I’ve no doubt that politicians—Democrat and Republican—worry about raising the S-word on the campaign trail (and certainly would never use the A-word), given the extraordinarily high affinity for the religious in American culture. Politicians today must tread carefully even when expressing their own religious tendencies. (Lest they be, well, rather confused as was the case when Howard Dean botched a question about his favorite New Testament book by answering “Job” and then never hearing the end of it.) Proving oneself on the religion front has become par for the course in American politics. (Think John Kerry’s desperate effort—“I was an altar boy—I really was!” in the 2004 race, and more recently, the pressure on Mitt Romney to defend his own tradition, Mormonism, while at the same time convince the American public that Mormonism wouldn’t get in the way of his presidency.)

Rather than watching for religious rhetoric among candidates, we should be asking higher-order questions about whether Americans are capable of an honest conversation about the idea of a secular society and the reality of our highly religious one. Politicians are batting around God-talk for the sake of winning votes, instead of launching a deeper, more truthful conversation about how intensely religion, and in particular Christianity, is embedded in American politics, law, and the constitution, instead of wondering whether or not, as a country, we truly want Christianity to influence our society so greatly.

Productive talk of secularism can only come up when we confront how religious our country really is. Only when we begin to parse how influential Christianity really has been in the way we’ve constructed our society can we begin to see how false the idea that America is a secular nation really is.

To use a term coined by Peter Berger, Americans live under a sacred canopy—whether we like or not.