Furthermore, you succumb to the common error of implying that this country was founded on Christian values. Jefferson famously took a razor to several bibles and cut out the parts that he felt were in error. Hamilton, when asked why no mention of “God” was made in the Constitution, sarcastically replied, “We forgot”. Adams was a unitarian (hardly descriptive of a modern American Christian). The Framers of the Constitution realized that our nation was a hodgepodge of a whole variety of religious beliefs, ranging from agnosticism to Puritan Christianity, and they (rightly, I think) realized that Enlightenment political philosophy was the best grounding for the Constitution as well as the reasons given for separation (in the Declaration). I could continue with more examples of why your oversimplification is as erroneous as it is extensive.

As to the issue you claim to address (and yet do so with little more than a litany of disjoint quotes), there is little reason to believe that Christian conservatism in America is the best direction. I consider myself an orthodox Catholic and a conservative, but I do not trust the government (or want it, for that matter) to attempt to operate on specifically Christian-based values. This is based on a) the historical background to the Constitution (above) and b) the simple fact that asking the government to legislate specifically theologically-derived morality is to put both “government authority” and “religious values” ahead of “personal liberty” which the Founders simply did not do. And before I am told that all laws are based on morals which are given to mankind via divine revelation (i.e. the Bible), I should like to remind you that no such derivation was deemed necessary at our founding, because laws were derived from the primacy of “natural rights” that were considered fundamentally observable in “natural man”. Note the words “*endowed* by their Creator with certain *inalienable* rights”. The rights, in accordance with Enlightenment philosophy, are part of God’s creation of “natural man” and are inseparable. This is to say, our laws are based on natural rights and *not* on theological teaching.

Republicans (and Conservatives) need to return to their small-government, fiscally conservative, socially-responsible libertarian values and end their obsession with ensuring the strength of Christian values in America. Republicans have become little more than a lame “deficit and spend” answer to the “tax and spend” Liberals. I am loathe to give my children a nation characterized by reckless spending and, possibly worse, a nation more concerned with its security than its liberty and which is cowed by fear into accepting “big government”. It is as disappointing as it is historically unsurprising that we are following Late Republican Rome and Revolutionary France in supplanting intellectual meritocracy with jingoism and blind patriotism and which takes our rights for granted while we let government grow uncontrollably under the premise that “security” is our only sacred value.

– The Literal Interpretation of Genesis 1:19–20, Chapt. 19 [AD 408]”

And,
“With the scriptures it is a matter of treating about the faith. For that reason, as I have noted repeatedly, if anyone, not understanding the mode of divine eloquence, should find something about these matters [about the physical universe] in our books, or hear of the same from those books, of such a kind that it seems to be at variance with the perceptions of his own rational faculties, let him believe that these other things are in no way necessary to the admonitions or accounts or predictions of the scriptures. In short, it must be said that our authors knew the truth about the nature of the skies, but it was not the intention of the Spirit of God, who spoke through them, to teach men anything that would not be of use to them for their salvation.

– ibid, 2:9″

So, I don’t know why there is a controversy over creationism vs. evolution. There certainly shouldn’t be as was found by th echurchfathers over 1600 years ago.

Muslims have been enemies to everyone since the founding of that religion, except to other muslims, and even there they disagree among eachother. Remember the crusades? Well, read the book of genesis and especially the story of Abraham.

Abotion is abhorrible and worth protesting.

Religion is only one of many culprits, but it is a substantial one. Take the controversy over intelligent design(creationism,lets be honest with each other) and evolution. That entire argument has sparked a militant subsection of the Christian right that truly believes that the world is only around 6000 years old simply because one interpretation of a relatively fragile biblical chronology says it is so. In the process of this, they deny science from across the board, not just evolutionary biology(which isn’t taught in public schools anyways).

Religion took Muslims and made them our new enemies(go ahead and say 9/11 did it, I dare you!). Now its okay to tell Muslim jokes and ridicule Islam. Google for a minute and you will find the robots of the right regurgitating profane insults against Islam in mind numbing numbers.

For me, republicans were supposed to be a conservative approach to government. The last 8 years have been anything but. We had the largest deficits in history. The patriot act was the single greatest affront to our supposed dedication to liberty in all our history. It amounted to burning land to save it from invaders.

Where are the conservatives? I’ll tell you where. They are leaving their churches and going to their protests at the abortion clinics(to no avail) while the controllable fallacies in government continue to spiral out of control.Keep your God and religion at home. The government paves roads, builds missiles, and dolls out research grants. Good people come from good parents. Good Christians come from good Christian parents. End of story.

Based on the GOP leadership’s current attitude towards what was previously their base, the Conservative-Religious section of the electorate and the increasingly numerous comments on Conservative blogs (by Conservative “stalwarts”) such as the following, (cut & pasted here for your delight): “D@mn bible-thumpers! They cost us the election! We need to run them out of the GOP! They are soooo stupid! We need to stop worrying about everything but fiscal issues!”

I am left wondering if we bible-thumping Conservatives have a home in the GOP.

Those comments seem to me to simply be vocalizations of the actions of the leadership… a leadership that has abandoned any pretext of a moral guideline, saying whatever they think the citizenry wants to hear to get elected while never having any intent of attempting to keep those promises.

While the GOP may realize that they’ll lose their Religious base, I am uncertain they realize that they lack in equal measure the Democrat’s ability to lie convincingly: a skill born of constant and long, (indeed, multi-generational) practice.