The same was true of the other arts as well. In novels like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), paintings like Edward Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning (1930, Whitney Museum of American Art), buildings like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater (1935), plays like Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938), ballets like Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring (1944, music by Aaron Copland), and films like John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), one encounters a brand of modernism that is at all times effortlessly and unostentatiously American.

Yet everyone who has reflected more than casually on the American national character has observed that religious belief is one of its most prominent features. We are, as G.K. Chesterton remarked of us in 1922, “the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed . . . a nation with the soul of a church, protected by religious and not racial selection.” Today, at a time when Western Europe has become almost wholly secularized, 91 percent of Americans claim to believe in God, 82 percent identify themselves as Christians, and 62 percent say they would not vote for a political candidate who was an atheist.

The central issue of this election is the war in Iraq, and the senator is the candidate most identified with making the case for war in the first place and for not leaving precipitously now. He did not shrink from the issue in his announcement, admitting the war "has not gone well" and referring to it in appropriately cautionary terms. "America should never undertake a war unless we are prepared to do everything necessary to succeed, unless we have a realistic and comprehensive plan for success, and unless all relevant agencies of government are committed to that success," he said. "We did not meet this responsibility initially. And we must never repeat that mistake again."