Two aspects of British public culture make it bracing and refreshing for someone such as myself: the public culture is utterly non-religious and utterly devoid of crypto-fascism of the American variety (no Michael Savages, Ann Coulters, Bill O'Reillys, Tom DeLays, etc.).
In a country where the suspicion is widespread that even the Archbishop of Canterbury is an agnostic, where regular attendance at Church of England services hovers around 2%, and where the reasonable, default assumption in almost every encounter is that the person you are speaking with is also a non-believer, one is reminded rather starkly of one's minority status "back home."
Strikingly, of course, the non-religiosity in Britain co-exists with a much higher level of public morality than in the United States: a stronger commitment, manifest even in public policies, to fairness and equality values; to social policies that support families; to the rights of workers; and so on. Typical forms of moral depravity in America (which, of course, purport to occupy the moral high ground)--such as attacking the civil rights of homosexuals while simultaneously affirming the absolute moral rights of two-day-old zygotes against all moral claims of adult women--appear to be completely fringe phenomena in England, as one would expect in any country that isn't busy seceding from the Enlightenment world.
At the same time, one is reminded, rather alarmingly, of how far towards the crytpo-fascist right political discourse has moved in this country. I spent most of my return flight reading a recent issue of The Economist, an English conservative publication, but one still recognizably within the space of reasons and evidence. It would be impossible, of course, to spend the same amount of time with The National Review or a book by Bill O'Reilly. It is this degeneration of the public political culture that is, as we have been discussing, perhaps the most worrisome feature of the situation in America today.
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