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Originally Posted by Trollheart
Well, you kind of seem to. Don't Christians control and fund most of the big political names there? Aren't there huge fundraisers for Christian concerns? Don't they pretty much dominate what goes on in schools, regardless of the makeup of the student body? Looking from the outside, it would very much seem that one religious group (ie Christians) control a whole lot of the infrastructure of your society, no? Like, when we have elections nobody bothers that much about the religious beliefs or practices of the candidates, whereas it seems to be seen as a much bigger deal with yours.
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Like I said, we're religiously conservative, and there's definitely a big Christian presence in a lot of small towns, but the Separation of Church and State basically prevent religion from directly dominating policy. Plenty of uber-Christians (who are generally laughed at by the rest of us) would love to have Creationism and/or Intelligent Design taught in schools, and to "teach the controversy", but the law shuts that down like a guillotine. We can't even have student-led prayer groups in schools that have no government involvement cause of how liberally the Separation of Church and State is interpreted. And aside from those religious conservatives nobody really wants that to change.
Some places like Texas try a little harder for that ****, but everywhere else it really isn't an issue. I live in the South but have never even heard of anybody trying it here in my life. Christianity is not taught except for a day in history class the day before we learn about Islam, then Buddhism, etc.
Politic
ians are trickier. There aren't much in the way of non-Christian politicians (plenty of Jews though as far as I know), but that's generally important only as far as elections go. A politician might say, "God bless America" or something in a speech, but aside from some uber-conservatives they don't invoke religion as a reason to enact a policy, and if they did they'd probably alienate a significant portion of their electorate unless they were from a predominantly Evangelical area or something.