The Real Reason the Religious Right is Losing America

"It has long been understood that popular religiosity tends to sink as education and income levels rise. It is now understood that additional factors have sped up secularization in most first world nations. An extensive economic safety net, including universal health care, has left most westerners so secure that few feel a need to seek the aid and protection of supernatural powers and they have abandoned the churches in droves. America is the last advanced democracy to feel the full impact of secularization because the Republican alliance with conservative evangelicals that constitute a third of the nation and corporate interests has succeeded in preventing the adoption of a strong safety net.
Middle class Americans are in serious danger of financial ruin if they lose their job or health insurance and mobility from poverty to the middle class is unusually low by western standards.
But here’s the twist. The very same corporations are doing all they can to turn America into a nation of materialistic, hedonistic consumers and the public has in the main gone along with the project. The results are plain to see on the entertainment TV that is a sea of the non-traditionalist values their corporate owners favor. It was the retail chains that got rid of the Blue Laws that used to keep people in church on Sunday rather than at Wal-Mart and Home Depot."

Gregory Paul, OpEdNews.com, December 16, 2007

Worth reading. Some useful links in the text too.