The compassionate conservative drive for religious groups to provide spiritual and material help to the poor has only just begun. People who see the effect of belief in poverty-fighting may realize that if God apparently changes some lives, He may change more. Also, as other religions have a higher American profile -- the number of Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims in the United States has quadrupled over the past three decades -- more nominal Christians and Jews may explore them and eventually realize that the grass isn't greener in the other cleric's yard.

Overall, these factors lead to movement away from what Richard John Neuhaus called "the naked public square," naked in its lack of religious discussion. We've learned in recent decades that attempts to avoid mentioning religion in public places do not yield neutrality, they leave us naked. We have lived in a society, very unusual in the history of the world, where many intellectual leaders boasted of nakedness. Most people in most places at most times have worn religious clothes.

The "secular absolutism" decried by the Wall Street Journal could freeze to death the already-naked -- but as many of us face pressure perhaps from terrorists but certainly from the terror of growing old, we are likely to see the re-clothing of America.