LOSING THEIR FAITH? NOT REALLY: So says President Ronald Reagan’s  *“terrible, swift sword” over the federal bureaucracy, former Office of Personnel Management Director Donald Devine, writing in today’s edition of The American Conservative. (Full Disclosure: I spent 2.5 great years working for Devine as a Reagan political appointee).

Devine, a political scientist and data wonk by profession, took a look at the recent Pew and other polls reported by the Mainstream Media as heralding the accelerating decline of Christianity in the U.S. Not quite what the data show, according to Devine, who summarized it all thusly:

“Pew calculates worldwide that—mainly due to higher death rates and lower number of children—people with no religion will decline relative to those who are religious by the year 2060 and that Christianity will remain the world’s largest religion.

“So sorry to rain on the media parade, but while there has been a recent decrease in formal religious affiliation and participation in the U.S., mostly among the youngest, it has pretty much been within a narrow band that’s fluctuated over the last half century but maintained a participation and membership total surpassing any other type of social organization. That even includes watching the Super Bowl!”

* The inside story of Reagan and Devine made monumental reforms in the civil service.