The GOP’s testing religiosity

In this week’s New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg chews through the respective religious protestations of GOP presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney. Hertzberg seems more perplexed than irritated by Huckabee (perhaps he hasn’t read about Huck’s Christian Reconstructionist supporters), but he takes Romney’s over-hyped “faith speech” to pieces:

Indeed, the only “religion” that Romney had anything rude to say about was “the religion of secularism.” … Secularism is not a religion. And it is not true that “freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom,” as Romney maintained. What freedom, including religious freedom, requires is, precisely, secularism—which is to say, state neutrality in matters of religion.

Amen to that.