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Episcopalianism Vs Presbyterianism

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As a democratic country, a general way to gauge the feelings of the public is to analyze who the public elects to represent them. While Article VI of the Constitution mandates that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States,” an overwhelming amount of American presidents have been Christians. The two exceptions to this were Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, though theistic, remain religiously ambiguous. Within the Christian presidents, the majority of those have been Episcopalian and Presbyterianism. This is despite the fact that Episcopalianism and Presbyterianism make up a relatively low percentage of the overall self-identified Christian population. Contrastingly, …show more content…

However, that preference didn’t apply equally to all religions. In a study conducted by the Center, 17% of Americans in 2012 thought that Barack Obama was Muslim, while 49% knew that he was Christian. Out of those who thought he was Muslim, 65% of people expressed discomfort with his religion, while only 12% of people who knew he was Christian expressed discomfort. Meanwhile, in the same year, 60% of the population surveyed knew that Mitt Romney was Mormon and 61% of the sample were comfortable with it. This shows that Americans are comfortable with and favor religious presidential candidates, provided that religion is Christian and that Christianity itself is more important in an election that the denomination as significantly less than 61% of the population is Mormon. Ultimately, as it is Christian presidents who are being elected to office, Christianity serves as an influence on the country they are representing. Likewise, as many of America’s earliest presidents were Christian, their religious ideals had an impact on their work, no matter how …show more content…

One large example is the legality of homosexuality, or sodomy laws. Even the name, “sodomy” is Biblical in itself referring to the story in Genesis of the two towns, Sodom and Gomorrah. While the term sodomy is colloquially used to refer to homosexual acts, sodomy refers to non-procreative sexual acts, regardless of one’s orientation. Sex used solely for procreation is seen in the Bible and emphasized especially in Catholicism and Mormonism. The first instance is in Genesis. God’s first command to Adam and Eve is to “Be fruitful and multiply”. The same biblical often used for the argument against same-sex marriage before it was legalised, that God made man and woman, not man and man. Another religious influence on American laws are blue laws, which prohibit certain activities on Sunday, which range anywhere from the selling of alcohol to the operation of certain types of stores. In Genesis, it is made very clear that the final day of the week is meant as a day of rest. While non-religious reasonings behind blue laws exist, such as regulations involving working hours, these reasons do not fully account for the fact that the origin of blue laws stem from religious purposes, a day to help enforce the Sabbath and allow for

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