I think both extremes are wrong, but the feelings held by those on both sides are genuine, and the first step toward turning a seemingly endless cultural conflict into a conversation that may prove productive is to acknowledge that we are, all of us, acting with good intentions amid the world’s most enduring experiment in self-government and human liberty. In his last speech to the House of Commons as prime minister 50 years ago, Winston Churchill said, “Never flinch, never weary, never despair”—and I would add something I think Churchill would have liked: “Never disparage.” We can disagree without caricaturing and differ without demonizing. Such should be the American way.

As we ponder the issue of how to govern a religiously plural nation, we must first, it seems to me, determine the scope of the problem. We have been divided before: Whig v. Tory during the Revolution, free v. slave through the nineteenth century, and, in what I said earlier I think is the most relevant analogy, in the 1920s, at the time of the Scopes Trial in Tennessee. The twenties were much like our own time: an age of general affluence, of rapid social transformation with the move from farm to city, of the rise of a mass national media in the form of radio, and of questions about America’s role in a global order that, in World War I, had cost us blood and treasure and might again. In the culture wars at home, down in tiny Dayton, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan went at it over the tension between reason and faith, science and theology, freethinking and fundamentalism.

Faith has always been a source of tension in American life. From John Winthrop’s sermon at sea to George Washington’s improvised “So help me, God” at the first presidential inaugural in 1789 to Lincoln’s dependence on Scripture to Franklin Roosevelt’s D-Day Prayer to John Kennedy’s climactic inaugural line—“On earth, God’s work must truly be our own”—religion and religiosity have been part of our public lives.

There is no escaping that. Nor is there any escaping that faith is only one force, not the only force, in our national life, and it is most effective when it is handled with humility, not hubris. Literalism is for the weak; crusades for the insecure. The beginning of our way forward lies in the opening line of one of our oldest founding documents, Thomas Jefferson’s Act for Establishing Religious Freedom of 1786: it says, “Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free. . . .” Listen to that again: “Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free. . . .”

The genius of that thought is how it is at once a rational and theological notion. It assumes, as the great monotheistic traditions long have, that we are all God’s children, that the world and “all that is therein” are the products of God’s hands and heart. He has given us tongues with which to speak, ears with which to hear, and minds with which to ponder, explore, discover, and create. He did not create a race of automatons or, obviously, the reflexively obedient; he created man and woman and endowed us with the great gift of reason. Not to draw on that gift to our utmost would be to defy the Lord and what he wrought—it would be, in religious terms, a sin, a short-coming, a missing of the mark.

The faithful should not fear science, whether it is the study of fossils or genes. For anything and everything that is found under the sun—and, we now know, beyond the sun, in galaxy after galaxy, from here to eternity—is God’s. Thus the acts of contemplation and discovery, of writing poems and finding cures and positing theorems and composing symphonies, are for the religious, acts of piety, and of thanksgiving. For the secular, such things may be about the wonders of nature, or of rationality, or of logic. So be it: the point is that we are all on the same journey, if for different reasons. Aristotle said, “All human beings desire to know,” and Saint Augustine wrote, “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O God, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”

There, in two ancient thoughts, one pagan and one Christian, are words that should give us hope in this new century, for both suggest that life is an unfolding story and an endless search. Many Americans of faith believe the quest will end in a place where, as the prophet Isaiah said, God “will swallow up death forever . . . and will wipe away tears from all faces.” The secular, by and large, may not be so sure of that, but the genius of America is that we have together sustained a nation in which all of us may believe or disbelieve as we wish, reassured that we have the right to be left alone.

An early church father once asked: “What does Athens have in common with Jerusalem? The Academy with the Church?” I would argue that they have everything to do with one another, and the religiously observant, however conservative, can find much common ground with the fiercely secular, however liberal—and vice versa. I admit this is a counterintuitive thought in the Age of Red and Blue, but I think many Americans—and not only those who aspire to be bishops—would prefer to live in a nation that is more purple than not.

Jon Meacham is managing editor of Newsweek and author, most recently, of the book Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship (Random House). These words are adapted from his keynote address on June 8, 2005, during Harvard Divinity School’s Alumni/ae  Day luncheon.

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