Writing for the Christian Science Monitor, Brad Knickerbocker observes:

For the first time since the founding of the Republic, none of the major party candidates for president or vice president is a WASP – a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant – a fact that was confirmed when Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan to be his running mate.

As Knickerbocker goes on to observe, if there’s anyone who wants to vote for a Protestant, they’ve only got one choice this year: Barack Obama. Is this the end of an era?

Interestingly, the VP candidates are both Roman Catholic, but what a difference!

“As Ryan and Vice President Joe Biden articulate their views, we will be tuning into an intra-Catholic conversation pitting ‘social justice’ Christians on the left versus ‘family values’ Christians on the right,” writes Boston University religion scholar Stephen Prothero on his CNN blog.

That right there betrays a good bit of the shallowness and hypocrisy of the so-called “family values” of the right. The left has long supported family-friendly policies that support all families (not just the well-to-do ones) as well as promoting civil liberties and justice. The so-called “family values” of the right, by contrast, are working hard to get the government invading people’s privacy, taking away their individual liberty, and shifting the greater part of the burden away from the wealthy and onto those least able to bear it. Real family values wouldn’t be described as being opposed to social justice.

All in all, it’s going to be an interesting election.