... When this country was founded, James Madison envisioned a noisy public square with different religious denominations arguing, competing and balancing each other’s passions. But now the landscape of religious life has changed. Now its most prominent feature is the supposed war between the faithful and the faithless. Mitt Romney didn’t start this war, but speeches like his both exploit and solidify this divide in people’s minds. The supposed war between the faithful and the faithless has exacted casualties.

The first casualty is the national community. Romney described a community yesterday. Observant Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews and Muslims are inside that community. The nonobservant are not. There was not even a perfunctory sentence showing respect for the nonreligious. I’m assuming that Romney left that out in order to generate howls of outrage in the liberal press.

The second casualty of the faith war is theology itself. In rallying the armies of faith against their supposed enemies, Romney waved away any theological distinctions among them with the brush of his hand. In this calculus, the faithful become a tribe, marked by ethnic pride, a shared sense of victimization and all the other markers of identity politics.

In Romney’s account, faith ends up as wishy-washy as the most New Age-y secularism. In arguing that the faithful are brothers in a common struggle, Romney insisted that all religions share an equal devotion to all good things. Really? Then why not choose the one with the prettiest buildings?

In order to build a voting majority of the faithful, Romney covered over different and difficult conceptions of the Almighty. When he spoke of God yesterday, he spoke of a bland, smiley-faced God who is the author of liberty and the founder of freedom. There was no hint of Lincoln’s God or Reinhold Niebuhr’s God or the religion most people know — the religion that imposes restraints upon on the passions, appetites and sinfulness of human beings. He wants God in the public square, but then insists that theological differences are anodyne and politically irrelevant.

Romney’s job yesterday was to unite social conservatives behind him. If he succeeded, he did it in two ways. He asked people to rally around the best traditions of America’s civic religion. He also asked people to submerge their religious convictions for the sake of solidarity in a culture war without end.

Arnold Shcherban - 12/11/2007

...But they do care about non-believers having political influence; those seem to constitute the limit of their overexaggerated tolerance.
In fact, this country citizens are the most ideologically intolerant among all democratic and civilised countries in the world.
The tolerance to religious beliefs
(and the latter themselves) is the tolerance of an ignorant, uneducated, essentially culturally and ideologically savage people to ancient legends/tales, long ago thrown out by civilised world.

Jason Blake Keuter - 12/11/2007

One reason generally given for the relative robustness of religion in America is the absence of a state religion.

Another reason is the often ignored historical reality of lax religious observation. Talk of the founders believing theirs was a Christian nation obscures both their lukewarm attitude towards religion and the general absence of religious observance in colonial America. Even those colonies that were established for religious reasons were not populated exclusively with the devout, let alone the fanatical.

While the perpetual existence of a frontier has always served to undermine religion (and almost all other established institutions), even absent this frontier, established colonies were not intensely observant. Lacking any coercive state mechanism to force observance, the Evangelical tradition has taken root in America with a strength generally absent elsewhere.

Thus, there has always been in America an intensity to religious feeling because there has always been an absence of religious observance and this absence PRECEDES the Bill of Rights. The eccumenical tradition to which Romney appealed is a shallow window dressing that paints a picture of America as an intensely religious but equally tolerant society. America has proven to be intensely intolerant of any but the most banal kind of token religion that makes no claims upon individual freedom. In other words, Americans are so religiously tolerant because they generally don't care enough about religion to sacrifice the benefits derived from the exercise of liberty.