This is really an internal matter for the Jewish community and almost anything I might say could be misinterpreted. However, I do believe that the Jewish community, insofar as it retains its historic integrity in whatever form that may have taken through cultural variation, bears a vital witness to the one creator God, who made this world and will one day call it to account and remake it in justice and peace. The Jewish people have a great, though challenging, advantage over many western Christians, in that they know in their bones that they are called to be different, to be a sign of contradiction to the way the world tends to drift, even while (in their exuberant celebrations of the goodness of the created order) they are a sign of affirmation that the world of space, time and matter is the good creation of a good God.

What would be marvelous would be if Jews and Christians could work together increasingly on such things that we can agree on. This doesn't mean 'pretending we're all the same really'; we know we're not. But there are common affirmations, common stands against all forms of paganism, common respect for God's good world, which bind us together even while they remind us of our strange and sad differences. Above all, it is time on all sides to stop defining ourselves in terms of the horrible and barbarous events of the first half of the twentieth century, and start thinking of ourselves in terms of the good things that our God might have in store for the twenty-first.

This is rather like those questions where you're invited to 'pick your all-time favorite baseball/cricket/football team' where everybody knows it's just a cheerful but meaningless exercise... and of course in classic theology teachers have emphasized that all the seven deadlies are variations on dysfunctional humanity, humanity being less than it was made to be, humans failing to worship the living creator God and so failing to reflect his image into the world.

That's why the seven deadlies tend to reinforce one another. In our case in the western world I think pride is obviously a major failing: the massive implicit pride in our western achievements, technology, science etc., which somehow give us license to imagine that we are also superior in our worldview, our 'developed' moralities etc., and in many other ways too.

That way, our pride in being western post-enlightenment humans (or indeed our pride in having attained the degree of sophistication to call ourselves post-modernists!) gives us the further license to make up our own rules or non-rules or anti-rules, including the greed that says we can and must do what we like with the world, the planet, with other people's ecosystems, other people's bodies, and the hubris that says since it's all for our benefit anyway the aim of the game is to 'die young as late as possible', whereas I notice that for many generations of Christians the aim would have been to be killed for a mature faith as early as possible...

Anyway, scattered thoughts in response to a scattering question!

As often with U.S.-specific questions, I have a kind of 'curious trans-Atlantic onlooker' view of this one.

Huckabee's comment raises -- and of course begs -- all sorts of questions: how do we know what God's standards are, who says when a dispute arises, and can you implant Christianity (or any other theistic religion) in the constitution of a state just like that? God's standards, for most religions, would include regular and faithful prayer and worship: is He proposing to make churchgoing (or synagogue-going or mosque-going) and private prayer compulsory? Is adultery going to be punished by law? What about the prohibition of images? And so on, and so on. Actually it's amusing to have an American say this because I thought part of the reason that the U.S. became the U.S. in the late 18th Century was because the nascent States didn't want governmental interference in matters of religion.

My own reflection on this -- typed on the way back from spending the morning in the House of Lords, which begins with prayer for God's wisdom in our national life, and happened to continue today with a debate on whether we should have a national inquiry as to why on earth we went to war in Iraq -- is that Huckabee's raising of the question, and the way in which these things are now debated in the U.S. (and, in a much lesser degree, in the UK) is an indication that the Enlightenment 'settlement' whereby secular governments run the country and religion is a private affair, is rapidly being seen as threadbare.

We urgently need new public debate on both sides of the Atlantic as to how to (in the ugly phrase) 'do God in public'. It won't do to scream on the one hand that that's the way to a theocratic totalitarianism, or on the other hand that 'we know' for whatever reason (the excesses of religious fundamentalism, for instance) that God doesn't, can't and shouldn't belong in public. We need serious, grown-up, informed debate...