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"If I may . . ."

You may.

However you re-arrange it, I think you're right, and if I had 'rearranged it,' I might have perceived that. Sure enough, I took doc30's experience to be anecdotal, but it was on my mind just what proportion of our population is actually Christian. I believe that number to be 65% to 80%, church-going and non-church-going, not including 'nominals.' That sort of vagueness starts arguments.

Yes, I was refereing anecdotally to a subject that has poor definition. When you quote that a certain percentage of people in the U.S. attend church, it does not reflect internal divides where some people believe that other denominations are more 'Christian' than others. Some, my ex-wife's for example, believed that none of the mainline churches were Christian (e.g. Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Catholic). To their perspective, very, very few people, themselves excempted, are Christian. Their definition was based on speaking in tongues. If you didn't, you weren't Christian.

The overall point I was making was what gumlegs was stating. There is a subset of conservatives that believe a true conservative must be Christian. There is another subset of Christians that believe you must be a fundamentalist type of Christian to be American. I deliberately left it vague because, as I mentioned above, who is considered a Christian depends on who you ask. I also wanted to avoid charged words and terms like "religious right," "fundamentalist" or "evangelical" since these terms are used very liberally and, in many instances, without heed to the specific meaning behind these terms. YHAOS, I believe you are right when you say 65-80% of people here in the U.S. go to church. But that covers a very, very broad range of denominations and beliefs, some of which are diametrically opposite in their outlook on Christianity. I believe only a fraction of those people would fall into the groups I described in my original post to this thread.