News item:

Older adults who say they’ve had a life-changing religious experience are more likely to have a greater decrease in size of the hippocampus, the part of the brain critical to learning and memory, new research finds.

Does that mean that religious revelation shrinks your brain? That would come as no surprise to those of us who are part of America’s fastest-growing spiritual demographic—atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, freethinkers, and the otherwise unchurched. Score one for our team, no?

Er, no. Read on:

According to the study, people who said they were a “born-again” Protestant or [a] Catholic, or conversely, those who had no religious affiliation, had more hippocampal shrinkage (or “atrophy”) compared to people who identified themselves as Protestants, but not born-again.

If the study is right—it was conducted at Duke University Medical Center, a respectable institution, but only looked at two hundred and sixty-eight people—then we infidels are losing it, too. We might as well just give up, set the DVR for Hannity and “The 700 Club,” and finger our rosaries as we await the Rapture.

The real solid brains, it turns out, are to be found in the stodgy, white-bread, widely scorned, boringly unfanatical mainline Protestant denominations. The Big Men on Hippocampus (and the Big Women, many of them ordained) are Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and, of course, Unitarians, most of whom (not just the last named) believe in a maximum of one God.

This would have pleased my mother, a Congregationalist turned Quaker, who used to roll her eyes whenever Dad, a militantly atheist Jew, launched into one of his frequent denunciations of organized religion in all its manifestations.

But to business. What are the implications for the Presidential election? Well, Obama is a mainline Protestant and, therefore, the possessor of a unatrophied brain, which one hopes would be an electoral advantage. Romney’s brand of Christianity is anything but mainline. Mormonism is definitely non-Catholic, but it’s not especially Protestant either. It’s more of a Third Way. Mitt’s born-againness is strictly ideological, not theological. The net effect of all this on his hippocampus is unclear.

So: a slight plus for O? Maybe. But maybe not. Brains aside, mainline Protestantism itself is atrophying. It’s shrinking faster than the polar icecap. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, however, is booming. It’s the economy, stupid.