Most people I know are not hard-core religious people. They are what I would call 'lightly religious.' So I don't buy the notion that we can't laugh about religion in America.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I think the real problem for American religion are those minority of fundamentalists who try to identify political policies with religion.
People aren't religious because it's easy not to be. Like anything, it's habitual, and once it's a habit it's no longer hard.
It is easy to respect secular Americans who hold fast to the Constitution and to American values generally. And any one of us who believes in God can understand why some people, given all the unjust suffering in the world, just cannot believe that there is a Providential Being.
Notoriously, the United States is the most religious of the Western advanced nations. It's a bit mysterious why that is.
America is an unusually religious nation.
The U.S. is off the spectrum in religious commitment.
The British, I have discovered, assume that Americans are more religious than they are.
The god most Americans say they believe in is just not interesting enough to deny. Thus the only kind of atheism that counts in America is to call into question the proposition that everyone has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
You cannot classify a whole group of people based upon their religion and determine their intent. That's not fair. It's not American.
Being religious is quintessentially American.