The speech Mitt Romney just delivered is in my view an instant classic in American civil religion.

One of the troubling shifts in America’s self-conception over the last generation is not so much our drift toward God as our drift away from worry over the possibility that God might not be all that pleased with us. What made Lincoln great was his confusion about God’s purposes, his awareness that providence was in the last analysis (and perhaps even in the first) inscrutable. What makes so many contemporary American leaders small is their conviction that, come what may, God is on our side, which is to say that we lord over God rather than the other way around.

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One of the grave failures of this generation of American foreign policy makers is their blindness to the power of religion. The veil that both caused and justified this blindness goes by the name of “secularization theory,” which since the 1960s has been promoting as fact the fiction that religion would recede as modernity advanced.

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Every year in the “Death and Immortality” course I teach at Boston University, I challenge my students to consider whether they are “mortals” or “immortals.”

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Yes, and yes. The United States may be one of the most religious nations on earth but Americans know woefully little about their own religions, or the religions of others. . . .

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Like it or not, there is a religious test for the U.S. presidency. Most Americans say that they would not vote for an atheist for president. So, yes, presidential candidates need to have faith and they need to know how to express it.

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The United States may be secular by law, but it is Christian by choice, and for much of American history Christians have lorded over American culture. This began to change during World War II, when Nazis and Fascists in Europe gave Christians a bad name.

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Two words: “Say something.” I can't tell you how many college students who grew up in interfaith households have told me that their parents kept mum on religion because they didn’t want to “impose” their beliefs on their kids.

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