I agree, see above. I misread your statement where your point was instead to imply that whatever the truth, I lack the capability of determining it. ;)

I allege both are at work, but only due to the fact that its Communitarianism is a very shallow self categorization, a glorified self image. As a whole, I think American society is rather exclusive, it's religiously controlled and does have strong authoritarian traits in my opinion, but I already said why.

To give one example why I think Communitarianism is self-deceptive: the group of people who tend to be against creating social support structures are without fail religious conservatives. Health care, welfare, development programs, you name it - they're against it. It may well be true that they believe those same functions should be administered through the local church community, but that doesn't exactly make their intentions any less deplorable.

The fact that last week the whole community helped poor old Mrs Smith clean up her yard doesn't make up for rejecting the funding of more social workers.

> You've moved the goalposts quite a bit

Granted. I felt it necessary to come back to the original point in the original post, since we have drifted quite a bit in an effort to "correctly" label American Protestantism. Making a generalized criticism of religion was my central point, talking about the perceived similarities between the American and the Muslim system was only an extension of it.

When I expressed a hope that education could lead rationalism and humanism, I was implying that it could do so by healing away religious ignorance.