The United States is unique -- not sick, not healthy, just different from about every other country in the world -- and the recent Pew survey about religion in America helps to explain why.

Ours is a society of choice, founded and built continuously by people who opted to come to the United States to create a future and, by and large, to forget the past. The American dream is all about choosing who you are and who you want to become. Think about it. We Americans describe our identity as a collection of things we acquire. I “have” a family. I have a spouse and I have a child just as I "have" a job, I have an education, I have an income, I have a house, I have a car and, yes, I have a faith. Naturally I want to choose the one that seems the best fit.

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If American politicians thought they could get away with calling their critics blasphemers and dispatching them to burn in hellfire, I’m sure there are some that would. There have been times in the last 20 years when not a few senators and congressmen had that look in their eye, and not one of them was a Muslim. Fortunately the Constitution and the common sense of our diverse society have kept them in check. Afghanistan is not so lucky. What we’ve seen there in the last couple of weeks looks like a classic case of politicians using religion, in this case Islam, as a cover for their own cynical self-interest.

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“Well-intentioned religious believers”? That phrase, I confess, makes me deeply uneasy. In practice the selflessness of such people can be awe inspiring. In horrible conditions, their powerful faith gives them the strength to endure, to comfort, to heal. But at a policy level when they see practical problems through the narrow prism of dogma the results can be shocking.

The example of the Catholic Church, with its vast human resources and intense convictions, is particularly striking. It is committed to honor and preserve life. But how best to do that? General principles are easy enough to pronounce, but specific cases are the source of enormous anger and misunderstanding, both inside and outside the church, and none has been more contentious than Vatican opposition to the use of condoms to fight AIDS.

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Without quite naming names, Mitt Romney stood before the press and public in Texas yesterday and harked back “almost 50 years ago” to a time when “another candidate from Massachusetts explained that he was an American running for president, not a Catholic running for president. Like him, I am an American running for president. I do not define my candidacy by my religion.”

Romney was talking about John F. Kennedy, of course. But let me say, having just read that speech given almost half a century ago, Mitt Romney you are no Jack Kennedy.

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Sin generally and adultery specifically is the stuff of which soap operas are made, whether as the fiction of afternoon television or an affair of state that leads to impeachment. It’s just irresistible narrative, with all the attendant subplots of passion, guilt, deception, exposure and expiation. But in the United States there’s the added ingredient of overweening hypocrisy.

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Who will defend the Muslim who doubts his faith? Who speaks for the man or the woman who might believe in Allah, by his or her own lights, but does not wish to worship? We hear a great deal in the West about the need for freedom of religion in the Muslim world, usually meaning for observant Christians and Jews. But what about freedom of non-religion: the liberty of the individual to think, to reason, to speak out loud rejecting the dictates of public piety? Few voices are raised, if any, in his or her defense.

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The debate about the language in which we learn and express our faith is often misleading, I think, because amid all the talk of accessibility and historical accuracy, the most important word -- poetry -- is rarely brought into the discussion.

We easily associate music with worship, thinking we mean the power of melodies and rhythms sung by choirs and congregations. But the original music of the great faiths is in the words of the holy books and of the prayers. And that is vital, because, as most of us understand, you don't really "explain" music, you feel it, and the experience of great music is transcendent. It is also memorable -- indeed, unforgettable. So, too, with great poetry. These qualities are not always lost in translation, but when the new language is merely literal and utilitarian it becomes a barrier to the sense of exaltation that many worshippers are seeking.

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I recently attended a lecture by senior members of the Indonesian police about a network of terrorists who called themselves Muslims. Among the Power Point slides presented were mug shots of suicide bombers taken after the fact. Their explosive belts destroyed their bodies but left their heads intact, and the face of each was frozen at the moment of death with an expression of surprise, as if they had just seen or experienced something that really was quite unexpected. Did they behold the gates of Paradise, as they were taught they would by the people who recruited and instructed them in an aberrant version of Islam? Or did they glimpse the depths of hell as they stole away the lives of innocents in their campaign of horror? Where are the souls of those bombers now?

Surely they are nowhere, in the physical sense of a celestial or subterranean locale. If we are talking about a literal cartography of the cosmos, then, no, I certainly do not believe in heaven or hell. Nor, for that matter, do I believe that the word “now” has much relevance. Eternity is not something you check on your watch. If those self-executed murderers’ spirits endured in any way, they were beyond the measurement of present or future time.

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“Primum non nocere.” Doctors know the ancient rule, “First, do no harm,” and that ought to be the moral foundation for interventions in other states and societies. The American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq was an unnecessary procedure, ill considered and ill conceived, with disastrous results. One problem, Saddam Hussein, was eliminated. Countless new and dangerous afflictions were created.

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In 1860, the great British explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton traveled to New York and Washington, D.C., then made his way across the continent to Utah. The book he wrote about his journey, “City of the Saints,” is a rambling collection of observations and interviews by a man who had explored unknown corners of Africa and the Orient, studying languages, customs and faiths wherever he traveled. Now he wanted to know what Mormons and Mormonism were all about.

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