text: Ummm... I'm going to ignore the Trolly aspects of this post and answer it as if it were a real question.\n\nA lot of Americans do, yes, but more of them don't. It's funny to me that the foreign perception of the United States is of a bunch of religious zealots just because our president happens to be one. Turn it around: Americans don't assume that all French are corrupt, all Russians are borderline fascist, all Iranians are fundamentalist nutjobs, all Bolivians are coca farmers, all Egyptians are Arab nationalists, or all Finnish people look like Conan O'Brien. Back when the Taliban was in power, we recognized that not all Afghans were radical Islamists. That's why we allied with the ones who weren't.\n\nSo why is it so hard for the rest of the world to see America as a country of individuals?\n\nI think a large percentage of Americans (probably about half) believes that God has blessed us. I am one of those people. But within that group, there is a large portion that believes those blessings are not guaranteed. When America turns its back on God - as I believe it has under the current administration - I believe God will turn its back on America. He already did once before, in the 1850s. We continued to enslave our fellow men, and we were engulfed in civil war as a result. Those lessons seemed to be lost until last month.\n\nIn the most recent election, an overwhelmingly large majority of Americans voted against the Republican party. Many of those voting against them were, in fact, Christians who are sick of seeing our religion exploited by people like the president and his allies. We don't have a problem with wars of necessity like Afghanistan... but we do have a problem with being lied to, told that we were in imminent danger when we in fact were not.\n\nThere is nothing Christian about the war we waged on Iraq. Their dictator was a horrible man, and he deserved to be deposed, but the violent and haphazard way we went about it has cost the Iraqi people a great deal of suffering. Will God punish us for it? Undoubtedly, he already has. Will he punish us more? I hope we can use the 2008 election to turn the direction of the country around, and regain his graces.\n\nYes, there are American Christians who consider our blessings an inalienable right granted by God in exchange for, I don't know, being a democracy or something. I've never really understood them.\n\nBut there are also American Christians who believe that God will only be on our side when we are the good guys, not just the lesser of two evils.\n\n(P.S. We're not going to apologize for Korea. Go to South Korea, then go to North Korea and try to tell us what we did was wrong. And as for the Philippines, we inherited them from another power, developed their government and infrastructure, and then gave them freedom. Sure it took a while, but I'm not sure how we compare negatively with any other colonial power in history.)