Anthony told me about the routine: he was stripped naked, his hands and ankles were lashed together, a pole was threaded between his ankles, and he was hoisted up to hang head down. Then they beat the soles of his feet, sometimes for hours, until they were swollen and finally insensitive to pain.

He told of another inhuman routine designed to harm without breaking the skin or bones. Two thick books were placed on his head, and then two guards, each with a wooden cudgel, beat a tattoo on the books for as long as their inclination lasted. It was designed to produce all the damage of concussion and brain injury but without the external evidence. Anthony told me of continuing bouts of confusion and loss of concentration.

Why was he in prison, on trial for his life–a mandatory death sentence if convicted? Thereby hangs quite a tale and even a warning for us on this continent.

Anthony Alexander was used to living under a certain cloud of suspicion in his native Sri Lanka (once called Ceylon). He is a Christian. Most of his countrymen are Buddhist and Muslim and intolerant of his alien religion.

Sri Lanka has endured a long-running civil war, pitting the Tamil Tiger insurgents against government forces hard pressed to contain a force that draws support from many in the villages.

Alexander was a teacher at a Christian school. It was his job to teach, befriend, and mentor the students. But that calling, that obligation, worked against him when authorities determined that one of his students was a Tiger recruit.

The deduction was frightening. Young rebel at school of suspect, seditious religion. Befriended by teacher, who is clearly a rebel sympathizer. Arrest teacher on charge of being a terrorist.

Anthony Alexander lived two years under the very real possibility of execution. Like many Christians similarly tested, he saw in the occasion a God-given opportunity to witness to the other prisoners. That part of the story is an inspiration to his fellow Seventh-day Adventists and reason to see God guiding through to an unexpected sudden release a few months ago.

But what does Alexander's experience say to any society about the dangers of marginalizing and eventually criminalizing another's religious faith, while equating your majority faith with love of country and loyalty to the state?

It certainly tends to throw a more troubling light on the French government's current program of listing acceptable religions and deligitimizing those "cults" that it sees as dangerous to the republic. The result has been legal harassment of many groups that operate responsibly and freely in the U.S. and Canada.

In both Sri Lanka and France religions outside the majority or national creeds are automatically suspected as a threat to the nation. Such paranoia destroys not only religious liberty but eventually all real liberty.

There are no Tamil Tigers in the U.S. today. There are "secular humanists," there are rapidly multiplying cults, there are booming populations of religions once exotic to North America–Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists.

We can see this religious diversity as a national threat or a real world working out of the United States' unique constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.

As I pen these words the political process is going into overdrive in anticipation of the November presidential elections. Last night I watched the Republican convention held in Philadelphia–the City of Brotherly Love. Yet to come is the Democratic convention. But already there is a sense of moral triumphalism that unchecked might blind us to this national commitment to tolerance–nay, facilitation- of faith diversity.

I sense an almost desperate need to enlist the body politic in a holy war to reform the moral tone of the nation. Indeed, any Christian, or committed adherent of a religious faith, would gladly sacrifice and spend themselves to that goal. But the body politic cannot nuance its endorsement of a faith construct in any way that can avoid disenfranchising large numbers of principled dissenters. The constitution stands as a legal barrier to state-sponsored reformation, and the logic of human history argues for its futility.

The article by Jeffrey Rosen in this issue argues persuasively that the wall of separation created by the warning of the First Amendment is in the process of collapsing like a cold war barrier (my metaphor to fit his point). But unlike that situation where the hollow empire behind the wall had simply evaporated, the lion of state-sponsored religious coercion is actually reawakening around the world and could yet leap our lowering wall.

What America must do is commit to moral action. It must enlist the combined moral force of all faiths in a continuing covenant to respect each other's sincerity and right to hold those views. It must simultaneously keep the political process from playing the role of godfather to religion while at the same time allowing the high values of religious practice to ennoble public discourse.

It is a severe test for a nation begun on Christian assumptions to maintain its way in a post-Christian era. But this is the true challenge for Christian evangelism, not some modern equivalent of the Crusader who hacked his way to Jerusalem, leaving a trail of dead infidels and dead Christianity.

The "In God We Trust" state motto is a banner much fought over of late (see "The God of Our Mottoes" in this issue). It is not an operative legal justification to overturn the clear words of the Constitution. It is a reminder of the very real faith heritage of the people who constructed this Novus Ordo Secularem ("New Secular Order"). That motto signaled just as strongly a commitment to "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's (Mark 12:17).

James Madison, a godly man and an architect of the Constitution, knew that the destiny of NOS Liberty (more than just an acronym, NOS literally means "our" in Spanish!) does hinge on spirituality- personally applied. He wrote this: "We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."