How America’s right wing is becoming a lot more like Britain’s

 

 Washington DC

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[/audioplayer]Amid all the commentary about the Republican party’s triumph in America’s midterm elections, a remarkable fact was ignored: in style and substance, the American right is rapidly becoming a lot more like Britain’s. And that might be the key to its success.

In the last generation, American right-wingers have stood proudly apart from their counterparts in Europe, Britain, Canada and Australia. They were more religious, and more supportive of mass immigration. But that is changing. Exhibit A is the dwindling influence of the religious right in the US. Its power peaked in the late 1980s, when Protestant evangelical pastors like the Reverends Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were power-brokers in the Republican party; the latter even ran in the 1988 Republican presidential primary. In recent memory, conservative politicians were compelled to talk about the importance of God and Jesus to their personal lives and their political views in ways which would be unthinkable on the part of conservative politicians in other western democracies. But the religious right is a casualty of the increasing trend toward European levels of secularism and liberalism in matters of sex and reproduction. Americans still remain more religious than Europeans — but American society is converging into Europe’s post-Christian pattern. A vague belief in a God of some sort remains widespread, but organised religion in the US is haemorrhaging members to the ‘unchurched’ — a group of unaffiliated individuals which, if it were a denomination, would be the fastest-growing in America. The trend is most pronounced among younger Americans under 30, one third of whom have no religious affiliation, compared to one fifth of the population as a whole.