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Over in the US of A, modern culture divides the nation into two wildly polarized, at-each-other's-throats, black-vs-night, white-vs-day, Spy-vs-Spy (?) factions: Republicans and Democrats. (The big sad joke being, of course, that the two are slightly different variants of the same bland centrist position.)

Given the screaming and the hate that flies back and forth between the two, you'd think they were warring religious sects, not political parties. Yet it turns out religion isn't entirely removed from the goings-on. The proponents of the two parties do differ in their religious leanings – though in the Jesus-packed theme park that is America, we're again talking two mild permutations of the same thing.

The Texas Tribune reports on the sorry state of the state (Meet the Flintstones): Nearly one in three Lone Star citizens admits to a fantasy in which humans walked the earth with (and maybe roped and saddled?) dinosaurs, while a similar number drawled an addled "don't know". Only 41% of Texans comprehend that 65 million years of separation would make the Amarillo Trachodon Rodeo a wee tough to schedule.  

The article spells out the the numbers on Texan religiosity. My interest was in the latter part, which broke down Republican vs Democrat responses. Noteworthy differences include:

• Both groups attend church in similar proportions, though the Republican side attends more often.
• Over a third of each group imagines evolution taking place guided by God, but only Democrats also have a significant number willing to acknowledge evolution without God.
• Both groups show depressingly large numbers of persons denying evolution, including development of humankind from earlier lifeforms, but Democrats yielded notably better numbers willing to accept the reality of evolution.

Check the details for yourself in the news story. While the results speak only to Texas, you can expect to see similar divisions between Republican vs Democrat pretty much anywhere in the country. 

And that largely explains my own political leanings. The sad fact is that the leadership and members of both parties rate far too high on Jesus-loving evolution deniers, but at least the Democrat bunch is slightly more rooted in the real world. Given the continuing necessity to choose between these two parties in the US, then whatever the differences or similarities in actual political platforms, the religion factor alone keeps me – well, not exactly attracted to the less-religious Democrat half of the bag of nuts, but at least less repulsed by it. 

Yeesh, that's a depressing place to be. Is there a proper secular party in the house?