I DO NOT subscribe to the view that people who regularly attend church (and a majority of Americans do, including non-Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus etc) are aligned to the 17th-century mentality depicted in The Scarlet Letter (Minette Marrin, You really don’t have to be religious to be a bigot, Comment, Last week).

I have lived in Britain for more than 35 years. Everyone I know in America tends to be well educated, cosmopolitan — from both sides of the political spectrum. My friends in California and New York are apocalyptic over Bush’s re-election; but my friends and family from the supposed “Jesusland” are “comfortable”, not wholly convinced, that they have chosen the lesser evil of two lessers. Nobody I know believes that homosexuals are evil, or rejects Darwin or stem cell research or the individual freedom to choose abortion.

Marrin is falling into the trap of caricaturing religious people into “religiosity” which she describes as intolerant, pejorative and extreme. Michael Moore is a raving caricature and Rumsfeld equally scary.

These are people deserving of labels. Not the tolerant, balanced and sensible Americans who regularly attend the church of their choice, who searched their souls on November 2 and chose a candidate who appeared to share their values of faith, freedom and family. Let us hope that balance and tolerance and global goodwill prevail and that Bush manages to raise his game. We can but pray.

Joyce Devine Klein
Sheffield

BEWARE WOLVES: Your leader on Bush’s victory states that “this was a vote for old-fashioned Victorian values, a belief in patriotism, the family, church and public service”. Those same states which supported Bush’s Victorian values were the ones which, in the 1860s — all churchgoing — did not want the abolition of slavery and which still discriminate against blacks.

As for your statement that “Bush backs civil unions for gays”, this is contradicted by Andrew Sullivan (Focus), who writes that Bush “immediately backed a radical constitutional amendment for the entire country that would bar not just marriage but any legal protections for gay couples”.

Bush’s religiosity cloaks a view of the world which in almost every essence is the total denial of Jesus’s teachings. “Blessed are the rich” and “hate and kill your enemies after you smoke ’em out” are not quite what we always thought Christianity was supposed to be about.

Sentimentality always cloaks brutality, as Jung once wisely observed, and wolves in sheep’s clothing are always ready for the big chance.

Roger Payne
London NW3

LIBERATION: The ultimate sentence of your editorial is disturbing. The “increasingly disturbing death toll”, ie bombing and killing thousands of blameless people, is not conducive to nourishing the “precious flower” of democracy. There is small cause to think that the mass of Iraq’s population believe they have been liberated. To assert that Iraq can “hope for relatively secure elections” ensuring a “step towards embedding freedom and democracy” is an astonishingly optimistic view of the future.

Perhaps if America and Britain were to withdraw their troops, and transfer authority to a United Nations blue beret multinational force incorporating an Arab element, some progress could be hoped for.

Henry Findlay
Menstrie, Clackmannanshire