Christianity is everywhere in American culture, so ubiquitous and routine that most of us don’t even notice its presence.

But just a quick read of whatever daily newspaper you subscribe to proves this out. Let’s just take my hometown paper, the Mitchell (SD) Daily Republic.

Chaplain out, then in

On Friday, a story on A7, the “Nation” page, carried a newsbrief with the headline: “House chaplain wins job back after scalding letter to Ryan.”

It was about the U.S. House of Representatives chaplain, Jesuit priest Pat Conroy, being given his job back after shaming Speaker Paul Ryan for, Conroy said, muscling him to resign without cause. Conroy said he was told by a congressional official that he needed to go because the House needed a non-Catholic chaplain for a change. Fellow Catholic Ryan, Conroy said, told him he wasn’t providing adequate “pastoral care” to House members.

Without saying it, the story implied that having a House chaplain in the first place is unimpeachably appropriate, constitutionally or otherwise, when it’s clearly not. An excellent argument can be made — as originally proposed by the primary author of the Constitution, James Madison — that it’s patently unconstitutional for government to appoint a religious official to a formal government post. The Founders were emphatic about keeping church and state completely separate, and Madison specifically rejected the idea of a congressional pastor.

Yet, there is it today, a story about the House chaplain as though it were wholly unremarkable that he was there at all.

The texts of faux normalcy help fundamental errors persist.

Religion pages

Another way America’s Christianized culture persists mostly under the radar are weekly newspaper “Religion” pages and their “From the Pulpit”-type articles that widely populate U.S. community journals.

Since more than 80 percent of Americans are Christian, most of the newspaper articles on these pages are from a Christian — Catholic or Protestant — perspective. You almost never see one from a nonreligious secular perspective, even though roughly a quarter of the population (and growing fast) is now unchurched and religiously apathetic. However, the editor of the metro daily in our area, the Sioux Falls (SD) Argus Leader, has kindly published some of my nontheistic op-eds (such as this piece), allowing such ideas to at least get public visibility in a very traditionally faithful environment where they usually get none.

In the Republic’s Saturday “Religion+News” page this week was a story from local Christian pastor Rev. Jefrey Hubers titled “God is love, but love is not God.”

Put aside for a moment that in the real world the existence of an omniscient, omnipowerful, omnibenevolent invisible being has not been confirmed, much less whether such a purported invisible being can even personify a very human emotion as love.

But there is the Rev. Hubers quoting the apostle John in a 2,000-year-old translation (among many in different languages) of ancient human writings penned long after Jesus, the supposed man-God of their adoration, died: “God is love,” verse 8, line 16. In black and white.

The crux of the reverend’s column is that, while God is surely love, “love is not God,” and that we should guard against romantic love and the love of material things and focus on personal sacrifice and a general familial love of all mankind in the name of God’s love.

What that means, I have no idea, but it’s being read by lots of people whose main take-away probably is simply the unsubstantiated proclamation that “God is love.”

The continuing problem is there’s rarely any pushback, especially in the pages of the newspapers where these stories appear and where the minds of Americans congregate.

We hardly notice them anymore, but they persistently spread specious ideas.

Faith and abortion

A regular news story in Saturday’s Republic was also about religion, but it was between the lines.

The story (also reported here verbatim) described “verbal blows” being traded over the abortion issue by two South Dakota GOP gubernatorial candidates — current U.S. Rep. Kristi Noem and state Attorney General Marty Jackley. Both are pro-life. Rep. Noem is an evangelical Christian and Jackley is Catholic. Rep. Noem is castigating Jackley as AG for failing to prosecute Planned Parenthood for, as mandated by state law, “not explaining to pregnant mothers that abortion will terminate a human life.” (my italics, to show the inherent bias in the state law) Jackley countered that while the abortion provider may not have followed the “spirit of the law,” it did not violate its letter so was unprosecutable.

But abortion is a constitutionally legal procedure in America, so any laws purposefully making it more difficult are suspect in a rational sense. Indeed, abortion resistance has become a litmus test for the evangelical-heavy GOP, and is mainly a religious, bible-derived issue, not a temporal one.

But there abortion is in the pages of my hometown paper being casually discussed as if it is obviously evil, and that all that needs to be considered is how best to stop it.

That’s not reason at work, but faith. And it’s everywhere, even in newspapers.