Steven M. Warshawsky has a rebuttal to Christopher Orlet over at The American Thinker. A snippet:

...I have long believed that part of being a "conservative" is being respectful of religion. Or rather, to be more precise, being respectful of Christianity.  Unlike Orlet, I am not offended when someone says that this is a "Christian nation."  It is.  America certainly is not a Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist nation.  As a Jew, I am deeply grateful for this nation's Christian heritage.  No nation on earth treats Jews better.  While there are many reasons for this, I believe that Christianity is part of what makes America the great country that she is.  And as a fervently patriotic American, I will support and defend this country's Christian heritage to my dying days. 

Orlet, like so many other critics of the Religious Right, fundamentally fails to account for the central role of Christianity in Western and American history.  Most, if not all, of the values and principles that we hold dear -- the dignity of the individual, freedom of conscience, political and economic liberty, representative government, and so on -- are inextricably intertwined with the Christian culture that produced, developed, and/or sustained them.  Sure, there were other cultural sources and influences that played important roles.  But to suggest, as Orlet does, that ancient Greek and Roman civilization, let alone the civilizations of ancient Egypt and Babylon, played as great a role as Christianity is, quite frankly, ridiculous.  To see the main roots of our culture in ancient civilizations that ended thousands of years ago -- instead of in the religious and philosophical framework that has dominated the West for the past 1,000+ years -- is to abuse history and defy logic...

Just look around the world today.  Much of the world, outside the West, lives under conditions of tyranny, poverty, and/or barbarism, sometimes all three.  And in modern times, the worst crimes against humanity have occurred, and are occurring, in the non-Christian and anti-religious (i.e., communist and fascist) countries.  Is this a coincidence?  Orlet would have us believe that it is.  Orlet makes light of the connection between the atheistic ideologies that motivated Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and the genocides they committed.  I am not nearly as confident as Orlet that atheism, per se, played no role in these tragedies.  In any event, I believe the historical record is clear:  While life in Christian countries has not always been free or humane, the alternative has been much worse. 

Consequently, unlike utopians of all stripes, I am unwilling to gamble on what the outcome would be if Christianity in this country were replaced with some other ideology -- as the radicals of the 1960s and their present-day followers are trying to do (already with far too much success).  Perhaps surprisingly, Orlet's brand of atheistic conservatism, in struggling so mightily to deny the Christian foundations of American culture, looks a lot like the specious multiculturalism of the left.  Is this a weight he really wants to bear?...