Required Reading

In today’s New York Times, David Brooks writes about the fluidity of the American religious experience:

George W. Bush was born into an Episcopal family and raised as a Presbyterian, but he is now a Methodist. Howard Dean was baptized Catholic, and raised as an Episcopalian. He left the church after it opposed a bike trail he was championing, and now he is a Congregationalist, though his kids consider themselves Jewish.

Wesley Clark’s father was Jewish. As a boy he was Methodist, then decided to become a Baptist. In adulthood he converted to Catholicism, but he recently told Beliefnet .com, “I’m a Catholic, but I go to a Presbyterian church.”

What other country on earth would have three national political figures with such peripatetic religious backgrounds?

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As always with Required Reading, you have to go read the whole thing. Maybe I just found Brooks’s piece interesting because while I’m fascinated by religion, I don’t have one — so I can take a more dispassionate view.

But I’d like to hear back from those of you who do have a dog in this fight, on whichever side.

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