The New York Times is trying to understand the vast appeal of religion in the US after the election, and comes up with a dumb economics-based reason. They just can’t understand why the US isn’t more like Europe and other industrialized nations where “religion and modernity just [don’t] mix.”
But over the past 10 years or so a growing group of mostly American sociologists has deployed a novel theory to explain the United States’ apparently anomalous behavior: supply-side economics. Americans, they say, are fervently religious because there are so many churches competing for their devotion.
What’s supposed to happen is that as people become wealthier they have less need for the “opiate of the masses” and turn toward other institutions, such as the government and the educational establishment, to take over the functions once provided by religion.
