Religion Vs American Ways Essay

During the presentation about Religion, Chapter 8, the United States has doctrine of separation of church and state, which means the government is not supposed to offer any advantage to a certain religion. However, this doctrine clearly has a contradiction as addressed from the American Ways and the recommended source. From the American ways, there are examples that shows how the religion pervades into our daily, public lives. One example is the phrase “In God we trust” written on the American coin. Another example is that when Americans do the pledge of allegiance, they say “under God” to the flag. The other example is Americans do prayer whenever they go to official government branches such as Supreme Court, Congress, etc (Althen, G & Bennett,

So, government and church, or religion, cannot be separated completely. On page 111 on American Ways, “candidates for and holder of elective office at the national and sometimes the state level often make their religious view and activities quite public…All this is usually regarded as part of an effort to portray themselves as wholesome, right minded people who deserve the public’s trust” (Althen, G & Bennett, J, 2011). By reading these contents from American Ways, we can find these evidence that supports separation of church and state does not sound exactly plausible. Besides information from American ways, the recommended source also contains information to back up the contradiction of separation of church and state. The recommended source states how politics is closely related and significantly affected by a certain religion. The statistics shows that people who believe in the religion tend to support Republicans more than Democrats by the percentage of 58 % to 40%. Also, most of the executives of Congress are Christians (92%) and only 0.2 % of the Congress member is non-believer (Lipka, M,