My friend and colleague Charles Haynes would like the atheists who have been insisting on erecting anti-religious winter solstice displays to declare victory and go away. They've established their right to be there. I don't think that's going to work.

I was flying from Chicago to Washington for Thanksgiving last week when out of the corner of my eye I detected, on a page of SkyMall being flipped through in the next seat over, a photo of a Christmas  tree topped by a Star of David. Talk about your revelations!

As it dawns on the Republican Party that the American people are not entirely down with the Norquistian anti-tax pledge, so is it dawning that the upper hand in the culture war may not lie with religious conservatives. So along comes Richard Stearns, president of the evangelical international aid agency World Vision, with a call to Christians to lay down their arms.

A couple of weeks ago I called attention to a striking graphic from the Public Religion Research Institute that compared the religious layout of the Obama and Romney coalitions with the religious layout of the electorate by age cohort. Short version: Obama's (i.e. Dems) looks like the electorate of the future; Romney's (i.e. GOP's), like the electorate of the past.

One way to gauge how the Republican Party's is evolving since the election is to see what its 2016 presidential hopefuls have to say about the pre-election litmus test issues.

Earlier this month, the AP's Rachel Zoll reported that Russell Renwicks, a manager in the IRS Mid-Atlantic region, had recently said that the agency "had suspended audits of churches suspected of breaching federal restrictions on political activity." Oh no, claimed IRS spokesman Dean Patterson. Renwicks had "misspoke."

Averse as he is to hyping apocalyptic hyperventilating by right-wing preachers, Terry Mattingly takes the MSM to task for ignoring the pre-election assertion by the Rev. Robert Jeffress that President Obama is preparing the way of the Antichrist.

You've got to feel a little sorry for the Catholic bishops. They declared that the Obama administration was making war on religion and not only was the president reelected but Catholics were the only Christian religious body to vote for him.

Republicans should be more worried about appealing to Nones than to Latinos. That's the message of PRRI'S stunning new graphic showing how the respective religious coalitions of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on election day relates to the religious demography of age groups in the U.S.

With Republican Beltwaydom now agreeing that something must be done to bring Hispanics into the GOP tent, eyes have turned to Rev. Samuel Rodriguez as the Great Brown Hope. I fear the hope is misplaced.

If you want to understand why President Obama campaigned on abortion rights this year, look no further than the national exit polls, which show that 59 percent of Tuesday's electorate think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as opposed to 36 percent who think it should be illegal in all or most cases.

The morning-after snapshot of religion and the election is that, as usual, Catholics were the bellwether. They voted for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by 50-48, and Obama captured the popular vote by...50-48.

With all eyes on the Buckeye State--which according to Nate Silver has nearly a 50 percent chance of being the tipping point in the Electoral College today--it behooves us to take a look at last look at what's happening to the evangelicals who constitute the state's largest religious voting bloc.

Sneaking in a few minutes yesterday to do a conference call with thousands of Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom evangelicals, Paul Ryan averred that President Obama had put the country on "a dangerous path."

Four years ago, Barack Obama beat out John McCain by one point among Protestants in Pennsylvania, 50-49, and lost the Catholic vote by four points, 52-48. This year, the two groups have switched sides.