For 2,000 years, Christians have been arguing over how the meaning of the life and teachings of Jesus applies to the world he left behind. The time was when the rivers of Europe ran red as Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox believers battled for the political primacy of their versions of the true faith.
That debate didn't just push America's first settlers to these shores - it followed them here. In Massachusetts, the Pilgrims established a rigid theocracy, throwing dissenters such as Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, out into the wilderness.
In the Middle Colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland, core values of tolerance and even respect among differing belief systems - Protestant, Catholic and others - began to emerge. It helped that the United States was a frontier nation. Those who disagreed, such as the Mormons, simply hit the road.
Still, political conflict among the branches and sects of Christianity endures. Whether the issue is evolution or the war in Iraq, abortion or the death penalty, the church at which an individual worships increasingly is seen as an indicator of his or her opinions.
Witness the recent White House attempt to reassure President Bush's religious base about Harriet Miers' anti-abortion credentials by spreading word of her membership in an evangelical church.
Such circumstances, Huston Smith says, make for bad politics - and bad religion.
The dean of America's religion historians laments the state of religion in America today.
"Three things," says the author of the classic Religions of Man, rasping out a kind of shorthand over the telephone from his home in Berkeley, Calif. "Polarized between liberals and conservatives. Hijacked by politicians. Beleaguered by secularism."
It is the last in his list that seems most to exercise Smith. An admirer of scientific achievement, he has little patience for the scriptural literalists who argue, for example, that the world was created in six days. Yet he is at least as frustrated with the broad authority that he says the West has ceded to science as the sole arbiter of truth.
"History was sliced in two by the discovery in the 16th- and 17th-century North Atlantic countries of the scientific method," Smith says. "And the benefits of modern science were quick to show themselves, three in number: Goods could be multiplied. Drudgery could be reduced. And health could be extended.
