A recent study by the Pew Research Center noted a sizable increase in the number of Americans identifying themselves as “religiously unaffiliated,” a group dubbed the “Nones.” Looking carefully at the available data, Peter Berger notes that the Nones are a very diverse group, not at all congruent with the secular or irreligious; 68 percent of them say they believe in a deity, and 18 percent consider themselves religious. Berger comments:

One [solution] would be to differentiate the “Nones” from the “Buts”—that is, from those who will say something like “I am Catholic, but . . . ,” this preamble then being followed by a list of items where the respondent cannot accept the teachings or the actions of his church. There are very many such people in most religious communities today. They fit into the first of two categories based on the work of the distinguished British sociologist Grace Davie—“belonging without believing”—that is individuals who do not disaffiliate from their religious community, thus cannot be called “Nones,” but do stay in with a degree of dissent or inner distance. The other category, “believing without belonging,” does fit the description of “Nones”—they form the very large group of unorganized practitioners of Asian meditation techniques or informal charismatic gatherings, and of course individuals who construct their religious idiosyncrasies all by themselves. . . .

What we have here is a religious landscape that is highly diverse, colorful, and volatile. It is the result of the combination of pluralism (the coexistence of different religions, worldviews, and value systems in the same society) and religious freedom (where the state refrains from imposing or re-imposing religious or ideological uniformity). . . . [W]e don’t live in a secular age, but in a pluralist age.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].