Excommunication for apostasy: rich Christian tradition....

There is a history, perhaps even a tradition, in the christian faith, of excluding apostates. It is well documented, even revered in the Roman Catholic church, called "Excommunication."
And, the protestant churches have a similar history, without the threat of papal excommunication.
Those who do not subscribe to the tenets of the faith, depending on the person, or group, or authority figure doing the judging, (and it could even be a gang of religious thugs demanding purity from their peers, and/or their leaders), are "ridden out of town" in the fashion of a "western movie".
The tradition has become deeply steeped in the culture of the United States, and even carries over into their statutes. For example, shooting another in self-defence, is recognized in select juridictions as permissible. While carrying guns is recognized as not only permissible, but even encouraged, in order to support and sustain the Second Amendment which provides the right to carry arms (even though it originally meant only for the establishment and sustaining of a militia force against outside enemies).
On the other hand, while killing in war, and killing in the act of stopping or preventing a crime is supported and encouraged, the spectre of a single penny of government funds going to a therapeutic abortion is national apostasy, and one state (South Dakota) is even considering legislation making the killing of anyone serving in a clinic that provides therapeutic abortions permissible, and not in itself a crime.
Currently, unions form the next targeted group of apostates according to the dogma of the wing-nut right-wing theocrats. Among those unions, teachers are high on the list as another group of apostates. Less public outcry seem focused on firefighters and police, presumably because the public considers them more essential, and less easily targetted, by the mobs of dogmatists, who, refusing to waste a crisis, have their political guns pointed at the target they have painted on the backs of public service employees, especially teachers.
One of the current "popes" on the search for apostates, in the U.S. is the Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has painted a target on the back of President Obama, as an apostate to the dogma of whatever business and coporate elite want, is whatever the Republicans will provide, and Obama is an obstruction to that end.
Obstruction is the chief arrow in the quivver of McConnell, as it has been for the last two plus years since Obama was elected. And it is with a religious fervour that McConnell seeks to "excommunicate" Obama from further participation in the government of the United States, as envisioned by the Republicans.
Apostasy, excommunication, obstruction....these are just different names for the same thing: the purification of the republic through the elimination of those who do not measure up to the standards set by those seeking another governmental vatican, ruled by the proper ruling class, the elite.
After all, the elite think more clearly, earn more money, entertain more sumptuously, converse more sophisticatedly, dress more fashionably, ride in more limousines and attend more of the exclusive parties in all of the cities in all of the states, with more of the "beautiful" people attending their soirees as honoured guests, than the plebians, those from the other side of the tracks, those who went, if at all, to the state universities, not to the private colleges, and whose mothers and fathers served as labourers and clerks and tradespeople and nurses and teachers than their more elegant elites.
And so, what is really going on in Wisconsin and other state capitals, allegedly because there is a shortfall in the state budgets, is a war on the poor and the middle class, stripping away the unions right to collective bargaining, as a measure to reduce the state deficits and debts...when everyone knows, as do the Koch brothers who are funding Scott Walker's campaign of "cleansing" of the proletariat from the negotiating tables of state bargaining sessions, that the unions and their worker-members are not the cause of the deficits/debts, nor is their gutting the solution to the overspending of the economic crisis.
In large measure, it was the greed, and the failure to oversee that greed among the hedge-fund managers by their political puppets in Washington that generated this massive economic dislocation.
And now, another form of "excommunication" or extermination (of the unions and their collective bargaining rights) by the Republican Vatican is dancing across our television screens in hundreds of thousands of pixels, some in High Definition and some in 3D, with a few in the old standard "low definition."
One has to wonder about the contempt of some christians (the rich ones) for the apostasy of their poor borthers and sisters (whose only sin is that they do not worship at the golden altar of  the gold standard and its accompanying riches), and who also believe in the unbelievable...that the state exists for the benefit of all, and not just those who can buy their privilege and their status and their power. Some apostasy!