Quote:I don't see any proposed laws with the government promoting religion. Do you? Actually, it is in fact the opposite with any religious references being increasingly expunged from civic life.
(Edit: Whoops. This is *not* the president who opined that he didn't think atheists were citizens or patriots. It was his father. Apple clearly doesn't fall that far from the tree, but my mistake.)
George W. Bush is the president of the faith-based initiative, brought to the doorstep of the Whitehouse by evangelicals in record numbers. The president opposes (veto pen in hand) stem-cell research, free access to abortions, gay marriage, and *starts wars in the middle east* on the basis that he believes god talks to him. Like, directly. Literally.
If this is religion being "increasingly expunged from civic life," I'm really not sure what president you're looking at, but it sure isn't this one.
And it's not the personal religion that is worrying. Jimmuh was an odd duck in that regard, and yet he doesn't terribly scare me. It's the public faith, the embracing sense of the faithful "us" versus the infidel "them." The idea that, as David Bowie once sang, God is an American. That faith in God and faith in the God-talking President go hand in hand.
That kind of mental lullaby seems far more likely to drug your nation into a stupor than excessive legislation. (Afterthought: Especially since the scenario of Toqueville requires a government of excrutiating competence, which is downright hiliarious in the modern context, only moreso given your own earlier arguments about the competence of government.)
Quote:That would describe all past Presidents, with the possible exception of Bill Clinton, and possibly Nixon, who both would go through the dogmata of being a Christian without the adherence.
Jefferson? Not much of a Christian, unless you count any follower of any of Jesus' teachings, in which case I myself am a strange, god-denying breed of Christian.
-Jester
Afterthought: Just because wikipedia is so much fun for this kind of thing...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Day