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.

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

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.

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."

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.

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.

> 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.