Fox News’ Tucker Carlson said Friday he believes a poll showing a decline in church membership indicates that Americans are “enslaved.”
“Actually, people aren’t liberated by fleeing from meaning, from God, from religion, they’re enslaved. Look at the country. And I would say that’s true for you know, feminism and all kinds of other, liberate, you know, liberation movements that actually paradoxically put people in bondage, but this one particularly,” Carlson said on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.” (RELATED: ANALYSIS: Is Wokeism Becoming Its Own Religion?)
A Gallup poll published Monday found 47% of Americans in 2020 were members of a religious community, a decline from 50% in 2018. Church membership was around 70% in 1999 and 73% in 1937, when the first poll on the matter was conducted, according to Gallup.
A rise in Americans who don’t show a preference for religion has led to the decrease in religious community membership, according to Gallup.
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Carlson said to his knowledge, this is the first time church membership had fallen below 50%.
“This is a result of a long-term … liberation movement, a liberation movement that sought to liberate Americans from the constraints of traditional religion and, like all liberation movements in this country, at a certain point it becomes the opposite of what it purports to be,” Carlson said. (RELATED: Mental Health Improved For Only One Group During COVID — And Dems Did Everything They Could To Suppress It)
The Fox News host said worry and despair comes from a lack of purpose and reason for suffering.
“Are people really more liberated than they were when they believed in God, are they less anxious?” Carlson asked.
“Look, everyone dies in the end and if you don’t acknowledge that or provide explanation for what happens after you die, then people are filled with existential dread with anxiety and maybe drug abuse skyrockets and so does suicides and hopelessness and all the conventional science of despair like the ones we’re seeing now,” Carlson said.
The Gallup poll was conducted over the phone from 2018 until 2019 among 6,117 random adults across every state and the District of Columbia. The poll also carried a 95% confidence level with a plus or minus two percentage points margin of error.
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