This complaint has two inspirations, neither of them divine. The first is Mr. Frank Sinatra. He sings:

Bet your bottom dollar you’ll lose the blues in Chicago,
The town that Billie Sunday couldn’t shut down.

And I thought, what a different time that song represents! Frank Sinatra, one of the country’s most popular singers, celebrating the failure of the morals police to clean up the country’s second-largest city.

The second inspiration was a terrible made-for-TV movie that I watched a week or two ago. For some reason, the Tivo recorded Lifetime’s mid-afternoon presentation of The Jessica McClure Story: Baby Down The Well (or some such; about Jessica McClure, anyway).

The movie was made in 1988, shortly after the whole Jessica-down-the-well debacle. It is set in Midland, Texas, where the whole thing actually happened. It involves a couple whose infant daughter has fallen down a well.

And the movie features no prayer scenes at all.

If that movie were made today, there’d be praying from before the titles until after the credits. The credits themselves, in fact, would probably contain some line like "The producers would like to thank Jesus, without whose assistance this film could not have been made."

And there’s no way we’d see a mainstream pop star these days — remember that Frank Sinatra was, after all, a pop star — singing anything that denigrates religion, religious life or the dogma of any major officially-blessed religion, however slightly.

The United States has always, in my experience, been the most religious nation on Earth, excepting outright theocracies. Many, many more people go to church here than in any other place I’ve ever been, and a much higher proportion of people profess a belief in God. In public in this country, this almost always means a belief in Jesus (often pronounced "Jeeesuus") Christ. Though this complaint is not specifically aimed at "Christians", people calling themselves "Christians" are usually the worst offenders.

The devout in other countries tend to be quiet about it, seeing religion as a private part of their lives, not as the central piece of their public persona. You can’t imagine David Beckham, for instance, ever shouting, "Thank you Jesuuuuuus!" as Kurt Warner did after winning the Superbowl in 2000. He’d be laughed off the pitch.

(David Beckham plays midfield for Manchester United, an English football team. Kurt Warner is a quarterback for the St. Louis Rams, an American footaball team.)

Recently, though — just in the last five years or so — religious expression has become more and more and more public in the USA, possibly at the expense of the values that religion is supposed to foster.

This afternoon, I saw this car in the parking lot at McDonald’s:

I invite the reader to notice the Jesus fish on the back, the VMI sticker in the window, and the WE <heart> GOD license plate. We may assume from these indicators that this person believes in God and in Christ, and is a general supporter of law and order (VMI is Virginia Military Institute, a legendary military academy in Lexington, VA). Yet:

1. The car is parked on the line. Whatever happened to ‘honour thy neighbour’? People next to you in the parking lot are neighbors, too.

2. This is a $40,000 truck, with a serious trailer hitch on it. Presumably that hitch is used to tow a boat, or a big camping trailer, or something like that. That’s a lot of bread that could have been cast upon the waters.

3. This one is visual:

Not only is it illegal to stick things like that heart on a license plate, but as of the date of the photo, the plate had been expired for almost a month. These people are, in effect, tax dodgers: render unto Casear etc.

Now, I’m sure that the particular people who own this enormous vehicle are perfectly nice people, with no faults. I’m just using them as an example, because they happen to fit my argument perfectly.

The heightened religious fervor in the United States serves no purpose except to provide the religiods — or a vocal minority of them, anyway — a platform from which to attempt to control others.

We’ve got the appearance of religion and constant talk about a morals and ethics, but seemingly no action.

The person with the "WWJD?" bracelet is just as likely, in general, to attempt to swindle you as the next person. Britney Spears talks all the time about being a virgin and about her special relationship with Jesus, but she still appears semi-nude on TV and in magazines, and wears clothes that a hooker wouldn’t have worn in public 30 years ago. And the Republican Party talks about how good it would be to have religious organizations underwritten by the government, only to do an about-face when they realize that "religious organizations" includes the Moonies as well as Jerry Falwell.

And so I am forced to call for a moratorium on all the public religiosity in this country. If you are religious, fine. That’s great, and that’s your right. But scrape the fish off the back of your car, burn your "WWJD?" clothing items, stop talking about Jeeesus all the time, and start expressing your religion through acts and beliefs, rather than chotchkes and marketing messages.