We are the last line of defence. And we are failing.

It turns out that believers are increasingly affluent and connected while unbelievers are increasingly poor and disconnected.  Which turns Marx on it's head.  And it's a disaster for our society.  Social democracy and social liberalism those twin horsemen of the modern 'liberal' apocalypse have taught us first that we are the captain of our own ship and we can and have a right to 'do our own thing' and that the State is our savior.

The educated and capable are too smart to actually fall for such stupid notions - affluent doctrinaire liberals who advocate all sorts of flapdoodle behave as if it's not true in their private lives.  But the poor, weak, uneducated?  They've fallen for the 'Raw Deal' hook line and sinker.  Increasingly half of our society is flourishing and the other half is collapsing - not because they don't have money but because they don't believe in anything of true.

As usual, Walter Russell Mead spots the trend:

The stereotype, held apparently by none other than the President of the United States, is that religious people are less educated and less affluent than cosmopolitan and sophisticated seculars.  The bitter clingers handle snakes, guns and Bibles in West Virginia; the seculars discuss literature and economics at swank parties in Georgetown.

In fact, some recent research reveals, it is almost the other way round.  According to the American Sociological Association, the uneducated and the poor (often of course the same people) are dropping God like a hot brick; the ‘bitter clingers’ are increasingly better educated and more affluent than the unchurched.

As far as I can see, this is bad news for everybody.  Atheists and agnostics like to think of themselves as smarter than the God-bothering trailer trash on Tobacco Road, and deeply dislike the thought that they are losing the argument among the most intellectually qualified and best prepared; religious people have to be concerned for the future of religion when whole social classes are dropping away.

How can the church expose the lies of the false Gods of the all powerful state and social liberalism?  How will all of the lost ones be rescued from their temporal 'saviors'?