""Our nation was founded on Judeo-Christian policies and religious leaders have an obligation to speak out on public policy, otherwise they're wimps," said David Black, a retiree from Osborne, Pa., who agreed to be interviewed after he was polled.
[...]
Only Mexicans come close to Americans in embracing faith, among the countries polled. But unlike Americans, Mexicans strongly object to clergy lobbying lawmakers, in line with the nation's historical opposition to church influence."
This common conservative assertion that the US "was founded on Judeo-Christian principles" never fails to raise my hackles. They seem to forget that Islam was also founded on Judeo-Christian principles, and that Islam roundly sucks. Furthermore, the US was also founded on principles that included slavery and female disenfranchisement, which, like religion, all rightly belong in the garbage. Just because the US was founded on something, doesn't mean it needs to be preserved for all eternity.
And if I'm not mistaken, a lot of Founders were in fact Deists, not Christians in the Southern Baptist "God and Country" sense the way some folks would have us believe. Some, like Thomas Paine, also nominally a Deist, opposed organized religion altogether; his beliefs bordered on flat-out atheism. In any event, the Founders weren't a monolith and had internal disagreements, a liberal and a conservative wing, etc., and a lot of what they supported sucked anyway.
Interesting that the more atheist countries in this study are Rumsfeld's "Old Europe."
-B.