Blog #9 Religion in Politics and Nationalism

Last week in class we covered a topic that is very interesting to me.  We talked about religion in politics and nationalism and how it affects our country.  We referred to Heclo’s reading throughout class and related it to our discussion.  I found his readings to be very interesting on how he looks at things the way he does.  In class we also watched an interview of Governor Scott Walker after he won his third election.  The first thing Scott did was thank God for everything and giving him the opportunity to do what he does which are great things.  For a public figure like in his role to do that on public TV is super cool considering everyone out there these days that criticizes people for doing that.  I can relate to this as I was reminded all the time by my parents who were the most important person on getting me where I was with my sports career.  Being a three sport athlete in high school and a captain on the UWSP football team I had my fair share of interviews.  I’m not big on interviews win or lose but there was always one thing I remember to say in the interview and it was, “I would like to thank the Lord for giving me the opportunity to play this great game and to be out here with my teammates and friends ……”.  For a public figure here in Wisconsin like Scott to do that I thought was pretty cool. 

Next we talked about religion and nationalism.  Religion can shape a nation as we see in the Middle East.  The country’s religion in the Middle East has a much larger effect on the nationalism of that country in contrast to the United States.  Countries over there take the identity of their religion as here in the US we have the freedom of any religion we want.  Over there they get killed because they are different religions.  I remember when our current president got elected who they said was a Muslim that it was not right because he wasn’t a Christian as the all past presidents were.  This was a big deal even because the US event though it doesn’t have a national religion everyone associates Christianity with the US. 

Below I posted a picture of the back of a US money bill.  I used this picture in an earlier post but found it related to this blog also.  On the back of our currency we find the words "IN GOD WE TRUST'.  Those words were important to the men who started this country and those who were after them.  Our nation was viewed as being religious and Christians.  Know our country has turned away from that and not referred to as not being religious.  I believe our country needs to go back to what started this country and how this country was run in the beginning.  This would fix our country and take it back to the way it should be run.