Where Religion Meets Politics: Church, State and American History

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/12/07/The_Great_Issues_Forum_Varieties_of_Nonbelief

Susan Jacoby discusses the effects religion has had on American politics since the drafting of the Constitution. Denys Turner points out that despite America's formal separation of church and state, religion permeates politics to a greater degree than in Britain, where there is a government-sanctioned church.

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Journalist Susan Jacoby, philosopher Colin McGinn, and theologian Denys Turner explore questions such as: Is humanism another kind of religion? Is it religion's evolutionary future, rather than just one of several alternatives? What light does the recent scientific study of religion throw on these possibilities?

How do the new humanists compare to the new atheists? Can an atheist identity be shaped by a positive ethic, or must it be primarily an anti-religious sentiment? How will the persistence of belief and disbelief, as well as the tension between them, shape thought and culture in the 21st century? - CUNY

Susan Jacoby is the author of The Age of American Unreason. She began her writing career as a reporter for The Washington Post, and has been a contributor to a wide range of periodicals and newspapers for more than 25 years on topics including law, religion, medicine, aging, women's rights, political dissent in the Soviet Union and Russian literature.

Jacoby has been the recipient of grants from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2001-2002, she was named a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Jacoby's other books include Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004); Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1984, and Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search for Her Family's Buried Past.

Denys Alan Turner is a British academic in the field of philosophy and theology. He is currently Professor of Historical Theology at Yale University having been appointed in 2005, previously having been Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University. He earned his PhD in Philosophy from Oxford University.

He has written widely on political theory and social theory in relation to Christian theology, as well as on Medieval thought, in particular, mystical theology.

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[Zubinen]

Highly developed countries such as Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, etc. are mostly non-religious because the quality of life in such countries supersedes the necessity for some non-existent "afterlife".

[dackjaniels555]

God does not exist.

[theDudeAbides1100]

religion should have no place in politics. nothing is concrete about religion, it makes no sense for politics and religion to be mixed. come on, its 2012, we gotta grow up.

[hXcDiedWithHitler]

@Dooger1026 lol wow, you are so deluded. the pilgrims didn't found America, the founding fathers did. perhaps that's why they're called the _founding_ fathers? of whom, might i add, _rejected_ religion. in fact, most were deists. NOT christians.

"Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law." - Thomas Jefferson

we “as a nation” have nothing to do with your god. keep it out of our government, please.

RON PAUL 2012

[SwordofSpirit1]

Church is a man—made invention. There's nothing godly about playing church. Some call it sectarianism (religion). It's mammon worship. Hebrews 9: 11—12 But Christ being come an high priest of good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this building (creation); Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.

[JonathanTheAlchemist]

@Dooger1026

The pilgrims never had anything to do with the founding of the country. Who's the revisionist now?

[Earchiel]

@dackjaniels555 ಠ_ಠ

[Dooger1026]

Religion was never a private matter when it came to the founding of AMERICA. It is astounding how revisionists rewrite history, and the role Christianity had in America. Maybe every American should return to Plymouth Rock, to The Mayflower Compact, and to Matthew 5:14 " a city on a hill." This is what the Pilgrims believed to be their purpose.. To create a Christian nation,'"as salt and light," for the world to see! Stop revising the facts, and teach it as it was!!!!!

[ivlfounder]

@vechorik

That would violate the bill of right