Secularism

America's longest war has just come home. Last week, Fox News’s All-American Christmas Tree, standing merrily outside the channel's headquarters in New York, was set on fire and destroyed. The arsonist was quickly arrested upon which he was subjected to the fearsome rigor of our justice system: released without bail as he cussed out reporters. We should pause here to note just how banal and predictable much of the late-night jesting about the blaze has been. It isn't that the likes of Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert shouldn't joke about the fire — crack all you like, and the Daily Show's "Pine Eleven" was pretty funny.

Now for some bracing honesty from the Democratic National Committee. In a new, unanimously adopted resolution, Democrats have declared that ‘the religiously unaffiliated demographic represents the largest religious group within the Democratic party, growing from 19 percent in 2007 to one in three today’ (emphasis added). Advocates for truth in political advertising should rejoice. The so-called ‘secular’ left has finally abandoned the canard that its views and policies are purely ‘neutral,’ or the products of inarguable empiricism. According to the resolution, the religiously unaffiliated and the nonreligious (labels used interchangeably) are, instead, members of a new faith community.