While visiting the Central Synagogue a few days ago, something that our tour guide said stuck with me.\u00a0 \u201cHere in England, we don\u2019t have the separation of church and state that you have in America.\u201d\u00a0 This idea had never struck me before, but after thinking about it for a bit, I realized he was right.\u00a0 While America has no official church or religion, England assigns the Church of England as its national religion.\u00a0 However, it seems strangely paradoxical to me that, in America, a nation of no official religion, atheism is detested and atheists are looked upon as social deviants; whereas in England, despite its national church, the English seem remarkably apathetic toward religion.<\/p>\n
After vacating the Prime Minister\u2019s office, Tony Blair converted to Catholicism.\u00a0 His reasons for doing so were not to gain some perspective after losing the Prime Ministry, but simply because his wife is Catholic.\u00a0 This begs the question, however, why didn\u2019t he convert earlier, before his political career was over?\u00a0 As our tour guide explained, Blair waited until after he was out of office, because the English would think he was \u201ca bit weird\u201d and would feel uncomfortable with a Prime Minister with significant religious faith.<\/p>\n
This notion is fascinating to me.\u00a0 Blair\u2019s political career would have come to a dead halt for converting to Catholicism; but, more importantly, simply being an ardently religious person is enough for one\u2019s constituents to feel uneasy.\u00a0 This is the completely the opposite case for America.\u00a0 Politicians have to repeatedly assert their strong religious faiths; for, in not doing so, they would jeopardize their electoral chances, almost entirely.\u00a0 It will be interesting over the course of this year to do some additional cultural research regarding the ideas of a national church that breeds atheism and religious apathy, while the separation of church and state breeds strong faith and a society that views atheism as some sort of social \u201cother.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0As ambiguous as this connection seems, I believe it is vital in explaining the ways in which religion has developed so differently in these two nations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While visiting the Central Synagogue a few days ago, something that our tour guide said stuck with me.\u00a0 \u201cHere in England, we don\u2019t have the separation of church and state that you have in America.\u201d\u00a0 This idea had never struck me before, but after thinking about it for a bit, I realized he was right.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":371,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6696],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2010-luke"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/371"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3351\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}