Competing Ethical Systems James Hitchcock Through much of its history America has been assumed to be a religious nation, and indeed a good deal of the time a Christian nation. God has been invoked with great regularity by public officials, by politicians seeking to become public officials, on money, and in many other contexts. If much of this religiosity has been superficial and even sometimes hypocritical, it has nonetheless expressed the aspirations of probably the vast majority of Americans over the past two centuries. This religiosity reached its peak just prior to 1960. Quasi-official public ideology in the 1950s...