Americans are a pervasively religious people firmly opposed to the establishment of religion, and that paradoxical situation makes for endless confusion about the proper place of religion in the nation’s political order. Prominent in that confusion is the notion that the separation of church and state implicit in non-establishment further implies the separation of religion and public life. But the first proposition is a constitutional mandate affirmed by overwhelming national consensus, while the second is a denial of American principle and practice to which only radical secularists can intelligibly offer assent.

The point is virtually self-evident. The great majority of Americans say that they believe in God. They further say that they derive their moral principles from their religious convictions. Since no reasonable person wants a politics divorced from morality, it follows that in America religion and politics are necessarily related. Contrary to Alfred North Whitehead, religion is not confined to what people do with their solitude. It has public implications. Religious convictions have inspired and energized a host of American social movements from temperance to the abolition of slavery, from opposition to unjust wars to the crusade for civil rights. America is a religion-saturated society, and it has produced a religion-saturated political culture.

But recognition of the inescapable relation between religion and politics does not by itself get us very far. The necessary question that follows is: How do we get the fit between the two right? There