Americans like to get their religion in a building separate from where they get their car title. The crazy guy who stands outside of the courthouse with a placard featuring dead fetuses and crosses proclaiming ‘repent for the end is near’ is cliché enough, but that man does indeed exist, and he believes what he does is as integral to Christianity as was Paul’s mission to Corinth. Though he seeks to change the world, he does it from outside of the government building. The point is that most of us like our religion separate from our civil government and part of being a nation built upon classically liberal virtues is that we believe that government should support human progress. Faith is something for the individual and the family.

It is this notion, that society is imperfect and that progress is the eventual outcome of our American experience that defines the evolutionary thought of the Founders. Conservative “strict constructionist” thinking is historically inconsistent with American state papers and their intellectualism. The Declaration is a statement of Enlightenment values and the Constitution was designed as a flexible document for this reason. America was an intellectual pet project for extremely smart and practical men. The Founders were anything but orthodox, but instead, were men with varying degrees of reserved radicalism.

And what they left behind for America to figure out was the notion of societal progress. This does not mean progress over religion or progress over tradition, it just means that the previous generation’s mistakes need not be the mistakes of their children, and that we as a nation can correct and amend our faults for the benefit of future society. Rigid orthodoxy was never in the cards for America because it doesn’t allow for correction. In these United States, we believe in national renewal.

Though I am no sociologist, political scientist, or religious scholar, I see this as one of the principal differences between the Islamic/Western clash. In traditional Muslim nations, orthodoxy is a prime value and change is viewed as threatening, sometimes even, as heretical. This is why writers are jailed for asking questions and why poor Mr. Rushdie, who is not even Muslim, is facing persecution again this week for accepting a knighthood offered by the Queen for a lifetime of work. The Rushdie affair has been a twenty-year clash between the right for a man to freely express his art and those who are so obsessed with orthodoxy and so threatened and sensitive to critique, that they would kill a creative writer simply to make a gruesome point.

Orthodox Islam, or Islamist Islam (whatever the appropriate nomenclature) doesn’t share with us the traditions of the Western Enlightenment. They do not share our value in progress. Nor do they want to. Many Islamists see our belief in human progress as being culturally and morally toxic. Why vary from the truth when God has already handed down the truth? They see our belief in human progress condescension and judgment on their way of life. There is some truth to this. American exceptionalism, what is called a new form of cultural imperialism by some, is a threat to people whose religious orthodoxy is their only societal bond, well, other than totalitarian suppression.

We run the fine line of a culture now embracing multiculturalism where sometimes the culture being embraced has no respect, in fact little regard, for the national ethos. The American founding spirit of progress and reason in civil affairs, faith and values at home, is a huge part of this narrative and should not be lost, nor placated, because it is seen as a threat. We cannot control how people perceive us to be but we can control who we are. The important thing is that there is that progress is a value itself worth keeping.