Bruce Ledewitz comments in The Huffington Post:
The political implications of any movement away from the us-them divide between religion and secularism would be profound. The success of the Republican Party in winning large numbers of religiously oriented voters is based on two quite different foundations. One is policy. Religiously oriented voters oppose abortion and gay rights to a greater extent than the public at large. Secularists tend to support both. That is not going to change. The Democrats this year wooed religious voters, but not by offering much compromise on those fronts.
But there is another foundation for this Republican Party electoral success, one that is cultural rather than policy-oriented. The Democratic Party has just not seemed at home with religion. That suspicion was inflamed by the Obama comment about religion.
If secularism were to rediscover the language, symbols and images of traditional religion, now reinterpreted along naturalistic lines, this cultural divide could be bridged. Women and men of good faith could think once again of a broad progressive coalition among religious believers and nonbelievers, which, though it could not agree on all issues, would undoubtedly find a lot of political common ground. Indeed, such a coalition might renew the American radical tradition that has languished since Marxism was discredited.
All that is needed is an appreciation by secularists that religious concerns are the concerns of all human beings with perennial questions that can never go away: who are we, why are we here and what can we hope for? We who do not believe in God have a great deal to learn from traditional religion about how to approach those questions. We can become sufficiently self-confident that we no longer fear words like God and faith, but can look to shared realities behind them.
Read his full post here.