I’m afraid that that sounds a bit naive. How many people, do you think, are going to want to actually engage in a lawsuit that is going to make them complete outcasts in their own communities? Given that the general remedy a lawsuit would seek would simply be a desist order, and not money, how much money do you think they could actually get from a local jury who knows that the school board does not have unlimited funding (even if they could persuade a jury of their neighbors to rule in their favor)?
I suspect that the (mostly implied, not stated) claims of both sides in this squabble are overstated. The U.S. is not starkly divided into rabidly religious and rabidly secular communities. There are, indeed, communities throughout the entire country where government and its educational component are entirely secular. There are communities where educational structures are actually hostile to religion, (generally when run by ignorant officials who have misread the various (admittedly confusing) SCOTUS rulings on religion in schoo)l. There are also communities (more frequently found in, but not limited to, the Southeast) where religion continues to be an integral part of the curriculum and daily schedule. (One of the first big brawls on the SDMB after we moved off AOL involved a young woman who was upset about the prayers that continued to be inserted into her school’s daily routine and whether she should try to invite the ACLU to help her stop that practice. That was only eight years ago.)
The idea that schools are now secular across the country because we have laws (legislated or judicially declared) making them secular is on a par with the ideas that minorities and women no longer face discrimination because such practices are outlawed.
Justin_Bailey, have you ever lived in a rural area or in the southeast? I don’t mean have you ever been there - have you ever lived there?
I’ve lived in the rural south, the urban south, the rural midwest, and the urban southwest, so I think I have a good grasp how these things can be different from place to place.
I think you’re seeing the joke the wrong way…I took it that Zakalwe was referring to BILL as “Mr. Senator Clinton,” not Hillary. Which you have to admit is a little more amusing!
In my experience, conversation about religion on the SDMB is exponentially more common than conversation about religion in real life (at least, in my real life). And here on the boards, it’s usually in the form of a debate of one kind or another, or mentioned when it’s relevant to the conversation, not just brought up out of the blue. I never talk about religion with my friends, unless it’s mentioned in the context of family, such as talking about where a wedding is going to be, or a bar mitzvah or 1st communion that’s being planned.
I don’t find it to be the case that people make religious declarations very frequently at all. I have no idea what the religion of my dentist is. I think my OB was Jewish, but that was based on his last name, so I could be wrong about that. I certainly never heard anything about it from him. I may or may not know the religion of the people I work with. Sometimes, a story will come up that will indicate a person’s religion (like mentioning the nuns who taught them in school), or making a joke about being a certain religion, but I don’t think that’s the same as making Religious Declarations, or making a point of informing people what religion you are…that’s more of a cultural touchpoint. The last time anyone witnessed to me personally was about 15 years ago. I never, EVER heard any Bible talk in my public schools. That’s just a bizarre concept to me.
The thing is, this is a huge, huge country with a lot of different sub-cultures. I’m not saying that my experience is “typical,” because I live in a very different enviornment than a lot of people do. But, on the other hand, I wouldn’t say the experience of hearing a lot of religious declarations is necessarily “typical,” either. It can depend a lot on where you are.
Then prove to me that religion is everywhere. As you said, I can’t prove it’s not everywhere, but you can prove that it is.
I’m waiting.
And to Cisco, no I’ve never lived anywhere but Upstate New York, so I don’t know how the entire country works. But I do know that this “religion is everywhere” crap does not apply to anything I’ve ever seen.
Of course, but this thread wasn’t about little pockets of the country, it was about the country as a whole.
And as I, and several others, have said, it’s impossible to shout “religion is everywhere” and actually be taken seriously when referring to the country as a whole.
Wouldn’t you agree that this board focuses on religion much more than you do in “real life”?
True enough. Our everyday conversation doesn’t tend to run to great debates about the state of the world; it’s more like, “Where do you want to go for dinner?” “I dunno; where do you wanna go?” Message boards would certainly be a lot more boring if they accurately represented our day-to-day conversations.
Nope, the Constitution prohibits the government from acting to prevent someone from running for President, due to their religion. It says absolutely nothing about voters questioning a candidate’s competence (or sanity) based on their religious beliefs. While I have nothing against Mormonism, I would be uncertain about voting for a Scientologist.
Seriously, how many laws do we already have on the books that are entirely about matching law to religious beliefs? That alone should tell us that a candidate’s religion is a valid topic for discussion.
Looks like we’re starting to reach a middle ground, but I would call the secular areas the “little pockets” with the rest of the country being more explicitly religious. Notice which area of this map you’ve lived in your whole life. Satire, yes, but therein lies a grain of truth.
I haven’t frequented this board for the last year so I’ll try to refrain from making generalizations about it at the moment.
Why do I always find myself going around in circles on message boards? Go back and read my posts on page one if you want to know what I base this on. I don’t mean to be rude but really, I’ve already explained this.
Many thanks for the clarification. I think the reason we outside the US tend to think religion is all-pervasive and a part of daily American life is because we hear so much about it. A few examples that pop up here at the SDMB from time to time, and often seem to arise from news stories (some of which even make it into our media here in Canada), include:
– “Under God” is part of the Pledge of Allegiance. How can they legally include it when schoolchildren have to say it daily?
– “In God We Trust” is on American currency. Should it be, in light of the First Amendment?
– Our town decorated City Hall with a Nativity scene for Christmas. That’s religious; it shouldn’t be on town property.
– The local courthouse has a statue of the Ten Commandments. Can it constitutionally do this?
And every Presidential election, there seems to be a debate about the religion of the candidates, and what that might mean for the Presidency. JFK was Catholic, Clinton (the ex-President) was Baptist, the current Bush is born-again, and former candidate Romney is Mormon. Interestingly, I cannot even tell you what faith any of our Prime Ministers have adhered to (or not); it is simply not an issue in our elections. But it seems to be in the US.
With that being said, I will add that what we do not hear about are the normal, everyday interactions among Americans as they work, shop, and otherwise go about their daily affairs. I do know that when I’ve been in the US for business or on vacation, I’ve never been proselytized to, so I have wondered if my experiences are typical. But it would seem they are.
Thanks again, Sarahfeena. Ignorance is being fought!
And I don’t mean to be rude either, but I HAVE read your other posts. I’m guessing you aren’t getting the irony of your own posts wrt the other poster you are discussing this with…
Explain it to me. You think our experiences cancel each other out? Certainly they would if I claimed a hardline stance that religion is everywhere! But I don’t. I only think it’s much more pervasive than people from the more secular parts of the country realize.
New York, [parts of] New England, coastal California, and the PNW are the “little pockets.” Look at a map.
I think there’s a strong streak of “it’s always been done that way” in a lot of American life. The country is mostly a collection of small towns, and even the cities are mostly collections of small neighborhoods, where everyone kind of had the same background and the same religion, and it was just a part of daily life, and you really didn’t think much about it. I think it’s actually the growing secular and ecumenical attitudes of the population that are making these religious cultural traditions stand out and seem out of place. As more people move into a town, for example, who aren’t Christian, it seems weirder and weirder to have a Nativity scene.
I wasn’t around for JFK, and I don’t know much about candidates’ religions before that, but I’d bet a lot of money that there was very little in the way of religious differences in the entire history of the presidency. Even if individual Presidents weren’t particularly religious, they were ALL of Protestant upbringing, and probably came from just a handful of fairly similar denomnations, just as they came from similar WASP-y ethnic roots. They were probably Methodist, Congregationalist, etc. It wasn’t until JFK came along that religion became important, because he was of a religion that was feared and misunderstood to a certain degree (the same reason Romney’s religion is an issue now). The reason that Bush’s religion has been so commented on is because people believe that it is a driving force in his Presidency. By comparison, very little was made of his father’s religion, that I recall, probably because he was they type of religious that people expected and were comfortable with…some WASP-y Protestant denomination, not sure what it is, but it isn’t scary and he doesn’t wave it around too much. Similarly, people didn’t comment that much about Bill Clinton’s religion. We know he’s Baptist, which is what’s expected from people from his part of the country, and he got the usual photo ops coming out of church on Christmas, but no one worried too much that his Christianity was of the worrisome variety.
Over the last 100 years or so, the religious makeup of the US has changed considerably. There was a time when we pretty much were a white, Christian nation, with very isolated pockets of other types of folks. Then, the immigration waves happened and brought people in of all kinds of religious backgrounds, and I think it has made people much more aware of religion in general, because it’s another way to categorize people.
Oh, you know, you get pamphlets sometimes…I’ve seen them stuck in library books, for instance. I used to live in a neighborhood where a guy had a megaphone and would stand on his stoop and tell people they were going to hell if they don’t repent. But these, at least in my large city, are isolated incidents.
Al Smith’s Catholicism was a major factor in the 1928 presidential election.
Anti-Catholicism (and other anti-not-the-mainstream-religion bigotry) has been a major part of American society for a long time. The way it affected the presidency was by largely preventing anyone who wasn’t a Protestant Christian from getting anywhere near it.
Kennedy is notable not for being the first person to make Catholicism an issue, but for being the first who was able to win despite it.
I think most people who are paying attention know that the Bush family generally is Episcopalian but that George W. Bush is a Methodist. It’s not his denomination that concerns people–Methodism is a mainstream Protestant denomination–but rather other things about his religion and its affect on his political beliefs and policy objectives.
On the other hand, Clinton (and Gore) made a huge point to show that he is a believing Christian in order to fight the Democrats’ rep as being not-friendly-enough-with-Jesus. It was a big issue. Again, the point is not that religion wasn’t an issue, but that Clinton was able to face the issue and succeed.
