Gripping as I found it to watch the various campaigns from a distance, uninvolved and unaffiliated to any one party as I am, I also found it immensely frustrating that I couldn't get stuck in and help out where it was needed, and I missed that feeling of being a part of something big.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews distanced itself from the decree, saying the letter was from a marginal and unaffiliated group.
Being unaffiliated is not the same as being atheist or agnostic, but it does suggest a waning of evangelical institutional authority, just as traditional authority in the old-established churches began crumbling several decades ago.Some might well think that a leftward turn for American Christianity would simply restore it to its proper place.
A good place to start is to ask why Mr Hicks might believe it to be a good thing for unions to have the discretion the freedom to negotiate labour agreements that set wages below the new minimum, while also believing it to be a bad thing to leave individual, unaffiliated workers free to accept wages below $15 an hour.A good answer has to do with asymmetrical bargaining power.
These churches, he says, "don't have that sense of triumphalism, that sense that America has to be a great Christian nation".In the last half of the 20th century, membership of evangelical churches boomed while more traditional church attendance declined; today one-quarter of Americans aged 18-29 (and 16.1% of all Americans) are unaffiliated with any faith.
Many nominal Christians do not hold these beliefs, while many of the unaffiliated do.No politician, in either Britain or America, could build a career on appealing to numinous beliefs of the non-aligned.
Such is the clamour for its products that it had to close an online store set up in Australia by unaffiliated enthusiasts.
Mr Jomaa (pictured above) is to pick a cabinet of figures unaffiliated to any party like himself to hold office for an interim period before elections due in 2014.
It estimates that 5.8 billion adults and children around 84% of the world population in 2010 have some kind of religious affiliation.Of the 1.1 billion unaffiliated, many profess some belief in a higher power.
The percentage of unaffiliated voters fell from 36% to 16% that month, as they moved to the DPJ.The lesson for the 2009 election is that winning the flexicons is crucial.
A new survey by the Pew Research Centre shows a sharp drop in the number of Americans who identify with Christianity and a corresponding rise in the number who are religiously unaffiliated.
