[lucozade]

> the separation of church and state as a fundamental tenet of Western society

I think you may be confusing Western society with the US. It's not a tenet, fundamental or otherwise, of many Western societies.

But otherwise, I would tend to agree with you. Some people don't. But I don't have a serious objection to the decision even though I wouldn't have made it myself.

[dragonwriter]

> I think you may be confusing Western society with the US. It's not a tenet, fundamental or otherwise, of many Western societies

It's a fairly common element of Western societies, though the particular expression varies; ranging from broad tolerance despite a formally established religion through a firm secularism in the public square; the US, though it professes a reasonably strong though not extreme form that amounts to neutrality actually has fairly weak separation between privileged religious communities and government power in practice.

[craftyguy]

It's not even a real tenet in the US. Politics and national/state/local policies here have extremely heavy religious overtones. There is absolutely no way that a publicly non-religious person would be elected to any meaningful public office.

[dragonwriter]

> There is absolutely no way that a publicly non-religious person would be elected to any meaningful public office.

Jesse Ventura, Barney Frank, Pete Stark, and Jared Huffman, among others, would seem to refute this. I mean, I assume Governor's offices and the House of Representatives qualify as “meaningful public office”.

[craftyguy]

~4 people over the past 200+ years is not a meaningful demonstration of any tolerance towards non-religious folks holding public office.

[dragonwriter]

> ~4 people over the past 200+ years

No, that's just over the last 20 (no plus) years; each of the identified people has been elected to Congress or a Governor's office in 1998 or later.

It's true that the preceding 200+ years of US history had a substantially lower (but nonzero, even in comparable offices) average frequency of publicly non-religious office holders, but that's about how the US was not how it is.