# Republican Religious Debates **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 1, 2004, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/republican-religious-debates/266962 "2004-10-01T00:29:29Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Kick\_Ass\_Human](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/edb3f5/32.png) [@Kick\_Ass\_Human](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kick_Ass_Human)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2004, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/republican-religious-debates/266962/1 "2004-10-01T00:29:29Z")
In an article about gay marrige on yahoo it said that Republican Representivehttp://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=7&subscription=0# said “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”. Republicans ant-gayness has always been associated with religion doesnt this seem like its going a bit far. I mean going all the way back to god for support. Now I am not an athiest yet I still would never use god as my back up on a political stance. ---
**Author:** ![Iceland\_Blue](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/4bbf92/32.png) [@Iceland\_Blue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Iceland_Blue)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2004, 10:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/republican-religious-debates/266962/2 "2004-10-01T10:05:16Z")
Which being would you prefer to enlist? And AFAIK some gays would use a similar position of calling in God:‘God created us all equal’. ---
**Author:** ![betenoir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/258eb7/32.png) [@betenoir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/betenoir)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2004, 10:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/republican-religious-debates/266962/3 "2004-10-01T10:30:16Z")
> [@Iceland\_Blue](#): > > Which being would you prefer to enlist? > And AFAIK some gays would use a similar position of calling in God:‘God created us all equal’. My preference? Human beings. And some gays might use that position…it would be just as irrelevant to a legal debate. ---
**Author:** ![gigi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a587f6/32.png) [@gigi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gigi)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2004, 3:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/republican-religious-debates/266962/4 "2004-10-01T15:24:56Z")
I don’t know how one can reconcile religious beliefs with trying to be a politician in a secular society. You can feel it’s your moral duty to work for laws and a society that fits in with your religion, but this isn’t the first duty of a politician in a country without a state religion. Right-wing politicians as in the OP are trying to appeal to citizens who feel Christianity should be the basis for law. I know I couldn’t do it. Even deciding whom to vote for becomes compromising in the light of my religious beliefs, and choosing the least evil of the candidates. Any choice offends some part of my moral view (usually sanctity of life issues) and sometimes it seems like the only choice is no choice at all. ---
**Author:** ![mks57](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b9bd4f/32.png) [@mks57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mks57)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2004, 5:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/republican-religious-debates/266962/5 "2004-10-01T17:16:29Z")
It’s part of Western culture, which is heavily influenced by Judaism and Christianity. Like it or not, the United States is a Christian country. It may not have an established religion, but 82% of Americans identify themselves as Christian. The law is heavily influenced by the culture. Marriage is, by definition, a union between a man and a woman. ---
**Author:** ![Dangerosa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/22d042/32.png) [@Dangerosa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dangerosa)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2004, 5:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/republican-religious-debates/266962/6 "2004-10-01T17:23:34Z")
While I agree that the U.S. is demographically Christian, I disagree that marriage is, by definition, the union of a man and a woman. For instance, in a polygamous society, marriage may be the union of a man with many women. Or consider “The chef, with a deft touch, married chocolate and orange to create a flavorful but not overpowering souffle.” No people involved in that marriage whatever. Besides, definitions change over time - language evolves and are not carved in stone. We can, as a society, define marriage to be what we want, we aren’t limited by language or history. Now, as a society we may decide we like the one man one woman definition (I don’t, but “we” currently seem to). But ten years from now “we” might have a different opinion on the matter and change our minds. Which is what gets me about the “argument from the majority.” I wonder if people making that argument are going to be so quick to switch sides when (not if, when) “we” change our minds. ---
**Author:** ![Kick\_Ass\_Human](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/edb3f5/32.png) [@Kick\_Ass\_Human](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kick_Ass_Human)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2004, 5:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/republican-religious-debates/266962/7 "2004-10-01T17:23:42Z")
maybe we should change the definition of marriage! but that doesnt even matter because on [dictionary.com](http://dictionary.com) this is their defintion of marriage “A union between two persons having the customary and the legal force of marriage” so maybe not everyone is looking at this through as stubborn eyes ---
**Author:** ![presidebt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/c37758/32.png) [@presidebt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/presidebt)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2004, 5:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/republican-religious-debates/266962/8 "2004-10-01T17:33:12Z")
> [@mks57](#): > > It’s part of Western culture, which is heavily influenced by Judaism and Christianity. Like it or not, the United States is a Christian country. It may not have an established religion, but 82% of Americans identify themselves as Christian. The law is heavily influenced by the culture. Marriage is, by definition, a union between a man and a woman. Nitpick: roughly 80% of Americans identify themselves with a specific religion, while 76.5% consider themselves Christian. Aside: That’s a ten point loss over the last decade, leading the _National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey_ (2004), to conclude that “…the number of Protestants soon will slip below 50 percent of the nation’s population.” > [@](#): > > If this trend continues, then by about the year 2042, non-Christians will outnumber the Christians in the U.S. [Cite](http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_prac2.htm) ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2004, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/republican-religious-debates/266962/9 "2004-10-01T19:46:34Z")
> [@](#): > > If this trend continues, then by about the year 2042, non-Christians will outnumber the Christians in the U.S. Which IMO is neither a good thing nor a bad thing, but it **does** mean that people who argue for a particular legal stance based on Christian doctrine “because the US is majority Christian” are building their houses on sand. Actually, I do kind of have a hankering to see the proportion of Christians in the US diminish, solely so that I can watch certain Christians suddenly jump on the strict-separationist bandwagon when local majority populations of different faiths try to use government to promote their religion. “Hey! You can’t put that Bismillah banner up on the courthouse lawn! That’s government entanglement with religion! This is a secular nation!” Sweeeeeeeeet. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2004, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/republican-religious-debates/266962/10 "2004-10-01T20:16:14Z")
> [@presidebt](#): > > [Cite](http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_prac2.htm) I can’t get your cite to come up, but just to make the record clear, the assertion, “If this trend continues, then by about the year 2042, non-Christians will outnumber the Christians in the U.S.” is not original either to Religioius Tolerance or NORC. It is from Diana Eck, _A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation_, 2001. She is a professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard. Another interesting tidbit from the book is that “We are surprised to find that there are more Muslim Americans than Episcopalians, more Muslims than members of the Presbyterian Church USA, and as many Muslims as there are Jews — that is, about six million.” She declares that America has always been religiously diverse, but that the explosion in the second half of the 20th century is directly linkable to Lyndon Johnson’s Immigration Act of 1965, which she says is directly tied to the Civil Rights Act. ---
**Author:** ![presidebt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/c37758/32.png) [@presidebt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/presidebt)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2004, 1:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/republican-religious-debates/266962/11 "2004-10-02T01:56:29Z")
> [@Liberal](#): > > I can’t get your cite to come up, but just to make the record clear, the assertion, “If this trend continues, then by about the year 2042, non-Christians will outnumber the Christians in the U.S.” is not original either to Religioius Tolerance or NORC. It is from Diana Eck, _A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation_, 2001. She is a professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard. Another interesting tidbit from the book is that “We are surprised to find that there are more Muslim Americans than Episcopalians, more Muslims than members of the Presbyterian Church USA, and as many Muslims as there are Jews — that is, about six million.” She declares that America has always been religiously diverse, but that the explosion in the second half of the 20th century is directly linkable to Lyndon Johnson’s Immigration Act of 1965, which she says is directly tied to the Civil Rights Act. The site quotes her, actually. They don’t claim it as their own, just for the record. I haven’t read the book, so thanks for the additional info. ---
**Author:** ![presidebt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/c37758/32.png) [@presidebt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/presidebt)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2004, 1:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/republican-religious-debates/266962/12 "2004-10-02T01:58:57Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > Actually, I do kind of have a hankering to see the proportion of Christians in the US diminish, solely so that I can watch certain Christians suddenly jump on the strict-separationist bandwagon when local majority populations of different faiths try to use government to promote their religion. “Hey! You can’t put that Bismillah banner up on the courthouse lawn! That’s government entanglement with religion! This is a secular nation!” Sweeeeeeeeet. 😉 I know it’s not polite, but heck, this is hilarious. Thanks for the belly laugh, I needed one. I agree with you also that this is neither a good nor a bad thing. Your point about sand is excellent indeed. ---
**Author:** ![Freyr](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/freyr/32/5763_2.png) [@Freyr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freyr)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2004, 4:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/republican-religious-debates/266962/13 "2004-10-02T04:07:20Z")
> [@Kick Ass Human](#): > > In an article about gay marrige on yahoo it said that Republican Representivehttp://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=7&subscription=0# said “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”. Republicans ant-gayness has always been associated with religion doesnt this seem like its going a bit far. I mean going all the way back to god for support. Now I am not an athiest yet I still would never use god as my back up on a political stance. In making decisions, especially tough decisions, we all fall back on whatever moral/ethical code we’ve come to accept, whether that’s the J/C Bible, enlightened self-interest, the Great Bird of the Galaxy or the Invisible Pink Unicorn. It then becomes a question of whether or not enacting legislation based upon an expressly religious code would violate the Establishment Clause. While many religions condemn homosexuality, others do not and some take no position on the subject at all. Republicians who say “Adam and Eve **NOT** Adam and Steve” seem to think that Christianity is the only religion worth considering. Even then, they’re acting with deliberate blindness since the question of homosexuality being good or bad in the eyes of the Christian god is still hotly debated. The matter is hardly settled. So, I think any politician who give the “Adam and Eve **NOT** Adam and Steve” quote is really saying: _I think homosexuality is icky but I can’t think of a good reason to justify it, so I’ll give this cute sound-bite instead!_ ---
**Author:** ![Brutus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/91b2a8/32.png) [@Brutus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Brutus)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2004, 5:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/republican-religious-debates/266962/14 "2004-10-02T05:12:53Z")
> [@Kick Ass Human](#): > > maybe we should change the definition of marriage! but that doesnt even matter because on [dictionary.com](http://dictionary.com) this is their defintion of marriage “A union between two persons having the customary and the legal force of marriage” so maybe not everyone is looking at this through as stubborn eyes It is important to note that God created Adam and Eve, _not_ adam and eve. ---
**Author:** ![Freyr](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/freyr/32/5763_2.png) [@Freyr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freyr)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2004, 9:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/republican-religious-debates/266962/15 "2004-10-02T21:14:04Z")
> [@Brutus](#): > > It is important to note that God created Adam and Eve, _not_ adam and eve. It’s even more important to note that this **“God created Adam and Eve”** is pure mythology and has no basis in reality. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2004, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/republican-religious-debates/266962/16 "2004-10-02T21:25:09Z")
> [@Freyr](#): > > It’s even more important to note that this “God created Adam and Eve” is pure mythology and has no basis in reality. Cite for this?? FTR, I BELIEVE this to be true too…but I don’t know it for a fact. Do you? -XT ---
**Author:** ![Blalron](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/35a633/32.png) [@Blalron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blalron)\ **Post date:** [October 3, 2004, 12:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/republican-religious-debates/266962/17 "2004-10-03T00:16:50Z")
Just once I’d like to see a vocal, obnoxious, Madalyn Murray O’Hare type atheist get elected to Congress to counterract crap like this. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [October 3, 2004, 3:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/republican-religious-debates/266962/18 "2004-10-03T03:05:16Z")
Could you expand on what you mean by ‘crap like this’? Are you talking about the OP or about a specific post in the thread? -XT ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [October 3, 2004, 3:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/republican-religious-debates/266962/19 "2004-10-03T03:28:46Z")
> [@mks57](#): > > It’s part of Western culture, which is heavily influenced by Judaism and Christianity. Like it or not, the United States is a Christian country. It may not have an established religion, but 82% of Americans identify themselves as Christian. The law is heavily influenced by the culture. Marriage is, by definition, a union between a man and a woman. > [@presidebt](#): > > Nitpick: roughly 80% of Americans identify themselves with a specific religion, while 76.5% consider themselves Christian. > > Aside: That’s a ten point loss over the last decade, leading the _National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey_ (2004), to conclude that “…the number of Protestants soon will slip below 50 percent of the nation’s population.” > > [Cite](http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_prac2.htm) Further nitpick: Most modern American “Christians” would have been regarded as heretics by earlier generations of Christians, Catholic and Protestant alike. From _The Next American Nation,_ by Michael Lind (New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1996), pp. 278-279: > [@](#): > > Conservatives do not recognize how much the nation has changed since the fifties in its religious attitudes. It may be that the religion of nominal Christians in the United States can no longer be described as traditional trinitarian Christian. The scholarly term for their belief is henotheism, the belief that all ethnic groups and cultures have, and should have, their own gods and rites. In Christian theology, this is the heresy of indifferentism. Robert Linder and Richard Pierard have described the evolution of American civil religion: “Its umbrella has changed from evangelical consensus to Protestantism-in-general, to Christianity-in-general, to the Judeo-Christian tradition in general, to deism-in-general.” The decline in belief in Christianity as the only true religion has been extraordinarily rapid in the United States. In a poll taken in 1924 in Muncie, Indiana, 94 percent of high school students agreed that “Christianity is the one true religion and all peoples should be converted to it.” By the late 1970s, merely 38 percent of respondents in a later poll in Muncie agreed that Christianity was the only true faith. Two-thirds of the respondents in a 1991 poll agreed that Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists “pray to the same God.” ---
**Author:** ![DanBlather](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/f4b2a3/32.png) [@DanBlather](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DanBlather)\ **Post date:** [October 3, 2004, 5:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/republican-religious-debates/266962/20 "2004-10-03T05:23:09Z")
> [@mks57](#): > > It’s part of Western culture, which is heavily influenced by Judaism and Christianity. Like it or not, the United States is a Christian country. It may not have an established religion, but 82% of Americans identify themselves as Christian. The law is heavily influenced by the culture. Marriage is, by definition, a union between a man and a woman. It’s also an ice cream country; 94% of Americans eat ice cream!! By definition, ice cream needs to contain greater than 10% milkfat. And remember, God created Ben and Jerry as well as Adam and Eve. But perhaps more on point, why are you in favor of the Government fobidding Epicsopalians and Unitarians from marrying couples of the same sex? Do you oppose religious freedom? [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/republican-religious-debates/266962.md?page=2)