It used to be simple.
Or at least it looks like that in hindsight. America was founded on, broadly speaking, Judeo-Christian lines. The framers of the Constitution may well not have all been ‘evangelicals’ but they were all influenced by the King James Bible, as well as by the thinking on ‘freedom’ that grew out of John Locke and other Enlightenment tolerance proponents that, while in some cases certainly radical (the French Revolution), were themselves also operating within or reacting to the same basic set of principles and assumptions.
This broad set of assumptions was promoted fully after the Second World War, and then reacted against vigorously in the following decades by a countercultural movement. Since then, the story has evolved in some familiar ways, but what seems clear is that the basic ground rules are not as straightforward as they once seemed.
