Derek Thompson

What I'm hearing is that there's at least two really important things that happened in the 1980s, early 1990s.

One is that the reputation of atheism went from being a strong...

Soviet communist connotation to no connotation, maybe even a positive connotation.

And so maybe lots of people who were de facto nuns or atheists or agnostics in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s could now say, no, I do not believe in God.

I am not a Christian.

But the other thing you said I think might be more powerful is

which is that between the late 1970s, the rise of Ronald Reagan, through the 1980s, and into the early 1990s, the rise of the new conservative movement was braided into the rise of a new Christian movement, which meant that Christianity and the GOP became like

the double helix.

They became braided.

They became one singular entity, which meant that young liberals, especially young millennial liberals in the 1990s and early 2000s,

declined to call themselves Christians because they associated Christianity with conservatism just as they no longer associated atheism with communism.

And so it was this dual connotation shift that happened right around the same time that led to this phenomenon where the share of liberal young people who say they have no religious affiliation began to steadily rise

while the share of conservative young people who said they had no religious affiliation rose much, much less, if at all.

Is all of that true as a kind of, this is a big subject that we're trying to wrestle down to the ground, but is that all true as a kind of capsule explanation for why this hockey stick moment in American history happened?

To deepen this point, you have a really compelling chart in one of your essays on the religion gap, depending on who watches Fox News versus MSNBC.

And one way to describe this graph for people who cannot see it is to say that according to your analysis,

Atheists are more liberal, more likely to watch MSNBC, than white Catholics or Mormons are conservative.

I mean, so when you think about how conservative a Mormon or white Catholic is, you're like, well, that's got to be really large.

That's plus 25, plus 30%.

Atheists are even more conservative.