Holy Smoke: The strange death of liberal American Christianity

What rubbish we British talk about American Christianity. For example, we’re still convinced that hardcore fundamentalist evangelicals can swing elections. But do Americans themselves really understand what’s happening to religion in their own country?

In the new Holy Smoke podcast, I’m joined by Professor Stephen Bullivant, Britain’s leading expert on patterns of churchgoing, to discuss unsettling new statistics – unsettling, that is, if you rely on the liberal media for information about US Christianity.

It’s a freewheeling conversation, to put it mildly, that covers the growing gulf between so-called Trump-supporting ‘cultural conservatives’ and pious ‘social conservatives. They’re not the same thing at all. Also: the Mormons, the Democrats’ infiltration of the US Catholic Church and (I could resist throwing this one in) that ‘devoted family man’, America’s first Catholic president.

Plus the big question: are mainstream American churches falling off a cliff, as their European equivalents certainly are?

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