Rhetoric Race and Religion
by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
Huffington Post
At the heart of the American experience is a profound contradiction: How are we so incredibly religious and yet so seemingly decadent?
While only 35% of Britons believe in God and 43% say they have no religion, 92% of Americans are believers and 80% are church-goers. Those same Americans, though, also make 68 million pornographic search engine requests every day, spending more than $3,000 on pornographic websites every second.
How are we to understand the materialistic impulses that had us spending $52.4 billion on Black Friday weekend shopping alone, and the bizarre accompanying stories like the woman who injured 20 shoppers by firing pepper spray into a crowd to clear her path to an Xbox?
Every four years, our presidential election cycle suggests the answer: Our public figures are obsessed with gay marriage and abortion to the exclusion of all other values.
Watch the Republican debates on television and you would think that America faces not a single social challenge other than stopping gays from marrying and women from aborting fetuses. America is a religious nation whose religious convictions have been hijacked by these twin issues, even though they have little to do with most Americans.
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