NEW Taki’s column: My semi-regular all-Canadian round up

So I can’t predict the “JOOOOOO!!!”-yness of the comments…

What if you got arrested for violating a restraining order taken out — in 1989 — against somebody else?

So now you’re in jail again for, among other things, causing a disturbance and blocking a sidewalk, even though—since you weigh considerably less than 900 pounds and hadn’t raised your voice—it seems like a pretty big stretch.

“Again” because you keep getting jailed for this “crime” over and over, to the point where you’ve spent more time behind bars than one of your country’s most viscerally despised serial killers (who now lives in Caribbean climes with her three kids—the same number of other peoples’ she helped murder).

Luckily, this isn’t you. But it is Canada’s Linda Gibbons.

Also at Taki’s, Pat Buchanan writes:

Since Eisenhower’s time, Christianity, the faith that created the West, has been purged from American public life. The Bible, prayer, and all Christian art, books and symbols have been expunged from the public schools as they were in Cuba when Fidel Castro took power.

That’s fascinating, because this guy insists the exact opposite occurred:

Much of what we now understand as an ambient American sympathy for religious expression, Kruse demonstrates, did not originate with the American founders. Neither did it grow organically during the nineteenth century. Instead, figures such as Eisenhower, working with like-minded allies in Congress, decided to make the Fourth of July a national “day of prayer” (1953), begin an ongoing tradition of National Prayer Breakfasts attended by the President (1953), add the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance (1954), and place the phrase “In God We Trust” on stamps (1954) and currency (1955).

Why then? The most original (and convincing) claim in One Nation Under God is that the association of patriotism with Christianity stemmed from a libertarian impulse within American business, as leading businessmen (including tire magnate Harvey Firestone, oilmen Sid Richardson and J. Howard Pew and entertainment moguls Cecil B. DeMille and Walt Disney) strategized to counter the popularity of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

While I haven’t read the book, the general consensus is that it proposes that what we think of as typical American religiosity was a 1950s invention.

This is weird because many reviews mention Toqueville’s remarks about how religious Americans were.

So… rather than being an “invention,” could all this activity in the 1950s be more like a revival?