Of course, this is making the rounds, approvingly, of Episcopal Church clergy. If we live in a post-Christian age, it was the clergy who moved it to that status.
Plus, this interesting bit that I read in the Orange County [California] Register this past weekend [it was on the back page of the surf report]:
In that sense, the federal debt might be better understood as an American Self-Delusion Index, measuring the ever-widening gap between the national mythology (a republic of limited government and self-reliant citizens) and the reality (a 21st century cradle-to-grave nanny state in which... "government is the only thing we do together.").
We used to be people of faith together, but there seems to be a new god in town, a two-party government that promises everything we could ever want in the temporal domain. Not a whole lot different from 1st century Palestine sometimes.