Now, just two weeks before the Iowa caucuses of 2024, a podcast is investigating the people on Donald Trump’s list of religious leaders. The podcast is a project of IowaFaithLeaderCoalition.com, and is named simply On the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.

The list is not what it at first appears to be, the podcast reports.

The following is from the first episode of the podcast, out today, Empty Chairs in the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.

“Back in the day when Twitter was still Twitter, and Twitter still mattered, Donald Trump claimed to have a huge number of Twitter followers. An investigation discovered, however, that at least half of Donald Trump’s supposed followers on Twitter were nothing more than fake accounts that had been purchased from scammers who make money by helping pretenders to make a social media footprint look bigger than it actually is. With so many untraceable names on Donald Trump’s list of supposed faith leaders, it looks as if Trump may be pulling the same dishonest scheme with his Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.”

So, who do we have to thank for ending the sadistic insanity of the Trump years? Look to non-religious Americans, a large voting bloc that overwhelmingly supported the Democratic ballot.

According to the Associated Press VoteCast survey, non-Christian Americans now make up 32% of the electorate. That number has been increasing rapidly, and is forecast to rise even more, because most Christians are above the age of 50. Christian churches aren’t replacing their members as their senior citizens die, because decades of toxic behavior by Christian leaders and organizations have driven young Americans away from Christianity.

Two-thirds of non-Christian Americans are non-religious – 21% of the electorate. Witnessing the hateful hypocrisy of Christianity hasn’t led people to choose another religion, for the most part, but to reject religion altogether.

The VoteCast survey shows that non-religious Americans voted against Donald Trump, for Joe Biden, more strongly than any religious group. 72% of non-religious Americans voted to kick Trump out of the White House.

The majority of voters from every single Christian group voted to keep the bitter fury, the violence, the racism, the sexism, the disregard for the law, the corruption, and the rampant dishonesty of Donald Trump.

That’s what toxic Christianity looks like. American Christianity is not a force for social cohesion and moral values. To the contrary, Christianity has been the leading force for division and hatred in the United States.

The lesson for Democratic leaders should be clear: If you’re looking for strong support for progressive values, don’t turn to Christians. Instead, you’ll find the most reliable progressive support among non-religious Americans.

We’ll name it here: Church

The Associated Press VoteCast survey interviewed over 110,000 people about various aspects of their lives, and about how they voted in the 2020 presidential election. The survey found a strong correlation between church attendance and support for the dangerous, radical agenda of Donald Trump.

Only 35% of voters who never attend a Christian church chose to vote for Trump. By contrast, 61% of voters who attend church at least once a week voted for Trump. The relationship was clear and progressive: The more often a voter attends church, the more likely they are to support the abuses, lawbreaking, bigotry, violence, animosity to science, and crude behavior of Donald Trump.

There are two plausible causal interpretations of this data. First, it’s possible that churches are especially attractive to people who enjoy crude behavior, racism and sexism, xenophobia, proud ignorance, disdain for the law, cruelty, and conspicuous corruption. If this is the case, Christian worship services aren’t the cause of dangerous radicalization, but are places that nasty bigots like to go.

A second possibility is that churches actively radicalize Americans, leading people who might otherwise be nice neighbors to become crude, rude, violent extremists.

It’s likely that both interpretations are correct to some extent. Christian churches have become stages upon which performances of defiant rejection of social norms take place, as preachers scream loud condemnations and passionate opinions that are disconnected from empirical evidence, in displays of raw emotional fury. These performances both attract misanthropes who seek the company of other hateful people, and normalize hateful attitudes and behaviors among other churchgoers.

Christian ideology also consistently teaches churchgoers that there is no need to have a factual basis for one’s opinions, even advising that dependence upon evidence and careful, rational thinking are sinful. Churches thus have become radicalizing training grounds for voters who are willing, and even eager, to believe whatever Christian politicians tell them to believe, without regard to the factual accuracy of any proclamation.

So it is that, even though the facts of Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in 2020 are rationally undeniable, Donald Trump’s Christian supporters are quite willing to accept Trump’s absurd assertions that he is the victor. A new verse of the old Sunday school tune for children could easily be sung:

Trump’s the winner, this I know, for my leaders tell me so…

Churches remain centers of political power in America, and have in recent years abandoned previous restrictions on explicit campaigning for political candidates, commonly hosting pro-Trump rallies and fundraising events.

The good news is that church membership is on the decline, along with Christian identity. In most Christian churches, the vast majority of congregants have grey hair and wrinkled skin, as young families with children are frightened away by the right wing radicalization of church culture. Younger generations of Americans are turning their back on church life and Christianity, constructing their political identities around critical reasoning skills and a more compassionate, secular vision of citizenship.