This is a pretty complex topic, but I'll go back to my question that I posed: if your behaviors indicate one thing, but your spoken word indicates another, what does that mean? Is is possible that modern secular culture is simply Christianity-as-act, but with the explicit verbal affirmation of belief removed? Religions change just as much as cultures do, and I would say that modern culture is quite obsessed with "verbal consent" as being the ultimate decider of what something is.

I'm not arguing that this is absolutely the case, but simply that it seems extremely plausible to me.

I think there is a difference between having cultural values and believing in a deity.

We can expand the definition of religion to include those sets of cultural values, but then I worry that:

a. the word religion loses meaning

b. someone who was raised in the Islamic world and comes to the States and converts to Judaism can never stop being a Muslim? Even if they weren't one to start with? That seems absurd to me.

a. The word doesn't lose meaning, unless you insist on what religion means circa ±2000 was the ultimate definition, and no previous or future meanings can ever be correct. Again, the definition of the term has changed over time and the separation of "religion" as a separate thing is itself a modern phenomenon.

b. That's more of a sociological labeling question, but I don't think that's a good example.

> The word doesn't lose meaning, unless you insist on what religion means circa ±2000 was the ultimate definition, and no previous or future meanings can ever be correct.

That's dodging the issue, which is that if you are going to argue that secular humaninsm is identical with christianity, then logically, you must accept that christianity is identical with secular humanism: No God, no creation, no Trinity, Christ is not the son of God in any sense... and if you do, then all the explicitly theological and christian concepts can be stripped out with Occam's razor.

I'd suggest you look at Bellah's Civil Religion in America (1967), which suggests that certain ritual practices, e.g. rising for the national anthem before a sporting event, are religious in nature.

And not that it's particularly definitive, but I'd note that cult and culture share the same Latin etymology.

"Just as Thanksgiving Day, which incidentally was securely institutionalized as an annual national holiday only under the presidency of Lincoln, serves to integrate the family into the civil religion, so Memorial Day has acted to integrate the local community into the national cult. Together with the less overtly religious Fourth of July and the more minor celebrations of Veterans Day and the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln, these two holidays provide an annual ritual calendar for the civil religion. The public school system serves as a particularly important context for the cultic celebration of the civil rituals."

> Bellah's Civil Religion in America (1967),

I've already read it. I agree that there are implicit religious values, perhaps even pseudo-religious, I disagree that it is an actual "religion" as such.

Nor do I particularly subscribe to American civil religion itself.

> who was raised in the Islamic world and comes to the States and converts to Judaism can never stop being a Muslim?

No, according to GP, insofar as that person believes in the sanctity of the individual and human rights etc, that person was Christian all along, no matter their belief in the resurrection of Jesus, or what they think their religion is.

A thesis I disagree with.

Frankly, I find these redefinitions of common words somewhat annoying, as eg. in one of the earlier talks of Jordan Peterson with Sam Harris, where Peterson insisted on defining "truth" as "that which confers long-term evolutionary advantage". No, that's not what truth is. Just invent a new word for it.

Similarly, one can easily say that today's Western secular societies hold many values dear that arguably arose in Christianity (see, I just did!), without then adding that those secular societies are not, in fact, secular, but religious.

It is not that complex an issue, unless you want an answer that is not the obvious, straightforward one.

> If your behaviors indicate one thing, but your spoken word indicates another, what does that mean?

Nothing more than that human thought and behavior is not a consistent logical system, let alone a sound one. As there is no reason to think that it is, this is not problematical, and there's nothing theological to see here.