Quote of the day: America as a Christian nation

An interesting observation, built upon the expression of the idea that while America is a secular polity, that polity is built upon the bedrock of an essentially Christian culture:

America is a Christian nation; this is a matter of fact, not of opinion. Whether America will remain a Christian nation is matter for argument, perhaps: the creation of special rights for pathics, for instance, indicates that Christian morals are going by the board; and the prevalence of abortion, the deliberate destruction of one's offspring, is another suggestion that both Christian belief and Christian morals have begun to succumb to total religious indifference, if not yet to atheism. But if Christian faith and morals will be generally rejected by the coming of the twenty-first century, then probably the whole culture will disintegrate, the material culture as well as the intellectual and moral culture; and human existence here will become poor, nasty, brutish, and short: unless some quite new culture, which as yet nobody can imagine, should rise up. Any such unnameable innovative culture, to endure, would require some transcendent sanction, perhaps some theophanic event -- something more enduring than mere Marxist ideology, which was a violent attempt at a new faith and a new culture.

 - Russell Kirk, Renewing a Shaken Culture (1992).