"DO YOU HAPPEN to be a member of a church, synagogue, or mosque?"

It was 1937 when the Gallup Poll first asked that question, one it has asked at regular intervals ever since. For more than six decades, church membership in America was quite high: It was 73 percent in 1937, and remained in the low 70s for the rest of the century. But beginning around 2000, the number of Americans belonging to a house of worship went into a nosedive. Gallup reported last month that church membership had sunk to just 47 percent. For the first time ever, only a minority of American adults are affiliated with a church.

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REASONABLE MINDS can disagree, I suppose, on the wisdom of Georgia's new voting law. For my part, nothing about it strikes me as especially dastardly, let alone racist — and I say that after having read detailed analyses of the law's main provisions, including a 5,000-word breakdown by The New York Times that was plainly intended to be unfavorable. I haven't found the ferocious attack mounted on the law by progressive activists to be very persuasive, but I acknowledge that people of goodwill might come to a different conclusion.

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ALCEE HASTINGS, the charismatic dean of Florida's congressional delegation, died last Tuesday at the age of 84. During his 28 years in the House of Representatives, Hastings was a reliably left-wing Democrat, and there probably weren't many issues on which I would have shared his point of view. But I was interested to discover that one of his last legislative acts was to draft a bill aimed at expanding the size of the House — a gutsy stand in a body whose members tend to jealously protect their power and perks.

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LAST SEPTEMBER, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany — an international organization that provides financial support and social services to survivors of the Nazi genocide — reported on a study of basic Holocaust knowledge among Americans younger than 40. The study comprised interviews with 11,000 millennial and Generation Z respondents, who were asked 30 questions designed to measure their threshold awareness of the Holocaust.

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JOE BIDEN has only been president for 71 days. The 2024 election is more than three and a half years away. Normal Americans — a category that excludes insatiable political junkies — have no desire this far out to see or hear from wannabe presidential candidates. It is way too soon to be inundated by their speeches and promises, their press releases and attack ads: too soon for everything in American life to start getting filtered through the partisan lens of a fight for the White House. We emerged from a grueling presidential campaign just a few months ago. The last thing most of us want is the arrival of the next one.

Too bad. It's already underway.

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