Guest post: Religion permeates the polity
Originally a comment by John Wasson on They’re making the law.
Religion permeates the polity: religion and the military; the unnerving “long conversation with a CIA official”; Prime Ministers Harper’s and Tony Blair’s statements about “God’s judgement” and “holy intervention” in political decisions; George W Bush’s declaration that Gog and Magog are at work in the mid-east; references to the Crusades …
Christian fascism is impervious to reason.
Of course this is not just in North America and Europe and not just Christianity: look at Thailand, India, Israel …
Religious belief is belief against (James P Carse, The Religious Case Against Belief).
And one interesting side effect of that is people don’t even notice that religion permeates the polity. Religious talk, symbolism, prayers, etc are so much a part of normal life that most people don’t notice how much a part of normal life they are. It’s just “how things are”. I wasn’t so much raised ‘religious’ as raised in a setting where the idea of religion was simply which church you went to. We didn’t call ourselves ‘religious’, because it was understood that God was real, and everyone knew it, so there was no dichotomy between religion and non-religion, only between Methodists and Protestants, and so forth. Right denominations and wrong denominations (for the record, I was raised neither Methodist nor Protestant, so those were both ‘wrong’ denominations).
I met my first out atheist when I was 20; I had ceased believing a long time ago, but had no words for it, and would never have admitted it. To admit not believing in God in that setting would be like not believing in breathing.
Since when are Methodists not Protestants? Like, they’re old school Protestant alongside Lutherans (first to the post), Baptists, and Calvinists.
Sorry, BKiSA, too much overwork…I meant Presbyterians, not Protestants. Sorry for any confusion…
(I had relatives who were Methodists, and relatives who were Presbyterians, and my mother had very little good to say about either denomination, but in the end, when asked why, it came down to something minor, like “sprinkling” instead of “immersing” or something equally esoteric)