A great post.  This idolatry of which you speak has reached unprecedented heights and is further supported by many media outlets.  As paleos it is time we started pushing back to let people know that there is another way.

The Constitution was written to try to unify culturally disparate parts of the nation.  Accordingly, religion, along with other social issues, were left to be decided by the states.  This explains why a number of states had established churches well into the 19C.  It also explains why the federal government was directed by the framers to keep out of religion entirely.

I don’t think the Left is religious other than in the most vestigial sense.  Even before we imported continental radicalism with the Ellis Island wave of immigration, religiosity was dying amongst American proto-liberals.  Eugene Genovese speculates that one reason for increased religiosity among Southerners and decreased religiosity among northern proto-liberals was that the Bible speaks constantly of slavery while never forbidding it.  While the north went onto Transcendentalism, phrenology, Ouija boards, and such, the South stuck with Biblical Christianity.

Rather I think liberals used Christianity solely to advance a leftist agenda.  Since the best way to sway people is to appeal to them on their own moral terms, the left has used Christianity against the West with devastating effect.  The left uses our own morality against us. 

Because they aren’t sincere in their religious beliefs, liberals have destroyed the churches they have taken over.  Just compare the United Church of Christ (the direct descendant of the old New England Puritan churches) with Evangelical Christianity.  I think this is why religion has declined in so much of Europe as well. 

One of the few places in the West where religion has prospered in recent times is again the South.  And I think this is largely because the South has resisted liberalism from the beginning.  And the churches that best resist liberalism are those growing the fastest.

This seems a little too glib:

Rather, the common danger [to secular and religious] is that posed by idolatrous beliefs which encourage the worship of the power of fallible human beings to remake the world through government action, whatever the cost to human dignity in the process.

Issues like “voluntary” school prayer and the like, which I’m guessing you wouldn’t classify as “idolatry,” are real threats to secular citizens and to those having minority religious beliefs, for instance to Jews or Muslims in predominantly Christian school districts.  In issues like this the two sides are opposed to each other, and whichever side wins, the other side will be hurt, at least in the short term.  I think we should have the integrity to admit that religious vs. secular, and also Christian vs. Jew etc., are often real adversarial conflicts in America, and sometimes you’ve got to choose one side or the other.

Oops, very bad choice of words in my comment above.  I didn’t mean the last sentence to come out the way it did.  Instead of “integrity” I should have said “clarity” or something like that.

Of course the left never abandoned religion. Polls show some 80% of Americans believe in God/higher power. There are an equal amount of religious people on the left as the right.

The media pundits have been spouting the myth that somehow GOD takes sides in politics. What a load of horse plop that has been. Thank goodness the amount of political corruption has put a wooden stake into the heart of that blasphemous fairytale.

Ploni Almoni:

“Issues like “voluntary” school prayer and the like, which I’m guessing you wouldn’t classify as “idolatry,” are real threats to secular citizens and to those having minority religious beliefs,”

As a non-believer let me ask you:  How does the practice of the Christian religion in any way threaten non-Christians? Why can’t Jews who want to live where they’re a majority go to areas where they are?  Why can’t Muslims who want Muslim views to prevail go to a place such as Dearborn, MI?  And by the same token, why shouldn’t Christians be allowed to practice their own religion in the country they created?  I must admit it sounds to me like a flimsy pretext for the continuation of minority rule in this country.  Do you have a problem with majority rule?

Jet:

First of all, atheists and agnostics only comprise about ten percent of the population.  And since only about twenty percent of the country profess themselves to be doctrinaire liberals, and since the non-believing ten percent is overwhelming of leftist orientation, half of the liberals are outright nonbelievers.  It’s also important to note that believing in a higher power and being a devout Christian are two entirely different things.  How many of the believing half of the left actually practice a New Age religion (e.g., Gaia worship), or are nominally Christian at best?  And how many of the remainder are members of a mainline Protestant sect that is in its death throes (e.g. Anglicans, the UCC)?

The number of Christian leftists are a large minority at best, and probably a very small one.

To answer a question to me: “voluntary” prayer, or “voluntary” anything in schools, often threatens a small minority who opt out with insults, beatings, ostracism, etc.  That’s how kids are.  Segregation is one solution, and probably a good one for minorities in the long term.  Being forced to leave your home and school is not good, though. Hence my qualification, that minorities are hurt “in the short term.”

I don’t think school prayer is either good or bad in general: sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad.  Maybe we agree that the only general rule should be that it be decided at the local level.  But when it is decided, one side wins and the other side loses.

Minorities such as Jews, Muslims, and atheists understand this, and it’s rather insulting to them to suggest that we’re all on the same side.  What I’d like to see emphasized is that we want control only over our own communities, not over Manhattan or San Francisco.

Another point about my example of “voluntary” prayer: the “voluntary” part was just a gimmick to try to get it past the judges.  There’s nothing unconstitutional about a school district requiring all of its students to pray to Jesus or Allah or whomever.  If, per impossibile, the government started obeying the Constitution, as we all wish, there’d be a fair amount of school prayer, but very little of it would be voluntary.  So even more clearly, one side wins and the other side loses.

Ploni Almoni:

I do agree with you on diversity.  It’s a curse rather than a blessing, and the potential for violence and discord is a big reason why.  But since it’s a curse we’re going to have to learn to live with, it might as well begin in school.  Schools certainly shouldn’t be in the business of telling some groups they have the right never to be offended, while telling whites they deserve whatever they get.

Certainly kids can be cruel.  But it has nothing in particular to do with religion.  It has to do with being different.  And to me this notion that schools should forbid their students to be different from one another is a huge step toward dictatorship.  Where will it end?

It is doubly imperative to teach students the religion and culture of the dominant group as they will have to deal with this group ostensibly for their entire lives.  Granted, the majority does have an obligation to respect minority rights.  But minorities must in turn respect the rights of the majority.  And thus far life in this multicultural paradise has been a one-way street.  But I see signs the majority is tiring of the status quo, and they shouldn’t have to put up with it.

I would also take issue with your belief that schools can coerce prayer.  Granted, schools can try to coerce beliefs.  And they have done exactly that with the most insidious liberal ideas, such as multiculturalism, though not with religion.  How successful have they been?  How many alumni of our public schools think multiculturalism is a fine thing?  No, nobody can force anybody else to believe anything.  But I will add that I believe schools have a duty to teach students the local culture, what used to be called acculturation. 

But judging by history I think your concerns about religious bigotry in the US are really overstated except for the northeast.  Contrary to what liberals want us to believe, there have been very few problems in the US with religious bigotry.  In the South they even had an institution known as the union church.  A union church was a non-denominational church building owned by the community where just about any visiting preacher was welcome to preach on Sunday mornings.  And exclusion of religious groups was almost always self-inflicted, that is, Catholics, Episcopalians, and a few others opted not to participate.

Likewise with Jews.  Of course Jews and Christians generally didn’t mix their religious celebrations.  But you’ll have to show me good examples of the anti-Semitism liberals allege to have occurred.  Instead I’m aware that the first two Jewish senators and representatives were elected from the South.  I’m also aware that a number of high ranking Confederates were Jewish, including one-time vice president Judah Benjamin.  I’m also aware that cities, such as Fort Meyers in Florida were named in honor of Jews.  Indeed, Jews generally lived at the top of Southern society just as they do today.  It hardly sounds like anti-Semitism to me.

I have heard liberals prate on about how the Ku Klux Klan hated Catholics and Jews.  But I believe this was the Klan of the 1920’s, and their goal was to stop immigration the way many of us want it stopped today.  And just as liberals will libel and slander immigration reformers today with all manner of names, the same appears to have been the case back then.  Instead of being called racists and anti-immigrant bigots, in the 1920’s immigration reformers were called anti-Semites and Catholic bashers simply because the majority of immigrants at the time were Catholic or Jewish.

I can’t help but think that what you’re prescribing smacks of multiculturalism.  Multiculturalists feign embrace of all cultures simply to deny their own.  It bears reiterating:  you’ll have to show me any pattern of sustained religious bigotry outside of the liberal northeast.  But this could change if these gratuitous provocations of the majority don’t cease.

Americans, and Westerners in general, aren’t bigoted enough for their own good.  And that’s why they’re losing their cultures and way of life.