that big of a deal. We are talking about a fundamentally different scenario.

I think that AI can be a big deal and fail to automate away plenty of aspects of our society. For instance, if AI made every man a coder whenever he cared to set his mind to it and dropped the price of all industry and manufacturing by 50%, the economy would be radically different! But humans would still be pulling wire and unstopping clogged toilets.