[R]egardless of the questioning she faced, Jackson's public declarations of faith in God prior to her hearing stand squarely within a historical tradition of the nation's civic religion present since the nation's founding. One of the founders, George Washington, offers a striking example in this regard.

Although his public religious observance was sometimes inconsistent, Washington's public and private writings pulsate with invocations of a higher power. His God--whom he most often referred to as "Providence"--was an unmistakably active agent who intervened to shape the fate of the infant United States.

When successes came during the Revolutionary War, Washington implored soldiers to "show their gratitude to Providence for thus favoring the cause of freedom and America." The general consistently exhorted his men to careful religious observance. "While we are zealously performing the duties of good citizens and soldiers," he wrote in May 1778, just after the harrowing winter at Valley Forge, "we certainly ought not to be inattentive to the higher duties of religion. To the distinguished character of patriot, it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character of Christian."

Washington's public expressions of faith were matched by an unswerving commitment to religious tolerance. When the not-yet-traitorous Benedict Arnold led an army to Canada near the beginning of the war, Washington gave clear instructions about religious tolerance. "[A]s far as lies in your power," he commanded, "you are to protect and support the free exercise of the religion of the country and the undisturbed enjoyment of the rights of conscience in religious matters with your utmost influence and authority." Washington's faith in divine Providence was inseparable from his commitment to freedom.

There were, of course, limits to that commitment. In his lifetime, Washington was one of the nation's largest slaveholders. And although he privately expressed opposition to slavery and a desire (on an unspecified timetable) for slavery's demise, he never once employed his enormous prestige to undermine slavery's malevolent role in American law and politics, Constitution and culture. He only freed the enslaved persons held in his name after his death.

There might be poetic justice in the picture of Ketanji Brown Jackson, a superbly educated and qualified jurist and the descendant of enslaved persons, who is forging her own new American tradition of public expressions of faith as she stands on the cusp of confirmation to the nation's highest Court.

That new tradition echoes a very old one. When the Constitutional Convention got underway, Washington reflected that, if it were to succeed, "it will be so much beyond anything we had a right to imagine or expect ... that it will demonstrate as visibly the finger of Providence as any possible event in the course of human affairs can ever designate it."

The sentiments expressed by Washington mirror what many Americans continue to believe: that there's something providential about the basic freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. A Deseret News-Marist Poll, for example, finds that more than half of American adults believe that the U.S. Constitution is inspired by God, and fully 62 percent believe that the First Amendment, defined in the survey as freedom of religion and freedom of speech, is divinely inspired. And although most Americans say they don't think religion should drive politics, 7 in 10 believe the country would be better off if Americans prayed for each other.

There are grounds for hope in these findings.