Pandagon

One of the most grating habits picked up by the mainstream media and politicians is talking about a sort of universal "faith" as some sort of great good shared by all decent Americans. It's grating because it was picked up from right wing sources that are trying to trick people that belong to the various faiths that aren't stripes of socially conservative Christianity to believe they should align themselves with right wing Christians against atheists. Mitt Romney was poised to exploit this, delivering a speech that said just that when his Mormonism became an issue. I hate it, because it's misleading. The natural allies to religious people not in the religious right are atheists, secular humanists, and the whole hodge-podge of disbelieving grumpypants who want the government to be scrupulously neutral on the subject of religion. Because if you aren't in an approved religion, then guess what? The government isn't going to respect your faith once they have license to put the religious over the non. Even if you're religious, you're getting grouped with us anyway, because having the "wrong" religion is just as bad as having no religion at all. (I highly recommend this recent podcast of Skepticality featuring a speech by Lori Lipman Brown for more thoughts on this one. She explains, interestingly, that the people to reach out to are Wiccans and Unitarians, who generally don't get included in the "people of faith" wide net and are well aware that the net will get much smaller once the broad net has performed its job.)