Today most people think of society as a collection of individuals held together by a government. Now, those individuals have certain beliefs and practices that cause them to come in contact with one another. Among those interests is religion. This is fine, the argument goes, in fact a good thing because it teaches people not to kill one another or take their cutlery without asking. But any attempt to infuse the values and/or practices of a religion into the public sphere is by nature tyrannical. After all, there are no real common values, beyond toleration, on which we can build a society, except intolerant values that cause us to oppress if not kill one another.

The other, older, traditional view is quite different. It sees society as a community of communities. Conservatism, as I have understood it my entire adult life, is rooted in a conception of the human person as inherently social. We grow up in families, in churches, in neighborhoods, and a variety of other associations and communities that help shape how we act, think, and feel. We belong to all these communities at the same time that we are Americans and simply human beings. Different things bind us together in different ways. But a key binding element is religion. Christopher Dawson pointed out that culture comes from the cult. That's not wordplay, but an appreciation of the importance of language. Both culture and cult share a latin root meaning to cultivate — as in one's garden, and as in one's own character. Cultures grow from inherited practices, and religious practices historically have been the most important, binding, and long lasting.

Today, of course, many people consider themselves too sophisticated to bother with such backward thinking. They hold to the Whig view of history, which says religion may have been necessary to bind primitive people together, but we've grown out of all that, even if we happen to remain religious ourselves. Of course, what this actually leaves us with is dying religion and an incredibly thin public morality that leaves the government in charge of deciding what's moral (anything not illegal, but just about anything can be made illegal), with whom we can (and must) associate, and how we can live our lives. Those who dissent hardly dare mention any duties, or even virtues, beyond toleration for fear of being called "taliban." Meanwhile, kids murder kids, mothers kill their babies, fathers abandon their families (or worse) and we can't even count on most people to fulfill their contracts, let alone mere "promises." Morality being a thing of one's own making in contemporary thought and practice, it tends to be disposable when it gets in the way of what one wants.

It is wrong — not just unfair but simply wrong — to say that the only alternative to moral vacuum is some horrible, intolerant religio-fascism or theocracy. The alternative to the thin society we now have is not theocracy, but a community of communities. It is a return to an understanding that most of us live most of our lives, not in politics, or in "private" shut up on our houses, but in SOCIETY — in a variety of social groups that can and should be allowed to determine their own existence, as they should cooperate with other, overlapping groups to make up our public life.

America was always a land of many faiths. But those faiths were allowed to take part in public life in ways they aren't any longer. Something as simple as a nativity scene, something as wholesome as a prayer before a graduation ceremony, so many things that help communities express and deepen their faiths and bonds are now illegal. Why? Irrational fear of religion. Fear that anyone who wants to point out the roots of our society in religion (e.g. American constitutionalism's roots in Calvinist church covenants) is going to destroy liberty; fear that anyone who has a faith different from ours must therefore have nothing in common with us, and so be dangerous if allowed into public discussions; fear that anything but the emptiness of our current public life will take away from our ability to do whatever we happen to want to do.

Not good enough.