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(September 15, 2004) — As voters of all stripes cast an eye to the fall presidential elections, it seems clear that a sizable majority of registered voters believes a president should be a person of strong spiritual conviction.

But we cannot agree on how much a candidate's personal religious beliefs should inform his public policy statements.

The land is abuzz with God talk. But if we are one electorate under God, we are certainly ambivalent about how much and what kinds of religiosity we are comfortable with.

From George W. Bush, whose strong faith provided him with the moral righteousness to launch us into Iraq, through the Clinton administration's brand of Southern Baptism, Reagan's campaign wooing of evangelical Christians to born-again Jimmy Carter, politicians have been pressed to air their religious views. Mark Silk, Director of Trinity College's Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, suggests that salience of religion in recent political campaigns correlates with the rise of the religious right and the return of the evangelical voice to national politics.

Strong voices from our pluralistic constituency, however, suggest that this trend to turn to the Gideon bible in the Lincoln bedroom nightstand may be deep cause for concern, especially as many non-Christian faiths now call America home.

First Amendment protections clash when our elected officials apply their sectarian beliefs and prejudices to such culture-bound issues as the definition of marriage, abortion, scientific research (e.g. stem cells) and the wording or re-wording of the Pledge of Allegiance. Religious language in the White House as well as in our courts has so easily come to blur church-state issues. Religion has become a divisive force in our society: moral absolutists on one hand, the "hands-off'' camp on the other.

And let's face it. The faith of our founding fathers has usually been expressed in terms of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the popular, though misguided, perception expressed as a generality by many and as a conviction by some is that America is a Christian country.

A truly liberally educated citizenry does not view non-Christian faiths as "false" or threatening. But the current election-season political climate makes it imperative that the very rich and growing diversity in American religious life be acknowledged and more important, accommodated. After all, the Gopalacharis, Nguyens, Hamids and Obasanjos now sit down to dinner with the O'Reillys.

Ongoing research by my Monroe Community College anthropology students under a grant from Harvard University attests to the astounding growth of Rochester's spiritual and religious diversity as well as to the decline of Protestant hegemony in American spiritual demography. Dramatic changes in our local and national religious landscape are everywhere; your neighbor may be a Lubavitcher, offer prayers in Portuguese to Our Lady of Fatima or visit a Hindu temple for puja. Or have no god at all.

Through interviews and photographs (www.monroecc.edu/go/pluralism), my students and I have been "mapping" the religions relatively "new" to our shores since 1965. Less visible and often nested temporarily in larger church buildings, some of these congregations were founded by first-generation immigrants or refugees; other groups have erected their often extraordinary, even spectacular worship centers in the middle of suburbia or in Rochester's urban neighborhoods.

Ethiopian Copts, for example, share space at the Third Presbyterian Church on East Avenue while a Laotian Buddhist temple (one of no less than seven Buddhist groups in the area) and a gold-domed Russian Orthodox Church soar above suburban woods and fields. Construction is progressing on a vastly expanded Islamic Center along Westfall Road. Still other structures provide worship space for Rastafarians, Korean Presbyterians, Jains, Sikhs, Hindus, pagans, Wiccans, followers of Afro-Caribbean Santeria, Baha'is, Armenian, Egyptian, Romanian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian Orthodox, Sufis, Native Americans and others.

Our research has been eye-opening for students. "It's great that we're finding out more about the towns and villages we live in," said Maureen Butler. "The way things are today," said Akeime Coston, "it's better to have a knowledge of different beliefs."

Clearly, people do not leave their religion behind when they arrive on our shores. While we do not have to agree with finer points of other theologies, the very fact of our citizenship compels us to carve out some room for other faiths.

As Diana Eck, Director of Harvard's Pluralism Project, has said, "Kerry and Bush should say, 'I'm running for president for all the people, not just for people of my own religious community; not even just for people who are religious, because the Constitution guarantees the freedom not only to be religious, but also not to be religious.'"

As we turn on our God-o-meters to monitor the final weeks of the 2004 presidential campaign, attuned to how each candidate explains his relationship to Jesus, we need to be wary of public officials imposing sectarian religion in the public square, for, as the Constitution reminds us, there can be no established religion in the land.

Day is a professor of anthropology at Monroe Community College.