"The United States seems to be at once the most religious and the most secular of nations," sociologist Will Herberg wrote in his classic work, "Protestant, Catholic, Jew." The year was 1959. Church attendance had hit a new high, biblical epics were a Hollywood staple, and religious intellectuals were enjoying renewed cultural clout. And yet, Herberg noted, millions of ordinary Americans had learned to divorce faith from their everyday public lives.
President Bush's faith-based legislation, stalled in the Senate for months, is going nowhere this year. The reason given is that the proposal, by opening up federal funds to religious groups serving the poor, would create a church-state quagmire. The real reason is a growing and unprecedented contempt for the religious values that animate many private charities.
The White House seems to understand that the favorite solution ofWestern public health elites a "condom airlift" for thecontinent would be a medical and moral disaster. It wasprecisely this approach that was roundly rejected by UgandanPresident Yoweri Museveni. Critics of the Administration's AIDSpolicy for Africa should meditate long and hard on thatalternative.
One way or another, it seems, the status of marriage now depends on who amends the Constitution first. Marriage either will be radically redefined through a gay-rights strategy of litigation, or it will be preserved as we have known it through legislative deliberation and a formal amendment process.