The non-religious “nones” are on the rise.

In 1992, upon learning that Bill Clinton would be the Democratic presidential nominee, the Republicans decided they would go after him with the "family values" strategy, and they've been trying to sell that strategy ever since.

In 1992 the number of Americans who say they have no religion was about 8 percent.

Now, after 20 years of rightwing efforts to ram their views down our throats on abortion, school vouchers, school prayer, intelligent design, putting the Commandments in courtrooms, stem cell research, euthanasia, cloning, civil unions, HPV shots, contraception, sex education, faith-based initiatives, banning books, assisted suicide...the "no religion" sector has doubled to 15 percent. The fastest growing religion is...no religion.

The same is happening around the world. In a few years, Christianity will be a minority faith in Britain. In ultra-Catholic France, only five percent go to Mass regularly anymore, and the trend away from the church is strongest among the young.

Also on the rise, are the people who are religious, but aren't hard-core evangelicals. Already, the far-right evangelicals are actually only a one-third minority in Christian America. And it’s going to get worse for them. Today, older Christians are heavily right wing, 47 percent conservative to 12 percent liberal. But among younger Christians there are actually more liberals than Christians. Even among the born-agains, only half of the younger members oppose same-sex marriage (and even among older evangelicals, opposition to gay marriage is dropping). So in a decade or two, the liberals take over. 

Far-right Christians know that they are a minority within the Christian movement, albeit an unbelieveably loud minority. They know that the majority of Christians who aren’t right-wing extremists are tired of seeing their entire faith hijacked by the American Taliban. So the extremists are starting to think preemptively, so as to retain control of Christianity in America. But in some cases, because they are not budging in their beliefs, they are doing even more damage.

The boss of the Southern Baptist Convention has admitted that the moral majority is no longer a majority, because American culture has moved on, and that “The Bible Belt is collapsing”.

The Southern Baptist Convention is losing about 75,000 members a year, in part because their core believers are aging, and because they have driven blacks away, but also because the conservative extremists launched a coup and took over the Convention, driving away moderates. American Presbyterians faced a backlash when they tried to take “the wrath of God” out of one of their hymns – hardliners didn’t want us to forget how angry God is. More evangelicals are trying to use shunning to punish wayward members and their families. The extremists are digging in their heels even further, declaring war on what is now called the Emerging Church or Emergent Church, umbrella terms for the post-crazy Christian movement, which the evangelicals condemn as watered-down pro-Democratic Christianity, akin to communism and Islam as enemies of America, or at least their vision of America. Catholic extremists are trying to pull the new Pope back to the right, with the implied threats that they will leave the pews and take their money with them. There is a growing body of right-wing investors who are steering their investment money – hundreds of millions – away from companies like Starbucks  which are insufficiently homophobic or otherwise too liberal, and toward the God-fearing companies.

So clearly they haven’t learned their lesson.

The far-right folks in Congress have assembled a Congressional Prayer Caucus, in flagrant violation of separation of church and state. The group has 97 members, almost all of them Republicans, about a quarter of the entire House. They control the Republican caucus, and the Republican caucus controls the House – Jesus people are running your Congress. The group has filed briefing documents before the Supreme Court, suing for the right to open congressional sessions with exclusively Christian prayers. They also fought the end of don’t-ask-don’t-tell, slammed Obama for not talking about God enough, tried to get Congress to set up a religion week and other religious events, and fought abortion rights. They also have allies trying to do the same at the state level; the state-level groups are pushing a religious agenda, fighting abortion and contraception rights, condemning humanists and secular views, and blocking voting rights.