Sundays in America

Some weeks ago I received an invitation to have Sunday brunch at Baker Books in Dartmouth with "Sundays in America" author Suzanne Strempek Shea.

Ms. Shea grew up believing, she explained to the packed bookstore crowd, that as a Catholic if she ever set foot in a Protestant church, the ceiling would fall and she would spend eternity in a very hot place. When Pope John Paul II died, she realized she had strayed far from the roots of her faith — no longer attending church at all — and began a spiritual journey home to her own faith with a quixotic yearlong pilgrimage to churches of other Christian faiths across America.

I was struck by the idea of that falling ceiling recently when I saw a New Yorker cover featuring Barak Obama as a Muslim bumping fists with his wife Michelle, portraying the Democratic nominee-in-waiting and his wife as jihadis taking over the Oval Office. Editor David Remnick said the cartoon was intended to cast a sharp light upon a dark "politics of fear."

This week, Barak Obama warned of a campaign that stresses his "differentness." Mr. Obama's gripping search for racial identity — as a black man raised largely by his white mother in his memoir "Dreams from my Father" — should be on every American's summer reading list, irrespective of the politics of an election year.

Yet, Ms. Shea's journey of American faith is a powerful story, too.

As a little girl on her way to church, Ms. Shea said she saw other little girls in her town dressed in their Sunday best headed to other churches. They also believed in God, she knew, but their mistaken doctrine would consign them to hell. Seeking her way back to faith, she began visiting those "other" churches she had been warned about.

"Happy Resurrection Sunday!" was the joyous Easter cry at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Harlem, where she began the quest that would take her to 52 different churches in a year. Gracious fellow worshippers went out of their way to make her feel welcome. On Memorial Day she visited the Cadet Chapel at West Point, to honor the war dead. On the 4th of July, she travelled to the little Maranatha Baptist church in Plains, Ga., where 82-year-old former President Jimmy Carter still teaches Sunday School. She visited the Colorado Springs Cowboy Church, evangelical churches, a chapel in Las Vegas and a Quaker meeting, too.

One week in the fall, she visited Trinity United Church of Christ, where Mr. Obama was baptized, and at least until recently, where he worshipped. Trinity United bills itself as a congregation "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian." It is a church dedicated to social justice, yet it is also a church of strivers, a congregation in pursuit of salvation and the American Dream. Sitting in a pew in this church, Mr. Obama heard a sermon by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and discovered "the audacity of hope." In an age when many churches are nearly empty, here Ms. Shea found the pews packed.

She continued her spiritual journey with a visit to St. Sebastian Catholic Church in Baltimore, where the bishop is named Sharon, and the priest is openly gay. Not your parents' Catholic Church, she wrote, but it might be yours. And on to the Jehovah's Witnesses, and the All Saints Parish.

On the final Sunday of her pilgrimage, Ms. Shea found herself stuck in the Denver International Airport Interfaith Chapel with other stranded travelers of unknown denominations and far flung destinations. It was not her plan, but she had found a place of worship as wide open as America.

Ms. Shea said she has returned to Sunday services in her Catholic church with a new appreciation for those with different beliefs.

These are indeed anxious times in America when fear of "differentness" may be used to divide us. Yet, every exercise in democracy is also a journey of faith. And as Ms. Shea reminded us at the bookstore, these are times when our collective faith can unite us: faith in God, for those who seek it, but also faith in one another, and faith in America, too.