More and more, the emoji form of this gesture is being interpreted as a high five.

New surveys say that religion is on the decline. According to Pew data reported on NPR, both America as a whole is trending away from devotion:

Among the findings:

• The share of Americans who say they are “absolutely certain” that God exists has dropped 8 percentage points, from 71 percent to 63 percent, since 2007, when the last comparable study was made.
• The percentage of adults who describe themselves as “religiously affiliated” has shrunk 6 points since 2007, from 83 percent to 77 percent
• The shares of the U.S. adult population who consider religion “very important” to them, pray daily and attend services at least once a month have declined between 3 and 4 percentage points over the past eight years.

But more dramatically, young people in particular are practicing at a much lower rate:

Skepticism about religion is especially evident among young people. The Pew study found that barely a quarter of “millennials” (born between 1981 and 1996) attend church services on a weekly basis, compared with more than half of U.S. adults born before 1946. Only about 4 in 10 millennials say religion is important in their lives, compared with more than half of those who are older, including two-thirds of those born before 1946.

While we can debate all kinds of fun things around this topic, like what’s causing it, if the trend is permanent or reversible, the juiciest might be what it means for the country.

How will a less-religious citizenry affect life in America, both for good and bad reasons?

Does that mean a net positive or negative for society as a whole?

Is this a trend worth encouraging or preventing?

If religion is personal, should it even matter?

Even metaphorically, clowns are more sad than funny.

With his usual flair for brutal honesty and cutting language, Matt Taibbi writes about following the Republican clown car of primary campaigns over in Iowa to see what’s really going on. Though he may not have uncovered much we didn’t already know, he is able to distill the things that are driving us toward doomsday like few others can. See these few paragraphs near the piece’s conclusion:

Politics used to be a simple, predictable con. Every four years, the money men in D.C. teamed up with party hacks to throw their weight behind whatever half-bright fraud of a candidate proved most adept at snowing the population into buying a warmed-over version of the same crappy policies they’ve always bought.

…

There’s no hidden platform behind the shallow facade. With Trump, the facade is the whole deal. If old-school policy hucksters like Christie can’t find a way to beat a media master like Trump at the ratings game, they will soon die out.

In a perverse way, Trump has restored a more pure democracy to this process. He’s taken the Beltway thinkfluencers out of the game and turned the presidency into a pure high-school-style popularity contest conducted entirely in the media. Everything we do is a consumer choice now, from picking our shoes to an online streaming platform to a presidential nominee.

He may be right; our obsession with outsized characters over policies and substance could still possibly lead to the most embarrassing candidate ever fielded by a major party. And what if he somehow won?

If we elected a truly unqualified, dangerously confrontational president (whether Trump 2016 or a theoretical, even worse candidate), what’s the worst that could happen?

Would it really be the end of America, or would checks and balances keep us from disaster?

Would he make it through a full term or would the public stop the charade?