Contemporary Americans of a wide range of religious and political orientations find themselves adrift.  Adrift in the sense that we do not know where we stand in history; American history that is.  Therefore, we too often end-up relying on the latest poll. or trend article in the newspaper for our understanding of our political moment. Polls, although they are mostly snapshots in time, also sometimes to a good job of spotting and describing trends. Sometimes they are wildly misguided or grossly biased. Same goes for trend articles.

The problem many of us face is that we do not know enough about our history as a nation: as contending religious groups, classes, interest groups, and political parties. We don't know enough about the gradual extension of rights to more and more classes of people from the time of the founding.  We don't usually know that the struggles over the nature of religious freedom and separation of church and state are not new in our history, and that there is much to learn from the stories of how these matters were handled and how we got to where we are today. This has signficant implications for those of us who seek to engage the religious right of our time.