I liked how the Netflix series The Crown depicted Queen Elizabeth II as having God's ear, as a last line of defense against corrupt politicians. The prime minis

I liked how the Netflix series The Crown depicted Queen Elizabeth II as having God's ear, as a last line of defense against corrupt politicians. The prime minister has to run everything past the king/queen, which hopefully keeps the system honest, or at least in line with tradition. There's nothing like that in the US, by design, due to our constitutional separation of church and state. The words "In God We Trust" were added to our currency in 1864, and "under God" were added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. Although I think we'd benefit from having an ELI5 branch to provide a final sniff test by voters for all controversial legislation. There's only a 10% correlation between what the public wants and what congress passes, because we never managed to separate freedom of speech from freedom of money to buy speech. So the wealthy have a disproportionate say in our political discourse, that's why they push stuff like corporate personhood to maintain power. Which goes all the way back to the formation of the country as a democratic "republic" to hand off unethical decisions around slavery, sexism and colonization to a semi-elected ruling class that maintains the status quo, much like we hand off minor sins like killing animals for meat consumption to butchers. In other words, the US effectively has a lobbyist branch which worships money, instead of a religious branch. Of course the same argument could be used in reverse to say that all religious involvement in government is about the final control of money and power.