Credit: Flickr/Gage Skidmore. Some rights reserved.
Do religion and politics mix or should faith be a purely private matter confined to home, church, synagogue or mosque? Arguments about this seemingly black-or-white question raged in Europe and North America for most of the twentieth century. Life, however, is seldom so clear-cut, as the fictional US President Josiah Bartlett noted in The West Wing. Talking with the Republican Arnie Vinick, Bartlett suggested that whilst the US Constitution ruled that Church and State should be separate it didn’t insist that religion and State could be separated.
