Even a blind sow stumbles on an ear of corn every once in a while and Wonks Anonymous notes that Ross Douthat has come a cross a serious, important observation on American Christianity.

Readers may remember that there has been a great deal of recent controversy over the shocking ignorance of devout believers of the main points of their faith and the doctrines of other faiths. Which ignorance ill intentioned atheists have roundly mocked.

Ross has an answer quoted from someone who is on the faculty of Calvin College:

I continue to be suspicious of such surveys and reports precisely because they reduce religion to “knowledge.” … But what if religion is not primarily about knowledge? What if the defining core of religion is more like a way of life, a nexus of action? What if, as per Charles Taylor, a religious orientation is more akin to a “social imaginary,” which functions as an “understanding” on a register that is somewhat inarticulable?

Now Wonks Anonymous wholehearted agrees with this idea and he would go on to describe the social imaginary of activist modern American Christianity. The sort of religion practiced by The Catholic Church and most Evangelical sects.

First that the distribution of wealth and power in this world is, with some few exceptions, divinely ordained. Except for Hollywood and George Soros, the wealthy are given their wealth and their dominion over us by God and only on the rare occasions when Democrats do get into office is there a reason to question God's providence in the political sphere.

Likewise poverty and disease are God's punishments for sin.

Second, in all matters of faith and morals the masses do best by blindly obeying the teachings of religious professionals. This is explicit in Catholicism. Despite evangelical traditions of dissent it is also true of Protestantism. pastors of each television ministry may have slightly different interpretations of scripture but the masses had best follow.

Third there are only two sins: disobedience and disobedient sex. Which sins are quite naturally tied to the deepest and most ineradicable human impulses, autonomy and pleasure.

For American Christianity - no I do not include the Unitarians or the milder sects that take the peaceful teachings of Jesus seriously - we are all damned from the start and only a life of misery in submission to the churches and the rich can purify us of our stiff necked rebelion and make us worthy of heaven.

Hence the increasingly moralistic approach to our increasingly miserable and dysfunctional economy and the continued propagation of hate against sexual minorities.

No matter how hard he may try Obama believes in people, he believes that the misery of this world can be lessened. He believes that the distribution of power and wealth in this world can be made to serve human happiness and do not represent the ineffable plan of an uncommunicative God with anger management issues.

Obama does not get it and he should stop trying. Better to be hung as a neopagan than try to feign an inhuman and damnable Christianity.