It’s a miracle, really, that we managed to proclaim ourselves one nation, considering the religious convictions of many of the European settlers and explorers who first established communities within what became our national borders.

The Puritans, for example, were hardly seeking freedom of conscience for anyone but themselves and many of our oldest cities grew from mission outposts founded by French and Spanish priests.

And wise as our Founding Fathers have been in crafting a durable Constitution, and freethinking though many of them were, they undoubtedly took a restrained sort of glee in sticking their thumbs in King George’s eye by explicitly rejecting an established Church. It wasn’t entirely genius.

But thank God they did. Or at least I’ll thank God, and you can thank any cosmic force you feel appropriate.

I’d call myself a humanist, except I need some sort of more explanatory modifier, and “secular” doesn’t do it for me. I happen to believe totally and absolutely in God, though not in the way my foreparents did, and I consider myself to be a person of firm faith. I’m just not attached to any dogma, religion or label.

And, again, thank God that in this country I can believe anything, or nothing, and feel free to say so anywhere, to anyone.

But I’m awfully troubled, every election season, how candidates, especially from the party that’s supposed to believe most strongly in separation of church and state, and diversity of beliefs, and freedom of thought, etc. etc., all end up displaying their religious bona fides to reassure an anxious populace that they ain’t no damned godless Commies, or something.

I don’t know about you, and I don’t want to start any fights around the holiday table or anything, but among all the other reasons Hillary Clinton made it impossible for me to vote for her were those what seemed to be every-15-minutes-proclamations of her “strong Methodist faith.”

We have no legally required religious test for candidates for elected office, and religion, therefore, should not ever ever ever be part of campaigning for anything, anywhere, by anyone.

Not ever ever.

I have spent time in two of the modern nation-states founded as religious homelands. I have blood relatives in Israel, and many very dear and cherished friends, plus a considerable number of ex-in-laws, in Pakistan, a country I visited and sometimes lived in, over the course of the past 40 years. And I can tell you that democracy as we understand it in the U.S. cannot survive under such founding principles. I have seen what happens when it withers from a lack of diversity of belief — or when people are afraid, for terribly good reasons, to let others know what they really think or believe.

Democracy here is being dangerously threatened despite that glorious Constitution of ours, and not just by super-egregious flouters of our principles like Roy Moore. Until candidates for any office can say, without dooming their chances, that their personal beliefs are their personal beliefs and irrelevant to their fitness for office, the state of our union will continue to be more perilous, and less perfect, than our founders sought to ensure.

Sarah Crysl Akhtar lives in Lebanon.