TO THINK ABOUT – AT 9:56 A.M. ET:  As we start 2016 we look for guidance for the country's future.  That guidance begins by understanding where we are today.  David Gelernter, of Yale, who, although a professor computer science, has become a prominent conservative philosopher, contemplates the importance of religion in American life.   Consider this quote, from the Weekly Standard: 

Why should this new and dangerous virus have broken out now, in our generation? Judeo-Christian religion has been in decline for centuries. But important milestones have passed in our own lifetimes. Baby boomers were educated, in the '50s and '60s, in public schools that were still informally Christian—in a nation that (moreover) had been created by devout Christians guided by biblical ideas, and refounded during the Civil War by another Christian generation led by the most deeply religious of all our presidents. By the generation following the Second World War, it's likely that the U.S. cultural leadership was already mostly atheist. But it was reticent about saying so; in that era, many Americans still hesitated to go all the way. And the centrality of biblical religion to America's best self was reaffirmed during these same years by the pastors, priests, and rabbis of the civil rights movement. Today all these hugely important facts have been suppressed. My impression, as a college teacher, is that most young Americans have simply never heard them.

So here we are today with a mainstream press, cultural leadership, and intellectuals who laugh off the idea that a presidential candidate's religion matters. Yet it matters intensely. Its real, practical importance is large. Unless you are a Jew or Christian, you are likely—as a modern American—to make a religion of your politics. And that will shape, in turn, your relation to the opposition and to the American people.

COMMENT:  Please read the entire piece.  I'd like to hear your reaction to the professor's ideas.

January 1,  2016