In American political life it is obviously unhelpful to be viewed as the party of godlessness—everyone gets that. But it’s the how of appealing to the godly that ought to compel a bit more scrutiny, because how these appeals are being conducted now, and by both parties, does not make for an edifying spectacle.

It’s what Robert Bellah and, more recently, Robert Putnam, have been trying to tell us: our well of religiously-informed civic capital has been drying up, and (as we used to say on the farm), you don’t miss the water till the well runs dry. No amount of posturing, no airbrushing over the reality of an atomized society, can change this.