Religion in the United States currently takes on a very visible - and in ways puzzling and disturbing - role in public life. In 2004, George W. Bush was re-elected President of the United States with strong support from evangelical Christians. His God-and-country rhetoric and support for government funding of faith communities signaled a worrisome alliance between political neoconservatives and evangelical Christianity and led to a blurring of boundaries between religion and government, despite an official legal separation of church and state. To critics, it looked, and looks, as if a national religion has been “institutionalized.”

Recent developments have spurred secular reaction. One of the clearest signs of the reaction was the lawsuit brought to the Supreme Court in 2004 by Michael Newdow, an atheist who charged that the phrase “a nation under God” in the pledge of allegiance as it was recited in public schools violated the separation of church and state and was therefore unconstitutional. Though the court has not ruled on the substance of the case, it has spawned considerable controversy touching on what amounts to a sensitive and unresolved issue in American national identity.