...between there and here. i've lived here, and there too, and i spend a lot of time defending here from american attacks and there from european ones...

here the government has taken on the church head to head: legalised gay marriage, is working on easing the religious out of public education, (it's not a constitutional requirement here, just a sensible idea), and when you start talking about america here, you get.........

(apart from the usual appalling ignorance that many europeans have about the usa, matching exactly the extraordinary lack of knowledge some americans have about europe),

......... a uniformly astonished reaction to america's current religiosity. people genuinely find it hard to swallow some of the info i give them.

and when i talk to americans visiting spain, some of them are sincerely shocked when i point out that no-one here has any idea if anyone in politics ia a practising believer of any type and that the question seems irrelevant to nearly all of us.

we've got a right wing here, sure, hot promoters of family values and the moral teachings of christianity, but the argument is always presented as a fight against compulsory secularisation and preserving the right of the religious to educate their children in religious schools etc.... that kind of approach. no chance of the religious right getting a political voice.

when i read american history it seems to me that religious fervour is an epidemic that sweeps across america eery sixty or seventy years. wasn't their an outbreak in the interwar years, an another one either before or after the civil war? i know there was a wave of evangelical excess in the 1760's...

can this be a cyclical phenomenom, or is it something else...?