When I went to school in Montreal in the 70s, the public schools were divided between Protestant (mostly English-speaking) and Catholic (mostly French-speaking). In the Catholic schools, every classroom had a crucifix.
That’s certainly more religion than I experienced in the public schools in the U.S. (which I attended both before and after).
Ed
Wouldn’t work. The real loonies, the militants, are in independent churches. Rogue Christianities would proliferate in opposition to the state church. Remember the pre-Westfalen wars?
What we should do is just codify the worst of our beliefs in a new American Religion:
White is good, black inferior, Gawd speaks English, et cetera. Legitimize all the racist, nationalist crap. Welcome them into the central halls of power explicitly, & let the rebellious thing to do be to be something other than a racist or a nazi.
It’s the only way 
Sounds to me as if Leaffan was scared by a Sunday School teacher or something, when his mother was pregnant. Now he’s getting back by poking us with a stick, from his hiding place under the bridge.
What I think happened, is that by forbidding a state religion, America forced religion to be more subtle, less brutal. Europe spent centuries fighting religious wars, centuries with religions crushing people down, torturing and murdering with impunity because they and the state were essentially one. In Europe, religion was more free to show it’s true face; the face of a brutal, sadistic, mass murdering lunatic.
In America, religion was forced to pretend to be more civilized; not being so firmly in control of the state, much less identical with it, it couldn’t just round up and kill all opposition, or rely on the government to do so for it. It was forced to use propaganda and corruption and indoctrination and intimidation much of the time, rather than naked force. In America religion has been forced to wear a mask over it’s true face. But that face is still there; America is full of good Christians who’d love to tear down the Constitution and begin the torture and slaughter.
Stephen Harper is Christian & Missionary Alliance, which I would describe as strict Evangelical/mild Fundamentalist.
I was C&MA before I finally joined the AoG.
Man, I wish we could go back to when Thomas Jefferson was President and attended Sunday Services in the Congressional Hall.
and owned slaves!
and fucked 'em!
Canadians suck at Pittings.
There is no debate on this. I’m 100% correct on this.
The end.
Why?
I doubt that would work. And also there might be a teeny-tiny little Constitutional problem in the way. Just a little one.
Indeed, why? Dream big, big fella! I personally pine for the good ol’ days when heresy would earn you a good pooper-poking on the Judas Chair, or when “consorting with Beelzebub in the woods at midnight” would earn one the just and swift punishment so sorely missed in today’s permissive and Godless society. When a community was a real community of god-fearin’ folk—when Goodman Ted (by coincidence, the sole witness and affiant to the aforementioned demonic consort) shew the very grace of the Lord by offering to purchase, for a mere pittance, a large amount of adjacent land from Goody Turnip, in the event her husband fail to withstand his engagement with the ducking stool…
I happen to agree with you 100% and I can’t understand why more Americans aren’t outraged by this. It is my single biggest turn-off with any politician. STFU about your relationship with Jesus, it is irrelevant and I don’t care. Truly unbelievable that in 2008, our Republican VP nominee wants to teach school children *creationism *(intelligent design) in science class and people aren’t protesting in the streets. And the big scandalous criticism aimed at the Democratic presidential nominee is that his father was not Christian. Seriously it’s fucking embarassing to be an American sometimes.
What’s the problem, Leaffan? We know that among Western democracies, the United States is one where religion takes a lot of space in the public sphere. It’s part of their culture. But they’re not unique in this regard, even Canada isn’t blind to religion.
Why does this bother you, especially that you don’t even live there?
Leaffan, who peed in your Wheaties this morning?
Jesus.
Some of us only pretend to be religious. It helps us to judge others harshly without disrupting our lifestyles.
Perhaps Leaffan actually cares about things outside of the borders of his/her country. And the simple fact is, the way America throws it’s weight around, America’s irrationality is a concern for the whole world.
Well, that’s why there needs to be a strong, high wall of separation between Church and State in the US. In the UK, for example, there can be an established Church without it having a corrupting influence on politics (though whether it has been a corrupting influence on the Church of England is a very different question), because people don;t identify themselves as religious to the same degree as Americans.
In the US, religion has always been an important motivating factor in politics. Fortunately the Founding Fathers recognized this, and gave us the twin pillars of constitutionally enshrined freedom of religion, as well as protection from the establishment of religion. Absent that, the US would likely have developed down a very different path.
So I think you are addressing things the wrong way here, Leaffan. The strength of religious belief and involvement in politics doesn’t show the failure of the principal of separation of Church and State in the US; instead it shows why said principal was necessary to be enshrined in the Constitution. Some countries don’t have it there because they don’t need it there. Others (Saudi, Iran, etc) sorely need it, but don’t have it.
This is the aspect of US politics, contrasted with their official separation of Church and State that seems so odd to me. While we have some minority parties here with a religious bent, (and the usual few on the loony fringe) where expressing ones faith is part of being a candidate, the candidates of all the major parties would be hurt in their campaigning by doing such a thing.
Our current Prime Minister Helen Clark is agnostic by her own definition (and objected to being called an atheist a few years back by the then-leader of the Opposition party Don Brash – someone who himself when asked about his religion answered: “If you mean, ‘Do I believe there is a supernatural being with whom I can talk’, then no.”) 
The current leader of the Opposition (National Party), and possibly our next PM if polls are to be believed, is John Key, who per Wiki: ‘does not profess any faith as such, describing himself as “not a heavy believer” and not a believer in life after death, although his mother was Jewish which makes him Jewish through his maternal lineage.’
I don’t really know too much about the religious views of most of our politicians, because frankly, it just doesn’t generally come up in their political / public role, and I think most NZers prefer it that way.
This.
Separation of Church and State does not mean that we’re supposed to be non-religious people, or that it’s wrong to want religious people in power. It does mean that what those people in power are able to enact as law with regards to religion is limited.