Jon Rowe has an excellent post at Positive Liberty about a number of Christian scholars whose work debunks the Christian Nation myth. In addition to the work of Gregg Frazer, which he and I have both promoted greatly, he also cites scholars like George Marsden, Mark Noll and Nathan Hatch. And I love the response that he cites to his own work in this regard, where some hack from Worldmag calls Rowe a "militant secular pagan" - whatever the hell that is.
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Clearly, a militant secular pagan is someone who smites you with the hammer of Thor, in whom they do not believe.
Obvious, really.
A "militant secular pagan"? Oh man, that's fantastic. I wish someone would call me a militant secular pagan. Even though it doesn't make any sense, it still sounds so much more interesting than atheist.
A friend of mine who was a born-again Christian once referred to me as a pagan even though we had previously had multiple discussions about my atheism. I think the problem comes from trying to fit everything into Biblical categories. There, all non-Jews/non-Christians are demon-worshippers. The Bible doesn't mention atheism or secularism. It seems strange to imagine people whose thinking is so dominated by a Biblical paradigm that they can't really imagine anything that doesn't fit into it, no matter how much a part of modern American culture, but that is indeed the impression I have gotten from talking to some fundamentalists.