On the one hand, he is inspiring the members of my generation like no other presidential candidate I’ve encountered during my lifetime. I show up for lunch with my girlfriends and several of them have “Obama” buttons pinned to their winter coats. My husband and I have people over for some conversation, drinks, and Guitar Hero, and we end up spending half the evening discussing Obama’s latest oratory triumphs, watching clips of his speeches on YouTube, and waxing poetically about his promises of hope and change. Excitement about Obama among my friends—and students, too—abounds, regardless of race, gender, and religion (or no religion, for that matter).

So yes, Obama inspires revival-style fervor. Can we call it religious, though? I don’t think so.

There’s no doubt that Barack Obama gets people’s blood pumping, gets them excited, motivated, cheering, loudly and proudly—and we need this as a country—but the question remains: how will Obama apply this energy on the ground? Can he only lift spirits? Or can he move them to action, too? And what if we all have different ideas about what kind of action is necessary? How do “hope” and “change” translate on the ground? Obama has us, but what will he do with us now? How will he challenge us to apply all of this fervor in concrete ways? That is the most difficult task.

The subject of religion, specifically, is the one area where I worry about Obama. Obama’s June, 2006 "Call to Renewal" speech advocates what I’d call an "ethic of common ground" when it comes to faith. He says that key to successful dialogue about faith is for people with different religious backgrounds to discover what they have in common, that this is the answer to religious difference, and how conversation about and between religions should occur. We should all come together about our similarities.

That may sound good. But I worry that prizing commonality enables us to ignore the reality of religious difference and diversity, not only among citizens of the United States, but across the globe. Employing an ethic of common ground may force committed believers to bow out of the conversation, or into pretending to be "the same” for the sake of discussion. The pressure to be "the same" can lead believers into silence or apathy when it comes to faith, and suppress, rather than celebrate, true religious diversity. How does religious diversity matter, after all, if no one feels comfortable to express strong belief or a difference in opinion?

One of the major challenges we face, as a country, is to understand the uncompromising religious fervor among people of different faiths in other parts of the world. The best place to begin that task is to do so at home, as we talk to each other about these same issues. But I’m not sure that Obama is ready to reach beyond his all-encompassing, “one message fits all” format, at least when it comes to religion.

Obama is in an interesting position, capturing the imagination of an extraordinarily diverse population of supporters, especially among the young. But will he use this opportunity to challenge us to push each other beyond silence, sameness, and apathy, or enable us to tread water happily under the banner of hope? (Don’t get me wrong: hope is a great message. We need hope! But what do we do with all this hope once we have it?) Obama has all the powerful presence of the best of preachers, but what would be truly inspiring (I think), is if he pushed voters not simply to endure an ethic of common ground, but to discover the real meaning of diversity, which often involves expressing difference, strong difference, even if, in the process, you discover that you are not as alike as the person next to you as you thought.

That would really be something, I think: if Obama dared take all this fervor to awaken us to the reality that a wildly diverse group of people can come together without checking our differences at the door.