But we've struggled even before we were a nation to strike the right balance between the privacy of belief and the need to see faith affirmed in public. Mixed signals are everywhere. We ask priests, ministers, rabbis and imams for their invocations at inaugurations, graduations, even City Council meetings. We proclaim liberty throughout the land, conveniently ignoring that the signature statement on the Liberty Bell comes from the Bible. We're in one of those ambivalent periods again, when God seems to have signed on as a bipartisan campaign adviser and perhaps even has an office in the White House.
Religious expression is in vogue, and worry about morality and ethics dominates opinion polls.
Some may agonize over this quandary, or lament its apparent hypocrisy, but I relish the tension. It helps the free market of religion to flourish. The swings of the pendulum may sometimes give us a case of national spiritual whiplash, but they act as a compass, a course-corrector, pulling us back when we've strayed off the path to one side or the other. The shifting tensions are a necessary part of the landscape. What should be more worrying is the way we expect religion to replace public morality.