I believe that America’s core ideals are very much linked to its Christian faith. So as Easter has just passed, I thought this would be a good time to take a closer look at the state of the American church and then weep quietly and say it was a great country while it lasted.

Now, according to a Pew poll, 62% of Americans identify as Christian. This is a slight drop from the 1697 poll which showed 99.9% of Americans were Christian with one heretic hiding in the woods hoping some long-haired guy with a buckle on his hat wouldn’t blow his head off with a blunderbuss.

But today’s religious landscape looks different depending on political affiliation. For instance, on the political Left, 43% of those who identify as progressives say they have abandoned Christianity and become Episcopalians. Fourteen percent of progressives say they have renounced the corrupt beliefs of colonizing white men, have returned to the innocent and beautiful natural religion of indigenous peoples, and were preparing to sacrifice a virgin to the volcano God until they realized that by the time they were sure she was a virgin, she wasn’t a virgin anymore, and if they threw her into a volcano there’d be no one left who knew how to make breakfast.

Other progressives say they are sick of the sort of restrictive religions that ruined the 1950’s by making everything so great. Instead they have turned to more modern faiths with practices that reflect the moral progress of mankind. These practices include yogic meditation, ritual mindfulness, and tantric sex followed by butchering any unborn babies conceived during tantric sex, then celebrating the mass slaughter by dancing around a pole in a wild blood-drenched frenzy, getting a full body tattoo featuring goat-headed demi-gods with flaming eyes, then running naked through a forest while grunting inarticulately and listening to music that’s mostly composed of drumbeats and shrieking because classic rock is just the best.

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Among Christians on the political Right, 17% say they believe in Christ so hard they’ll kill anyone who disagrees with them, 14% say their faith is so strong they might even be willing to go to church as long as porn is provided, and 8% say their worship mostly involves posting unspeakably cruel remarks on social media to people who aren’t as Christly as they are. Four percent of conservative Christians say they have abandoned their own egos for Christ’s sake and have thus elevated their souls into a state of suffering-yet-serene agape love, and are now hiding in the woods hoping some long-haired guy with a buckle on his hat won’t blow their heads off with a blunderbuss.

The remaining 57% of Right-wing Christians spend most of their time sobbing and whispering, “Oh God, I suck so bad, please, please, please have mercy on me and don’t send me to hell or California.”

As far as other American religions go, 94% of limousine drivers identify as Muslims, 16% of Christian women pretend they’re Buddhists, and 82% of Jews control 90% of everything except which parts of Ivy League campuses they’re allowed to walk on without one of their professors pointing at them and making that awful insect noise like Donald Sutherland at the end of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

Approximately 29% of Americans have no religion whatsoever and they say that makes life much easier because they’re able to rotate their heads 360 degrees and spider walk across the ceiling, which comes in very handy when they’re trying to escape from the exorcist.

Around the world, the religious landscape is much more varied. For instance, in Great Britain, while 47% of the people identify as Christian, 70% of them say that Islam is also absolutely great, totally fine, really wonderful and not a problem at all, no, really, it’s fantastic, they’re not just saying that because they’d be arrested for telling the truth.

In France, 49% of the population were excited because they thought they belonged to a dark, obscure, mystery cult with elaborate secret rituals until they found out they were actually just Catholics.

And in China, 23% of high-ranking Communists identify their kidneys as Uiger.

* * *

This excerpt is taken from the opening satirical monologue of “The Andrew Klavan Show.”

The views expressed in this satirical article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Andrew Klavan is the host of “The Andrew Klavan Show” at The Daily Wire. Follow him on X: @andrewklavan

Klavan is the bestselling author of numerous books, including the Cameron Winter Mystery series. The fourth installment, “A Woman Underground.” His most recent nonfiction release is “The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness.” (May 2025, Zondervan/HarperCollins).

When it comes to the United States and our allies, one of the great failures of American foreign policy since the end of World War II is this bizarre idea in the United States that if our allies are imperfect, it somehow makes sense to abandon them. 

This is what we did in Vietnam. Our allies were imperfect, so we abandoned them, and then the Viet Cong took over. The same thing happened in Afghanistan, where our allies were seriously imperfect. And by imperfect, I mean there were a lot of terrible people involved in the Northern Alliance, along with tremendous corruption in Afghanistan’s government. The Taliban, it turns out, were significantly worse. 

So when it comes to determining what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine and what should happen next, the question is less about whether Ukraine is perfect. It certainly is not. The questions are: What exactly does Russia want? What is in America’s best interest?

I can tell you what is not in America’s best interest: a larger, more powerful Russia. In determining how to negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war that originally broke out in 2014 with the Russian takeover of the Donbas and Crimea, and then was reignited by the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022, it’s simply not enough to try to figure out what the “rational middle ground” looks like. 

What the Trump administration is currently trying to do is find a solution. Well, you can find a solution, but unless you have a way to actually implement the solution, any solution you propose is meaningless.

No matter how hard you try, you cannot impose the solution from the outside in the way the United States would if, for example, we had boots on the ground — and we don’t want boots on the ground. That means you somehow have to get the Russians to the table. Both sides need to be at the table. The Ukrainians are at the table. Right now, however, the Russians are not at the table.

America is not the dominant force in the region, nor do we want to be. However, the Ukrainians being at the table means it’s now time for the Russians to come to the table. So, how do you get them there? 

As Volodymyr Zelensky mentioned in our interview, he’s already agreed to an immediate three-day ceasefire. The Russians have not.

He’s already agreed to a rare earth minerals deal with the United States that is heavily slanted toward the United States.

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We already know what the Ukrainians want. They want the Russians to stop the war. Again, Ukrainians did not start this war — they did not cross the Russian border.

They want security guarantees, more durable security guarantees than the ones they gave in 1994 to give up their nuclear weapons. The Ukrainians want security guarantees that are material realities, not just promises.

The Ukrainians have already figured out that European and American promises tend to fade over time. They gave up their own nuclear weapons for a promise that the U.S. and the UK would respect Ukrainian territorial sovereignty, and it didn’t work out very well for them.

The Ukrainians want the freedom to pursue a closer relationship with the EU and NATO. That makes sense because the Russians continue to press while the Ukrainians want to press back the other way.

President Zelensky basically wants what happened at the end of the Korean War: an armistice. In 1953, South Korea and North Korea drew a line and created a demilitarized zone. They agreed to a cessation of hostilities and repatriation of peace. Then the war ended.

Officially, the war is still active but in practice the war ended because North Korea understands that if it crosses the South Korean border, it will be obliterated, partially because of the American troops stationed on that border.

Now, to be clear, the Ukrainians are not asking for American troops to be stationed on their border, but they’re ready for an armistice today. They do want security guarantees. We know what they want. They’re at the table.

The real question in all of this, the question that people do not want to ask, is what exactly do the Russians want? What would bring the Russians to the table?

Well, we actually know what the Russians want.

According to a speech Vladimir Putin gave last June, he wants:

That’s just called surrender.

Now, Ukraine can’t surrender her entire government and autonomy and live at the whim of Vladimir Putin, who has literally killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians in an aggressive war and kidnapped tens of thousands of Ukrainian children into Russia.

So again, I ask, what would get Russia to the table?

Now, Steve Witkoff is supposedly a magical negotiator. President Trump has deployed him to Iran, Gaza, and now Ukraine, and seems to think that either Ukraine is the problem or that Russia can be wheedled into dropping its core demands, and that if you tweet hard enough at them, Vladimir Putin will suddenly become friendly. Witkoff and the administration are now threatening to walk away from negotiations if the two sides don’t come together.

This misses the entire point.

Russia would love for that to happen. They want the war to continue, because when Russia says they want negotiation, that’s code for they want a continuation of the war.

What they want is either to take giant chunks out of Ukraine until they eat the whole thing over time, or they want the war to continue until the West gives way.

Why? Because Ukraine is extraordinarily key to Russia’s entire vision of itself as an empire. And that empire is geared in absolutely irremediable fashion against the United States of America.