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Under an old, Christian-based legal definition, insanity is understood to be the incapacity of a person to tell the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. If we propose that most people in the modern western world, people raised under the new, post-Christian, post-absolutist philosophical dispensation, truly do not know that abortion is wrong – that it is a monstrous evil to kill an innocent human being – nearly everyone around us is, in some sense, murderously insane.

That man, those men, clearly ought to have known, and their facades of civilization are not enough to cover their shame. It is not enough, we can say, confident that the world will agree, to like Beethoven and Bach, to read Schiller and enjoy sports and be attentive husbands and fathers. We must know the difference between good and evil, or we are lost, we become those men, those civilized monsters. 

Is this not the smiling, reasonable face of our worst dystopian nightmares?

Americans are hardly more religious than people living in other industrialized countries. Yet they consistently—and more or less uniquely—want others to believe they are more religious than they really are.

When you ask Americans about their religious beliefs, it's like asking them whether they are good people, or asking whether they are patriots. They'll say yes, even if they cheated on their taxes, bilked Medicare for unnecessary services, and evaded the draft. Asking people how often they attend church elicits answers about their identity—who people think they are or feel they ought to be, rather than what they actually believe and do.

self-reported church attendance has been held up as proof that America has somehow resisted the secularizing trends that have swept other industrialized nations. What if those numbers are spectacularly wrong?

2008 Gallup Poll. General population's feelings toward various groups, and the numbers are positive, neutral and negative: Methodists (51, 45, 3), Jews (about the same), Baptists (49, 40, 11), Evangelicals (40, 38, 22), Mormons (25, 46, 29), Muslims (18, 34, 48), Atheists (12, 40, 48).

2008 Gallup Poll. General population's feelings toward various groups, and the numbers are positive, neutral and negative: Methodists (51, 45, 3), Jews (about the same), Baptists (49, 40, 11), Evangelicals (40, 38, 22), Mormons (25, 46, 29), Muslims (18, 34, 48), Atheists (12, 40, 48).NonChristians on same: Methodists (32, 58, 10), Jews (43, 49, 8), Evangelicals (13, 36, 51), Mormons (26, 46, 28), Muslims (19, 54, 27), Atheists (36, 48, 16). Big issue here is that Baptists are not involved in this "Evangelical" number so that if one factors them in the whole thing shifts. Baptists had a higher rating of people who liked them. 74% of nonChristians were either positive or neutral toward Baptists. He suggests the word "evangelical" is now a pejorative term; it provokes negative responses.

The group most anti-Evangelical is university professors. 53%