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Comment by taurath | Hacker News Reader

And yet people are more likely to change their religion to match their politics than vice versa.

Interesting, can you elaborate on what you mean and is there any studies behind it?

My sister and her husband did this. He was Episcopalian, and she became pretty religious after marrying him. No one in my family was raised religiously. My parents always said we can figure that out for ourselves when we get older. Anyway, once the Episcopalian Church welcomed gay pastors, and her church got one, they fled and became Southern Baptists.

In entire fairness, the Protestant strains in general can be organized along a single dimension with Calvinism at one end and Unitarianism at the other. Episcopalianism is relatively close to the latter, and Southern Baptism to the former; I don't really know that I'd describe it as a change of faith entire when someone moves along that dimension toward a more satisfactory interpretation of the scripture which all these strains share.

That's rather specific to the US and I'm not sure I'd rate that as changing religion TBH.

In Europe, your usual choices when you disagree with the dominant church are to get over it, become atheist, or - more rarely - change faith altogether (as in to Islam, Buddhism, etc.) because, more often than not, you exhaust Christian picks after going through Catholicism and the local Protestant flavor or two.

In contrast, the US offers a very wide variety of Christian flavors (and Christian-based sects). So when, like your sister and her husband, you disagree you can just pick another church flavor down the block that is mostly the same with a few twists. You're still nominally Christian though.

The difference between the two is sometimes put forward to explain the contrast between the high number of atheists in Europe and the high number of religious people in the US.

I don't think that qualifies as changing religions.

Politics and religious beliefs are intertwined. Especially in the US (in the Western world).

This seems sensible to me.

If a person truly believes his religion, it has major implications for his/her notion of what it means for humans to thrive, what activities are moral/ethical, and the goals of human society.

It would be very strange indeed if those beliefs had no bearing on one's politics.

Do you support removing non-profit status from churches to formalize this?

No, because once you give the government the ability to tax something you give the government the ability to control whatever that something is. The Supreme Court has ruled on this in the "Walz vs. Tax Commission of the City of New York" ruling.

> Do you support removing non-profit status from churches to formalize this?

I don't know. I see good arguments for and against.

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