"Left2Right" and "Christian America"

This new blog, "Left2Right," strikes me as an interesting enterprise.  Here's how the group of several dozen politically-left-leaning-but-apparently-interested-in-respectful-dialogue academics describes the project:

We're a bunch of academics, mostly philosophers but also some lawyers, political scientists, and economists.  We're interested in liberal ideas, though we are probably far from unanimous about what "liberal" means, and our being interested in liberal ideas doesn't entail that each of us subscribes to all of them.  We think that political debate in this country has deteriorated into a shouting match, a food fight, a flame war -- call it what you will.  We'd like to consider whether liberal ideas should be somehow reconsidered -- in some respects revised, in others perhaps merely re-stated -- with the aim of increasing the overall ratio of dialog to diatribe in the American political forum.  Some of us will be trying out various ways of re-thinking and re-formulating those ideas; others may end up arguing that such attempts are unnecessary, even counter-productive.  And in the course of our discussion, there will be plenty of digressions and asides of the sort that naturally occur at the margins of a group discussion.

Now, much of what gets said in Left2Right's comments-boxes is, in a view, disappointingly tedious and smug.  Still, the bloggers' own posts seem, generally speaking, quite provocative and engaging.  Here's a particularly interesting one, by philosopher Don Herzog, reflecting on the significance and implications of the claim that America is (or should be) a "Christian nation":

A while ago I wondered what would change if we publicly affirmed that this is a Christian nation.  My dilemma shapes up this way.  I don't want to believe that the people urging that are doing right-wing identity politics, slinging around vacuous slogans; I assume they want concrete policy change, not feel-good gestures.  But on the other side, I don't want to believe that the people urging that are what I'd style extremists who might think, for instance, that a public university could fire me as a faculty member if I couldn't demonstrate that I was a Christian in good standing.  (If there are people who'd do that, I'd argue against them.  Strenuously.  Not just label them extremists.  But hey I'd do that too.  Any port in a storm.)  So I keep looking around for some position that skirts the horns of that dilemma.

Check it out.

Rick