Americans responded by retooling what had been a de facto Christian nation into a Judeo-Christian one. Now Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism were seen as three equally legitimate expressions of American public faith.

Each of these religions, it was believed, affirmed one God, who acted in history, spoke through prophets and holy books, and laid down and enforced His (and this was a male God) Law. Each was also understood to be perfectly compatible with such American virtues as democracy, equality, and liberty.

After 9/11, this holy trinity of legitimate American religions morphed in many minds into Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Earlier presidents had referred to the important faith-based work being done in America’s churches, synagogues, and mosques, but after the Twin Towers fell, this sort of inclusive rhetoric became imperative in political circles—an interfaith gathering without an imam now seemed unworthy of the name.

What intrigues me about this new notion of a Judeo-Christian-Islamic (aka Abrahamic) America is how it manages to be both inclusive and exclusive at the same time. Obviously, it admits Muslims in what had once been a Protestant-Catholic-Jewish club. But by stressing such Western religious staples as monotheism, it obviously excludes religions that affirm no God (Buddhism) and those that affirm many (Hinduism).

I see both the Judeo-Christian model and the newer Judeo-Christian-Islamic one as rear-guard efforts to keep the Christian America model alive—efforts that will likely fail. We live in a country where Buddhists and Hindus are now asking for a place at the table of American faiths—where the sort of “faith-based” social services lauded by the Bush administration are delivered not only by Christians, Jews, and Muslims but also by Hare Krishnas and Zen Buddhists.

Or, as Supreme Court Justice William Douglas put it in 1965, we are “a nation of Buddhists, Confucianists, and Taoists, as well as Christians.”