Reddit reviews Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse

Yup, that's exactly right. The American alt-right is very secular, and it's attachment to Christianity is less about Christ and more about seeing Christianity as a cultural corner-store of Western society, regardless of whether or not we should "believe" in Jesus. A lot of the far-right activity in Europe seems similar in their quest to preserve "Christian values" (and this seems to be also the case for Quebec, with it's negative treatment of Muslim and Jewish religious rights, as Quebec, while being very secular, wants to preserve Catholicism anyway as a part of it's "cultural heritage"). A fascinating development has been seeing the American alt-right split over religion, with people like Richard Spencer following a more secular notion of religion (Spencer favors establishing some sort of quasi-pagan religion in his white utopia, but not because he actually believes in paganism), while others really (like Nick Fuentes) want to establish some sort of theocracy.

And we can see this tie of the growing rise of a secular right in the States by analyzing the demographics of who voted for Trump. There was an article published in Aero just the other day about this which I'll quote at length because it's important and has some data points:

>It is true that in a choice between Trump and the progressive Left, most of the religious Right held their nose and chose Trump. But the voter base that propelled Trump’s meteoric rise to power – the faction of the Republican electorate that forced Trump to be the only viable alternative to Hillary Clinton, as it were – is overwhelmingly the secularized portion of the Republican coalition. This is an important nuance that is often missed by the mainstream coverage of Trump’s relationship with conservative voters across the country: Trump’s core constituency is disproportionately comprised of Republican voters who tell pollsters that they seldom or never go to church.
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>The narrative about the religious Right’s disproportionate support for Trump isn’t wrong, per se, but it’s incomplete: Republican voters who regularly report church attendance were significantly more likely to support mainstream candidates like Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson in the primary, and were uninterested in supporting Trump until the general election. But Trump’s base is largely comprised of the Republican voters who no longer regularly attend religious services.
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>Tim Carney, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who recently published a book documenting this phenomenon, writes:
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>We broke down Republican primary voters by church attendance. Among the most frequent attenders—those going more than once a week—Trump got about 32 percent of the vote. Trump also got a minority of those who simply go once a week. Among those who reported going “a few times a year,” Trump got about half. He got an easy majority (55 percent) of those Republicans who “seldom” attend, and a full 62 percent of those who never attend. That is, every step down in church attendance brought a step up in Trump support, and vice versa. The most frequent attenders were half as likely to support Trump as were the least frequent attenders…the GOP electorate has secularized, and [that secularization] helped Trump win the GOP nomination.

This goes to show that the secularization thesis some tout (the more secular a society becomes, the more it embraces metropolitanism, the more tolerant it gets, etc.) isn't right. The Rationalist community also goes to show that pure "rationality" can bring you to some very odd places.

True, but a lot of his rise was correlated with falling churchgoing. https://www.amazon.com/Alienated-America-Places-Thrive-Collapse/dp/0062797107

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There are also some polls that show that churchgoing Trump voters hold more tolerant views on immigration and race than nonchurch going ones

Most people havent bothered to educate themselves.

This book has kinda opened up my eyes to the importance of local institutions, of which a local militia was (and could be) a great example: https://www.amazon.com/Alienated-America-Places-Thrive-Collapse/dp/0062797107