Well having read Bruckner’s article I strongly suspect that amongst other things, most strongly objected their children automatically being enrolled in the Church of Sweden.
Nope. I consider Americans who wish to have a state religion for America to be morons who have no recollection of what they were, or should have been, taught in school. The US’s Constitution has SOCAS as a pretty big thing.
From what I gather, European countries have had state religions, generally, a wee bit longer than the US has had its constitution.
Now, I do consider a state religion to be a bad thing, but perhaps that should be discussed in a different thread.
Okay. How about “1/3 of Americans are absolute morons when it comes to the issue of Separation of Church and State”?
Can we hijack this thread to introduce other topics on which Americans’ knowledge seems substandard? If so, this pdf may be interesting – it breaks down certain beliefs by age, gender, political affiliation and ethnic group. From it we learn
[ul][li] it is the young who are most likely to think water fluoridation is sinister, and believe in lizard people[/li][li] Hispanics are most likely to think moon landings were faked. Whites are most likely to believe Obama is the anti-Christ.[/li][li] Blacks are much less likely than Hispanics to think UFO crashed at Roswell, but much more likely to worry about the New World Order. (Whites and “Other” are most likely to worry about NWO.)[/li][li] Dems and Repubs are about equally likely to believe in a JFK death conspiracy.[/li][li] 58% of Repubs think Global Warming is a hoax, compared with 11% of Demos.[/li][li] For several questions, e.g. “Did Paul McCartney die in a 1966 car crash and get replaced with a lookalike?”, it is the Very Liberal and Very Conservative who join together in accepting a conspiracy theory.[/li][/ul]
If I have to submit one particular factoid from the report for Pitting, I think I’d go with the fact that 22% of Romney voters answered Yes to “Do you believe President Barack Obama is the anti-Christ, or not?”; another 19% were unsure.
My favourite bit of that poll is the 5% of Obama voters that believe he’s the Antichrist but voted for him anyways.
I suspect that might actually show that 5% of people answering polls are screwing with the pollsters.
Why?
I’m not sure what the percentage is, but this whole thing about:
The GOD blessed the country, God bless you, etc…. stuff like this makes USA look stupid and makes the USA a fundamentalist country of the Christian flavour.
Church and State should be separated, after all the USA prides itself on the right to have religious freedom.
State religions in most European countries are dating back to a time, when churches had more power (not a good thing) – e.g.: the Catholic Ireland: is getting more and more out from being under the thumb from the Catholic Church, that state religion thing almost is just a formality at this point.
So, if the USA wants to go and have a State religion – it is step backwards, not forwards.
Perhaps some are Christian fundies who are desperate to hurry along the Apocalypse, and are voting for someone they think is the Antichrist because having the Antichrist in power brings the Second Coming closer.
Yup. I think this is an adequate explanation. Also some of that 5% was probably really just fucking with the pollster. There has to be some percentage of the population who just get a kick out of claiming they believe that Obama is the antichrist and also saying they voted for him.
Or hell, maybe they think he’s the antichrist but voted for him despite it!
This might be clearly crossing over into the pedantic, but the U.S. Constitution never uses a phrase or a phrase similar to “separation of church and state.” Now, that is a “constitutional theory” widely accepted by all legally literate Americans and recognized and enforced by countless court rulings and pieces of legislation. But it arises out of the first part of the first amendment, which starts off with the establishment clause (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”) and that is really the heart of this particular issue.
Separation of church and state is a legal/constitutional concept developed over many years of jurisprudence and societal development to cover all the areas outside of that which aren’t explicitly covered by the First Amendment. Basically the first amendment only explicitly prohibits establishing a State religion or interfering with the free exercise of religion.
It’s only through tradition, law, and our evolving body of case law that the concept of “separation of church and state” was developed. Ultimately based on the theory that if you do not separate church and state you’re inherently interfering with the free exercise of religion and possibly establishing a specific religion.
So the pedantic part is, when talking about an actual attempt to establish a religion there is no reason to talk about or use the SOCAS phrase, instead we can simply say this is a clear violation of the explicit establishment clause of the first amendment.
Never mind.
Yes, well that gets to a pretty important point - smart people do, say, and think stupid shit all of the time. Non-stop…
Moon landing a fake? Yes, say 14% of the very liberal. And 6% of the very conservative.
Well it’s gotta be one or the other, doesn’t it?
When I think of a state religion I think of Utah. Yes I know, it isn’t official.
Maybe the one-third of Americans in the poll who wanted Christianity to be the official state religion really supported a ceremonial recognition, sort of like naming the official state amphibian or the state flower. 
More concerning are periodic findings that large numbers of Americans don’t support First Amendment freedoms, like the 49% after 9/11 that thought the First Amendment “went too far”. (good news here is that in a recent Knight Foundation survey, only 24% of teenagers felt this way, down substantially from prior poll numbers.)
Oh, please. There’s no such thing–at least not in America–as “ceremonial deism” or whatever the current term is. It’s obviously religiously important to those who demand it. That’s ain’t just ceremonial. It’s just as false a term as “Creation Science.” It’s bullshit.
I say we compromise: Let’s establish a state religion, but it has to be Pastafarianism
So just who is demanding it ? so far there is no evidence presented that anyone is demanding an official state religion. All that poll shows is that 1/3 of Americans are okay with it without giving it much thought.
No reason to get your panties in a twist.
I was referring to those who are demanding “ceremonial deism,” not to a state religion. If you think there aren’t those demanding ceremonial deism, then you’ve somehow missed seeing the whole “In God We Trust” discussion in the public sphere.