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Neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg

Neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg

Last updated on: July 1, 2026 at 3:42 pm by Fred Clark

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Neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg 2026-07-01T15:42:12-04:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

• The PRRI Remonstrance: “New poll: 250 years in, Americans prefer religious diversity.”

According to a new poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, 64% of Americans do not want to live in a primarily Christian nation. Instead, they prefer an America of many faiths without a Christian majority.

“This is the antithesis of the Christian nationalist worldview, which essentially maintains that America was founded as a Christian nation, (and) it should remain a Christian nation,” said Melissa Deckman, CEO of PRRI.

This is interesting. I always have reservations about polling, particularly on matters where the wording of the question can sway the results in a big way, but PRRI is generally pretty good at sussing out the general opinion in general, and it seems to be the case that most Americans like living amidst the religious pluralism and religious diversity of this country.

That 64%-ish majority may not be as loud or as frantically panicked about life in general as the minority of religious chauvinists and would-be inquisitors who desire sectarian conformity, reinforced by the state’s monopoly on violence. But there are, in fact, a lot more of such people — normal, thoughtful people — than there are of the whiny, shout-y theocratic sort.

These normal folk are not, mostly, running around quoting from Roger Williams or from the Flushing Remonstrance, or from Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists or Washington’s letter to the synagogue at Newport. Nor are all of them well-versed in the history of sectarian violence and religious intolerance that made life intolerable for Europe for centuries. They don’t need to know all of that or to be able to articulate all of that to understand that neighborliness and friendliness and the mutual freedom to live and let live is vastly preferable to the unfreedom of any alternative to that.

Most people, like Jefferson, understand that having neighbors who belong to a different denomination or a different religion or who are not religious at all “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg” and not even years of fear-mongering propaganda about “Sharia law” or “the War on Christmas” is going to work on them.

This is also why, as a general rule, this majority of Americans is just simply happier, day-to-day, than the aggrieved minority of would-be religious nationalists.

Something I think gets missed in a lot of the religion-angle coverage of James Talarico’s senate campaign in Texas is that it’s not only about the contrast between his mainline Protestantism and the MAGA-fied white evangelicalism of Ken Paxton. It’s also that Talarico embodies this majority, American-as-apple-pie affirmation of religious pluralism. “Progressive Christianity” may be the source of Talarico’s values, but he’s not seeking to establish and to privilege his religion while restricting or outlawing the religion of other people. Paxton is seeking to establish is own sectarian beliefs as official government policy while restricting the religious beliefs of anybody who says different. And that — according to PRRI — is not something most Americans like.

• Some words put next to each other by David Dark: “Jesus is not our protection against God’s terror. Jesus is God’s loving response to ours.”

• ” If you’re a sports fan for long enough, it’s inevitable that you’ll become a curmudgeon,” Stacey May Fowles writes. “One day you’ll wake up and find yourself yearning for a better time that exists only in your mind.”

Fowles’ version of curmudgeonliness is one I can relate to — a sense of loss for the bygone ability to head to the park on a whim, buying the cheapest, nosebleed seat you can find (and then maybe working your way down the stands later in the game).

In the ’90s I used to do this every other week or so in the summer. You could park somewhere on Pattison Avenue a few blocks from Veterans Stadium, walk up and buy an upper-deck seat to a Phillies game for less than a movie ticket. And since the Phils weren’t contending much in those years, nobody minded if you watched the later innings of the game from some (more expensive, but unsold) seat closer to the field.

That’s how I ended up at a mostly meaningless late-August Phillies-Padres game, sitting two seats away from another guy who’d also just come out by himself to catch a ball game on a summer night. That guy was a big Phillies fan. I’m a Mets fan, but we still got along because we were both fans of baseball itself. And because I also like the Sixers and that other guy, as it turns out, was Maurice Cheeks.

That’s my Mo Cheeks story, but it is not my favorite Mo Cheeks story.

This is my favorite Mo Cheeks story. (And here’s a follow-up, 22 years later.)

• And some other words put next to each other by David Dark: “Be the not-generated-by-AI content you want to see in the world.“

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