Category: Culture

Cultural climate change the real existential threat

The confluence of multiculturalism, intersectionality, and extreme wokeness has led to its own rapid climate change.  %his one is far more certain, much more concrete, and eminently easier to spot.  It is cultural climate change…to the nth degree.

We are once again seeing preference given to people strictly on the basis of their skin color.  Black Lives Matter, All Lives Do Not.  Racial preferences abound in college admissions practices.  Black?  You’re in!  Asian?  You’re out!  We are now, once again, segregating dorms, graduation ceremonies, and just about everything else, based solely on immutable characteristics such as skin color.  There has even been talk in some states and localities of giving race-based preference for COVID-19 vaccinations.

Everyone must participate in the Big Lies, or risk ostracization, loss of employment, or worse.  Repeat after Dr. Fauci: “COVID-19 is an existential threat, therefore we must all hide in our homes and cover our breathing apparati.  Only a vaccine can set us free again…sort of, maybe.”

Repeat after the mainstream media, Deep State, and the Biden administration: “There was no fraud in the 2020 presidential election.  Anyone who believes that is a nutcase and should be prevented from speaking in a public forum…if not prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Repeat after the mainstream media: “Trump colluded with Russia.  He is a Russian asset, a plant.  He is an existential threat to democracy and this nation that we all love so dearly.  And Russia massively interfered in the 2016 presidential election, probably enabling Trump to win.”

Repeat after the education establishment, Big Media, Big Tech, Big Entertainment, and the Biden administration: “The U.S. is, and always has been, a systemically racist nation, overtly hostile to peoples of color; the LGBTQIA Community; and anyone not a white, cis-gendered, heterosexual Christian male.”

Also repeat after the education establishment, Big Media, Big Tech, Big Entertainment, and the Biden administration: “It is our moral duty to allow every person of color, every non-Christian, everyone from any marginalized group to leave their own country and seek a new and promising beginning in the United States, without exception, that they might have a chance at a better life.”

I fully expect to see, in the very near future, formalized preference for Womyn, peoples of color, and members of the LGBTQIA Community at amusement parks, in post office lines, at lunch counters, for cancer screening and baptisms, at boat launches…and probably everywhere else.

You sense it.  You feel it.  You know it.  This type of climate change is real.  And damaging.  As are all forms of institutionalized racial preference and discrimination.

How Totalitarianism Rhymes Throughout History: Czechoslovakia, China, & Venezuela

“It can’t happen here” is a political cliche in the United States. Regardless of your personal viewpoint, there is a vast swath of the American population who simply do not believe in the possibility of any kind of totalitarianism in the United States.

It’s worth noting that throughout history, in virtually every place that totalitarian regimes have arisen, the residents of these countries felt the same way. Russia was seen as too traditional and backward, the power of the Czar too entrenched to be defeated. Germany had been viewed throughout most of the modern period as the home of Goethe, Schiller, and Mozart, a place where the local Jewish population had largely assimilated.

Because totalitarianism emerges differently throughout history in different countries, it’s crucial to take a broader view of how totalitarian regimes arise. For example, when we’re discussing the rise of communism or the rise of fascism, we see different trends in Russia than we do in China, different trends in Italy than we do in Germany. When we examine multiple, somewhat lesser known examples of the rise of socialism throughout the world, we paint a picture of the different ways in which socialism originated and its possible resurgence.

This case study of terror analyses three examples of totalitarianism throughout history. In Czechoslovakia, the Communist Party was able to establish the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic by leveraging little more than a strong showing – but not a victory – in the parliamentary elections. During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of Communist China in the 1960s, Chairman Mao came out of relative isolation to radically remake an already communist country. Lastly, we will look right in America’s backyard at the rise of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

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Stillwater high schoolers stage ‘Back the Blue’ walkout

A group of Stillwater Area High school students walked out of class Thursday morning to show support for police officers.

Students were encouraged to wear blue and bring thin blue line flags. A group of counter-protesters also showed up.

The “Back the Blue” rally lasted about 20 minutes before everyone went back to class.

I wonder if these people even have the level of self awareness to realize their hypocrisy.

The Gospel of Failure
Our ruling classes just keep insisting on the same bad ideas.

Let me say, first, that I take no joy in Bill and Melinda Gates’s divorce. The union of two souls in one flesh is a deep-set spiritual reality, whether the participants know that or not. Things fuse so naturally in marriage that you hardly notice: bank accounts, social networks, families. Untwining two lives means tearing all that asunder. It can devastate even adult children, of which the Gateses have three. I grieve for them.

But because I take this so seriously, I cannot help remarking that these two people have expressed no intention to reflect, even for a second, on what divorce implies about their qualifications as global lifestyle coaches. Absent from all their public statements thus far has been any indication that this represents a significant personal breakdown for both of them, or that such breakdowns should give pause to people who wish to tell us all, every one of us, how to live. 

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Root of Mass Shootings Pandemic Is Not Gun Access

Growing up in rural South Carolina on my family’s farm, I developed a love, appreciation, and, most importantly, a respect for firearms.

To this day, I remain a collector of firearms and a supporter of the American right to keep and bear arms as enshrined in the Second Amendment. I was taught that safety is paramount to gun ownership, so I have always encouraged responsible gun ownership and use for all Americans.

With that being said, I have noticed a disturbing trend in our country: an ever-increasing number of shootings and gun-related deaths.

And while the quick response from some, namely the left-wing mainstream media and liberal politicians, is to ban weapons and become more restrictive, it appears to me that we have serious mental health and poverty issues contributing to gun violence. I don’t believe that banning guns will result in any significant decline in shootings attributed to these two categories.

In the United States, since January 2021, we have had 195 mass shootings, with 245 people dying and approximately 731 wounded, according to the Mass Shooting Tracker.

While it’s important to acknowledge that there is not a universally accepted definition of what constitutes a “mass shooting,” these numbers are staggering. They are some of the highest numbers in the industrialized world.

Let’s contrast 2021 with when I was growing up, when mass shootings simply weren’t a problem. I believe that this is the direct result of the era and the family structure: Parents were involved in their children’s lives and children were taught discipline and respect.

By and large, members of my generation were raised in households with two parents, and we were taught how to deescalate and talk things out when problems arose. Today, that no longer seems to be the case.

We have a moral and social failing in our country that has caused an increase in mass shooters, predominantly young men. One has to pause to think about what’s different today from 30 or 40 years ago. It certainly isn’t guns, because it’s harder to get guns today than it was in the past, when you didn’t have to go through nationalized background checks. When I was growing up, you could purchase a firearm with no questions asked, yet we didn’t see so many mass shootings.

America’s young men are struggling with mental health issues or are broken and living in poverty with single mothers struggling to survive. Many of them are clearly crying out for help, and we owe it to them to listen.

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Stupid people are still dangerous, so laugh, but be ready to defend yourself.

Woke people are stupid, and stupid people are funny.

Woke people are funny. They are funny because they are stupid, and stupid people are funny. I insist upon this. If it becomes necessary, and if God grants me the courage, I will insist upon laughter right up until I am in the stocks or whatever modern equivalent these sniveling putzes dream up. When they march me out or lock me up or come for my head, I will laugh.

Recently when I expressed this sentiment online I was rebuked: “Nazis were hilarious until they weren’t.” “Stupid with power is not funny anymore.” I want to take these objections seriously enough to answer them, because I think they express a real and growing anxiety. It is an understandable anxiety for anyone who sees how dark things could get in this country and around the world.

The upshot of the objection is: critical race theory and woke doctrine are no longer any laughing matter. We sniggered at the Leftists while they worked diligently away, and now they have taken over our schools and our government. They are seriously engaged in bringing the country down around our ears. In the process, they are doing terrible harm to us and our children. This is nothing to be scoffed at.

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The Appeal of the New Totalitarians.

I am not a follower or a fan of baseball. But I understand that it is, or has been, an important national pastime, beloved by many, not least, as Andrew McCarthy observes in a recent column, because it offered its acolytes a respite or oasis from politics, an arena where our differences of opinion could be redeemed or at least temporarily forgotten in the benign if intense partisanship of fandom.

It is for this reason that, impervious though I am to the charms of the sport, I regard with disdain the decision on the part of the woke commissars who run Major League Baseball to abandon Atlanta, Georgia. The reason they gave was that Georgia had passed new voter rights legislation requiring, among other things, that voters present valid identification in order to be eligible to vote. They called that a violation of “fair access to voting” when in fact it is legislation, very similar to that in effect in many other states, whose chief effect will be to make elections fairer. You need an ID to board a plane, check into a hotel, enter most urban businesses, but not to vote?

I see that Delta Airlines has also joined the woke brigade by taking a public stand against the Georgia legislation. How will the airline respond if you refuse to show a valid identification before boarding? (After Delta finished with its woke high horse, American Airlines borrowed it to present its own little exhibition of politically correct grandstanding with respect to similar legislation in Texas.)

This is all just business as usual in what more and more seems like the twilight of the republic. The cultural critic Stephen Soukup has anatomized the phenomenon in a new book that we just published at Encounter called The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business.

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Battlefield ‘Burbs

America’s political future turns on our last contestable places.

America’s political culture has been shaped by its rural and urban environments, each of which tends to be dominated by one party. Urban Republicans are now as rare as rural Democrats.

Yet the political future of the country lies in the suburban and exurban rings that dominate every metropolitan region. These voters are made up predominately neither of woke city hipsters nor gun-toting rubes, the stereotypes that dominate our competing cultural memes. The suburbs are the last contestable geography in the country.

Since 1950, suburban population growth has expanded more than ten times faster than core cities. Overall, suburb-dwellers account for more than half the population of the country, and 90 percent of the overall population of metropolitan America. Over the past decade, they have accounted for well over four-fifths of all new job growth (and the vast majority of all new patents). As one political analyst put it, “Suburbs are the new Florida.”

These trends were expanding before the pandemic, but as realtors attest, Covid has accelerated city residents’ movement to suburbs. Manhattan and San Francisco rents have been falling some, but prices in the periphery have been rising. A new national poll from the Los Angeles Times and Reality Check Insights, held after the November 2020 election, found that most residents of big cities want to relocate.

The American Enterprise Institute has found that less dense areas are now growing much faster than denser ones. Critically, millennials, once seen as drawn to urban lifestyles, were already ditching the big city before the pandemic, notes Brookings. A May Zillow survey suggests “space seekers” are leading the charge—millennials and younger Americans, according to Gallup and others, who want to get married and have children, and are following the widely dissed home preference patterns of their parents in order to do so.

Suburbs are also becoming more reflective of the nation’s ethnic diversity. In the 1960s and 1970s suburbs were considered largely white enclaves; but during the past decade, notes Brookings’ Bill Frey, the percentage of suburbanites living in predominantly white suburbs fell from 51 percent to 39 percent.More than a third of the 13.3 million new suburbanites between 2000 and 2010 were Hispanic, with whites accounting for a mere fifth of suburban growth in that same period. African Americans have been steadily moving from inner cities, where many middle income areas have declined due to economic collapse, crime or, in some cases, gentrification. Today, in the 50 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, 44 percent of residents live in racially and ethnically diverse suburbs, ranging from 20 percent to 60 percent non-white.

Competitive Politics in Rural and Urban America

Besides their numerical importance in elections, suburbs are the last redoubts of competitive politics. Both rural America and the core city have become increasingly dominated by political extremes. This does not mean there are no progressives in small towns, or Republicans in big cities, but voting patterns have become more lopsided.

Republicans now totally dominate the politics of small towns and rural areas. Yet as recently as 2008 Barack Obama won nearly one quarter of the country’s non-metro counties; eight years later, Hillary Clinton won barely ten percent. Last year, rural and small-town voters supported Donald Trump by a remarkable 47 percentage points, well above the 30 percent margin for John McCain eight years earlier. Pockets of past rural liberal populism, like Montana and North Dakota, are becoming crimson red. The biggest exceptions are found in “amenity” areas, such as Vermont, that draw on metropolitan refugees. Sixty of the seventy most rural districts nationwide are represented by Republicans.

Cities, largely devoid of Republicans, have undergone an equally thorough transformation. Less than three decades ago the nation’s two largest cities, New York and Los Angeles, were governed by Republicans while Houston, Philadelphia, and Denver were run by business-oriented Democrats. Now big cities are dominated increasingly by left wing progressives. They produce few Republican elected officials and vanishingly few congresspeople. By one recent account, only one of the 34 most urban Congressional districts is represented by a Republican.

On the Presidential level, lockstep voting approaches Soviet levels. In 1984, for example, Ronald Reagan garnered 31 percent of the vote in San Francisco, while winning 27.4 percent in Manhattan and over 38 percent in Brooklyn. By 2012, Mitt Romney, a more moderate Republican, won barely 13 percent of the vote in San Francisco, and he garnered less than half of Reagan’s share 28 years earlier in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Donald Trump did even worse in all these areas, winning barely ten percent of San Francisco and Manhattan, and barely 18 percent in Brooklyn.

The Last Ideological Battlefield

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I and others think the comparison is closer to today’s commie China with its fascist corporatism than Hungary was back then, but whatever..

Comment O’ The Day:
“The people who told us that the election of Donald Trump would usher in 1984 are busily ushering in 1984.” Dr. Maturin

The culture curators want to think for you.

Sandor Mecs was a child when his family lived in the town of Szentendre, Hungary. Today, it is a picturesque town 20 miles north of Budapest that is lined with winding cobblestone streets, colorful centuries-old homes, cottages, and churches and is a tourism center with its flourishing museums, charm, and proximity to the capital.

While the picturesque footprint was the same for Mecs and his family and thousands of other Hungarians 60 years ago, life in post-World War II Hungary was anything but ideal if you were a free thinker.

“At that time, we had become a Stalinized state of the Soviet Union, and Matyas Rakosi ruled the country for over seven years as a dictator who demanded no one strayed from the collective approved government thought,” he said.

If you did, you disappeared.

“Everything in government was militarized, and everything in our culture, the arts, the media, where you shopped, was all part of the government,” he explained.

There was no freedom of thought. You believed what the government and, by default, culture and new organizations told you to believe.

The government force was so oppressive that it established a secret police called the AVH, or the Allamvedelmi Hatosag, to make sure everyone thought the same and that no one dissented from whatever the government believed. Mecs explained, “My parents and family members lived in fear of people overhearing a conversation that might deviate from accepted thought.”

He said his father understood that after the doomed Hungarian Revolution of 1956 failed, it was time to flee the family’s home country.

“You have to understand when you leave, you leave everything behind, whether it is family members, belongings, or the roof over your head,” he said. “A week after the revolution, my dad realized we’ve got to get out of here, and we literally snuck across the border with Austria in the dead of night.”

Back then, there were people who, for money, would get you safely across the border. “They were taking groups of maybe 20 people at a time and getting them past the barbed wire. One of the border guards actually caught the group that we were in when a very familiar face caught his eye,” he said.

It was the guard’s sister, “so he let us go,” he said.

Within a short period, over 200,000 men, women, and children escaped their homeland, much like the Mecs family did. It was an exodus and scattered much of the educated and intellectual class. The only people who could afford to leave managed to spread globally, with many of them going to the United States and the United Kingdom.

Many intellectuals in the U.S. toss around the word “dictatorship” or “dictator” about political parties they don’t like frequently, and with such abandon, it is now deemed normal in some circles to use the terms without irony, primarily when referring to the Republican Party.

In their zeal to dismantle conservatism, they miss the true dictator in our country. They are our cultural curators. The corporations, much of the media, the entertainment industry, major league sports organizations, academia, and Silicon Valley all demand that we fall in line with how they think. They want to approve of how we speak, what books we read, what movies we watch, what words we use, who we support politically, how we educate our children, and what parts of history are acceptable to teach.

Many of these entities have gone from trying to appeal to a wide range of customers based on the products they sell or services they offer into social justice organizations, far removed from their core missions and their consumers.

When one of them deems something unacceptable in its version of the world, many others follow suit, often crumbling to their younger employees’ demands. The latter has been given enough power in this age of corporate social justice to destroy the very place they work if that corporation does not bend to their demands.

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We got where we are by being quiet and polite

 No More Silence Now.

I apologize for what I’m about to do. No truly, because no one deserves this ear worm. But it’s time to shout.

Shout, shout, let it all out.

Seriously.

This was brought about by an article from Glenn Reynolds who says that despite the fact none of us agrees with woke BS, a tiny minority is succeeding in silencing the majority.

He’s right on that. what he’s wrong on is the roots of this: how we got where we are. How the left came to be in control. Why they think they can impose their crazy ideology and that “if anyone opposes it” (And I guarantee that’s how they look at it) it’s just “Some uneducated rednecks.” How we got to the point when the left is completely ignorant of history or really anything and trying to recreate the cultural revolution because they feel no one will oppose them.

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You’re Not Trans. You’re Just Weird:

Editor’s note: This hypothetically open letter was originally posted by its anonymous author on Medium and was rapidly removed as “hate speech.” We found it to be a refreshing dose of honesty, a charming and relatable open letter from one parent to other parents (not to the child, obviously!) about dealing with a challenging and dangerous moment in raising children, especially “weird” adolescents who search for their identities harder than others and risk making life-damaging mistakes in a way never before possible. We are reposting it here on New Discourses with the permission of the author.

by Donna M.

My dear, sweet, son,

I’ve got to break it to you: you’re not trans, you’re just weird.

This seems like a cruel thing to point out right now. Clearly, you are struggling and feeling pretty awful about things. I can see that you are in a rough patch, and one of the first rules of parenting is to not pile on. The world is pretty heavy on your shoulders. You’re fifteen. There’s a pandemic going on. But here I come anyway. I’m about to throw more on you.

When you were two ­– a happy, chubby, little tyke in pull-ups, you watched the world with wary eyes behind the thumb in your mouth. You leapt with joy in the rhythm of the toddle music classes. You chattered and shared stories about your stuffed animals. You loved your little sister. Enjoyed cookies and finger painting. That was all pretty normal.

But you also started to count to one thousand on our walks. And you started to call out the store names as we drove around. And you preferred reading books rather than playing with the other two-year-olds at preschool. And you hated sitting in the circle when instructed. And you hated the feel of blue jeans. And you threw big tantrums when you lost any kind of game. In other words, you started to show signs that you were… weird.

The grandparents were the first to notice. They said gentle things like “You oughta keep an eye on that one,” and sent us links to Wall Street Journal articles about child prodigies. And then the other parents in the play groups started to comment; “He’s pretty intense, huh?” And the teachers were on to it pretty quickly. They started to use fancy terms like “asynchronous development.”

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The best interpretation of “woke” is as a synonym for “crazy, stupid, and vicious”.

When Will the Woke Go Full Caligula?

The other day, I was scrolling through Twitter when I happened upon this particular tweet, directed against the former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss:

“Imagine if @bariweiss offered 10% of the defense she gives white supremacy to all the antifascist, Jewish-allied, Black and brown women of color she has made a career putting in danger,” it said. “NYT staff of color felt so unsafe around her that she had to resign.”

Something about this tweet struck me instantly: it was completely insane. No thinking person can hold that Weiss is anything but a political moderate with no sympathies whatsoever for white supremacism and neither the power nor the desire to harm anyone.

I also understood, however, the likely motivation behind the attack: Weiss has recently emerged as a strident voice against cancel culture and the amorphous but potent phenomenon known as “Woke.”

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A BADGER AMONG KITTENS BY DENTON SALLE

Certain stories make the rounds about wild animals that get mistaken for pets.  It can be someone from another country trying to pick up a skunk because it looks like a cat, a coyote or bear cub thought to be a stray dog, or a feral dog left alone with a house cat.  The stories never end well.  Once of the worse I heard (and some of these are true) was a young woman who found a badger cub and thought it a lost kitten so she took it home and put it in the basket with her kittens.  Whether true or not, it makes a good model for a multicultural society that has scrapped the idea of a common culture, particularly when that culture ignores the differences between classes and ethnic groups for the simplistic broad groupings of race and sex.  Whether you realize it or not, there are badgers in the basket.

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For Our Leftist Elites, the Double Standard’s Meant to Be Blatant. That’s the Point

I came to understand our political situation today by watching gorilla documentaries. Let me explain.

At day’s end, when I’m exhausted, I wind down by finally turning on the television. The last things I usually watch are nature films, on the diverse, fascinating, and mostly apolitical channel CuriosityStream. For a grand total of $12 per year (as of now), you get access to thousands of polished, beautifully produced documentaries on every subject from ancient history to contemporary science. It’s the best entertainment money I’ve ever spent.

Invariably, I look for animal films. First of all, I’m a sucker for God’s innocent creatures, especially the furry ones. But I take delight in all the evidence of direct, Divine design all through the animal kingdom — from speeding sharks to circling condors. I do wish CuriosityStream would air some programming from the Discovery Institute. Its scientists do much better explaining nature via design than Darwinists do with their “just so” stories and smuggled-in teleology. (“Evolution developed the eagle’s eye to make it a better hunter… .”)

The Pyramid Is the Point

One thing I notice among most higher mammals, especially primates: the almost universal preoccupation with hierarchy. In some species, only the highest status female gets to breed. Once she claims that position, usually by bullying other females, it goes mostly unchallenged. But much more prevalent are species where the status that matters is male. The dominant male collects a harem of she-gorillas or sea lionesses, and fathers all the group’s children. Lesser males steer well clear of females, and accept the scraps from hunts, lest they summon the alpha male’s wrath. Often the dominant males will go out of their way to humiliate their lesser brethren, just to remind them who’s boss.

And that’s how to understand what’s happening politically right now in America.

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From last May, but as on point now, as then.
RTWT (Read The Whole Thing)

The Great UnReason of 2020: The ‘Curious, but Quite Authentic, Inability to Think’

Upon the Nazis’ rise to power, Hannah Arendt, a Jewish woman who would go on to become a considerable 20th century philosopher, had to flee with her family from her native Germany.

Once the war was over and some prominent Nazis were brought to justice, Arendt attended the trial in Jerusalem of Adolph Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust.

The experience left an indelible impression upon her, one that would shape the trajectory of her philosophical thinking.  What she observed was that, much to her surprise, Eichmann wasn’t the incarnation of evil that she expected to encounter.  His actions were monstrous, yes; but he was remarkably ordinary or “banal,” to use Arendt’s term of choice.

What struck Arendt was Eichmann’s “curious, but authentic, inability to think.”

“However monstrous the deeds were, the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic, and the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.” 

Eichmann didn’t subscribe to any “theory or doctrine,” exhibited no “particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction;” his “only personal distinction was a perhaps extraordinary shallowness.”

Note, Arendt did not intend her characterization to be interpreted as commentary upon Eichmann’s IQ.  Nor, for that matter, did she mean to suggest that he was literally incapable of thinking critically.  Rather, her point was that Eichmann showed no will to think beyond the clichés—the memes, bumper sticker slogans, and hashtags—of his day.

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Okay, as requested:

Think what it says about the nation when half the people give the rioters who loot and burn private property a pass, even after more than $2 billion in damage is done to homes and businesses.
The left and its antifagoon blackshirts occupied city blocks and still control two “autonomous zones”, but when a government building that is the seat of power was infiltrated and occupied, it’s the worst day in modern history.

Leftist rioters attempted to burn down a Federal building in Portland. Leftist rioters vandalized statues and Federal monuments.
When Trump deployed federal law enforcement to protect the Lincoln Memorial and Portland Federal Courthouse, he was literally called the new incarnation of Hitler.

When the right breaks into the Capitol, and doesn’t set one fire or throw one Molotov cocktail, spray paint one slogan, or destroy one statue, the call is unanimous to arrest and prosecute them to the end of the earth them lock them up and throw the key away.

We cannot have two sets of laws and two codes of behavior in this country. It didn’t work in France in the 1790s, Russia in the 1910s, or what used to be Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

We have to return to one standard or this will happen again.

What we saw yesterday was as much a ‘People’s Revolt’ as anything else.

If you want to stop such, you have to stop treating standard operational people like dirt, and the first step there is to listen to them and not just blow them off as rednecks who live in ‘flyover country’.

Gallup: Churchgoers Only U.S. Group That Avoided 2020 Mental Health Decline

According to a Gallup Poll released on Monday (7th), frequent church attendees were the only group in the U.S. that did not experience a mental health decline in 2020.

Gallup has conducted its November Health and Healthcare Survey annually since 2001. The 2020 results show 34% of Americans consider their mental health “excellent,” and 76% consider their mental health “excellent/good,” both are all-time lows.

Forty-six percent of Americans who regularly attend religious services said their mental health is “excellent,” an increase from last year’s 42%.