I’ve always found it somewhat ironic that the U.S. is perceived as a highly Christian country around the world and yet, we have so many attacks on Christian values and mores throughout the country each and every day. As a Christian, I also find it difficult to understand how a country that was based upon Christian values and mores is expected to completely eliminate them. For quite some time, I’ve believed that the statement “seperation of church and state” not only doesn’t exist in the Constitution of the United States, but it also does not mean what it has been interpreted to mean for many years.
BoingBoing had an interesting post yesterday. The direct link to the maps is here. I found these maps somewhat curious. Take for instance the Baptist map. As one would expect, a heavy concentration in the south-east U.S. Catholics? Heavy in the North-east, upper mid-west and extreme south-west. Mormons? Heavy concentration in and around Utah. No surprises there. No surprises at all really. What I did find surprising though is the “adherants” map. These are the total number of religious participants as a percentage of total population.
Can you spot what I found interesting? Ok. Try this… Can you take that map and decide which states vote as “red” states? “Blue” states? Also, aside from the extreme western states(Oregon, Washington, and California) and a couple of Population centers, a very large portion of the country is in the “greater than 50%” shades.
So, my next question to you is this: How is it that a country that has a strong Religious concentration such as the U.S. does(as depicted in this map) continue to stand for attacks against our Religion? How is it that the midwest(almost entirely over 75% adherent) does not make a stand and elect some strong Religious leaders to be our representatives in congress and the senate?
Answer: The country is in a sorry state of affairs where the wishes of the constituents no longer matters and it’s all about how much pork can get thrown around and how many “junkets” the lobbyists can pay for.
Technorati Tags: religion, religion in the US, Map of religion
About Shane Ede
Well, I think we probably do have some pretty religious people in congress right now. Religion does not necessarily guarantee the moral correctness of a person. In fact some of the most morally correct people I know aren’t the least bit religious, they just believe in having standards of conduct.
I think we would be amiss as a country to elect religious leaders as our representatives just because we’ve failed to put rules in place that limit corporate and special interest group influence through ‘donations’ and junkets. We need to severely limit the source and amount of campaign contributions and completely eliminate contributions from corporations if we want to bring the standard of our representatives up.
If you want to know what our country would be like if our religious leaders ran it take a look to Iran for an example of how well that works.
I completely agree. The “religiousness” of a person does not necessarily guarantee the moral behavior of a person. What I was trying to get at was more the attacks on the ten commandments and easter and such that have gone on based on one or two people complaining about it. Not only that, but the fact that they get away with it is what disturbs me. We have the right to free speech, that is in the constitution. But just because you speak out against something, does not mean that it should go away. Look at all the people who have spoken out against the Iraq war. Obviously it isn’t going away. My question is, where are the religious people when people speak out against the ten commandments? Why is there not a stronger voice for them?
I also think that Iran is a poor example of religious leaders running a country. The reasoning for that is twofold. Iran is not a true democracy, so the people did not get to choose their leaders and I do not believe that extremists can be counted in the same area as the religious that I’m speaking of.
I would argue that its fairly widely agreed upon that Iran did democratically vote to become a religious state and did elect their first religious leader into office. Sure they might not like it now but I’d say its a perfect example of how electing religious leaders into office can result in a system that is just as corrupt as any other type of representative.
http://www.iranchamber.com/history/rkhomeini/ayatollah_khomeini.php
Unfortunately, I don’t have the corroborating evidence to prove it, but I read somewhere reputable that while the election was legit, the people were only allowed to have the choice of the parties and people that the government chose. If your only given the choice between one dictator or another, does your vote really count?
Before you say it, yes our elections do operate somewhat similar, but we do have the ability to have a few dissenters occasionally.