Along came the justices a few years later to assure us that the Constitution forbade legislative restrictions on the right to abort a pregnancy. That religious-based morality generally disallowed abortion was a matter over which the justices passed in embarrassed silence.

We might not equate these pronouncements -- untouchable because of the untouchableness of the federal judiciary itself -- with assault and battery against religion and, especially, against Christianity. Yet, coming so soon after the comparative serenity of the churchgoing '50s, such developments shocked. And still do.

Just what gives secularists the supreme confidence there's nothing to this religion business? The weight of tradition is on the opposite side. You sense, while taking in the scurryings of the secularist brotherhood, an anxiety to get things done and nailed down lest through a sudden opening in the heavens a thunderbolt should shoot downward.

The brouhaha over Darwin vs. intelligent design gives evidence, if not of fear, perhaps of exasperation with folk who just won't quit wanting to affirm the agency of God in creation. A world without a creative principle -- hence without purpose -- suits secularists well enough. Nor can they see intelligent designers as working at anything short of the subversion of science.

How many Mormonophobes Romney persuaded in his behalf, we can't tell. Give the man credit for at least opening a question that we, the people never face with confidence or enthusiasm: namely, how, in a manner compatible with the constitutional requirement of respecting non-belief in Christianity of Judaism, we avoid kicking the God of the Bible out of history and out of sight. Which looks to be precisely the errand of militant, snobbish secularism.

If it takes a Mormon to make us look squarely at these urgent matters, well, let's hear it for the Mormons. Or, anyway, this particular one.