Our culture is resonant with Christian overtones, mixed with the presence of other religions -- exemplified at this season by the presence of Christmas, Chanukah and Kwanzaa symbols and activities in the public square. Even so, our formal government laws and institutions eschew the notion of this being a Christian nation.

With 80% of the American people self-described as Christians, there is no wonder that the tone of public life will often have a distinctly Christian cast, particularly around holiday periods.

Indeed, the pervasiveness of religious aesthetics in America gives lie to the assertion of what Richard John Neuhaus has described as “the naked public square” as a justification to tear down the wall separating church and state. Such assertions confuse the government square (a comparatively narrow place in American life where religious endorsement and establishment is banned) with the public square (where from my perspective, religion is not just alive and well but flourishes with a remarkable vibrancy).

Indeed, the notion that there is a war on Christianity, a war on Christmas, or an effort to sanitize all mention of religion in public is simple bewildering and belied by what I see and hear every day: our bookshelves, music stores, radios, televisions, corporate America (including stores and businesses abounding with Christmas displays and carols), religious music and books, televangelists on TV, Christian music throughout our airwaves, fundamentalist voices on talk shows -- above all, in the over 300,000 houses of worship, where religious worship and teaching are widely proclaimed.

It is only the government that must remain neutral on religion, for the government square is, appropriately, different. This is a government of all the people, by all the people, and for all the people. The vision of our founders asserted that the protection of religion and integrity of government required that government be separated from any law or action even respecting an establishment of religious life. President George Washington and the Senate of 1797 that included many of our Founders could not have been clearer than in the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the United States and the Bey and Subjects of Tripolis of Barbary, when it observed that “…the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

In today’s America, it was Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor who summed up this idea most simply and compellingly in asserting a constitutional ban against government endorsement of religion. She argued that no one should be made to feel like an outsider because of the actions of their own government. In this sense, America is not – nor should it be – a Christian nation.