As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

Reducing the actions of people to objects or "simpler organisms" is rarely a helpful concept. Often people are much more complicated than our reductions of them.

Well…yeah!

Religion serves a function. Even if that function is psychological.

When you take religion away, something else will fill the utility-gap.

Silly humans failing to grasp the purpose of stories/narratives.

Edit for the downvoters (who clearly don’t understand): the question “Why do science and philosophy matter?” has only religious/ideological answers.

That isn't true if you mean in terms of achieving the classic American dream… Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and others are moving more people out of lower/middle class to middle/upper class as a percentage. I do not know in terms of raw numbers but via % we are behind.

People feel the urge to label some one, group, or idea, as bad. I get around this by accepting that I am bad. It helps me see the best in everyone else, and makes me hold myself to really high standards. It is sometimes unpleasant though.

It's probably some sort of natural calibration process.

What a condescending and misanthropic view of people. So we're just paramecia with "registers" waiting for occupation.

As with anything, I think the real answer is much more nuanced.

1) This article is making the case that this behavior is universal, when there is no evidence of that. As always has been, there are subsects of any ideology that are ravenous in their dogma. They are always the loudest and get the most attention, because their actions are so extreme. It's selection bias by the media, who (wouldn't you know it) are the same folks making the assertion that political religiosity has supplanted deified religiosity.

2) If there's something resembling a "trend" happening around peoples' emotional investment in politics, it's likely around the fact that politics is increasingly prodding itself into peoples' lives. At the very least, if I travel abroad, and we have a president like Trump, I look like a fucking idiot. That sucks. At the worst, I'm a woman or minority whose livelihood is negatively affected constantly by political footballing.

This has nothing to do with an absence of god, but everything to do with a real, quantifiable affect on peoples' lives. How can you expect people, secular or not, to put up with the state of social and political conversation as it exists today? If they're staunch conservatives, how can they put up with a clear wind blowing in the direction of socialism? If they're democrats, how can they put up with a clearly obstructionist and crooked counter party?

Reducing all of that to computer parlance and the most basic biologies undermines the real problems that people are dealing with.