American religious historians have identified three Great Awakenings since the 1740s. In each, a lot of the country was swept up in torrents of enthusiasm that rattled defenders of established order (including churches that joined altar to throne) and dismayed the secular, Enlightenment-minded, too.

Some say that a fourth Great Awakening crested in 2004 but was deflected into America's "civil religion" in 2008, thanks to Barack Obama's biblical cadences. G.K. Chesterton called the U.S. "a nation with the soul of a church," and Obama massaged it enough to win Pastor Rick Warren's blessing at the Inauguration.

But if Obama is carrying on Martin Luther King, Jr's. religious republicanism, he's also one part Harvard neo-liberal and one part Chicago pol. Only a stronger, cannier faith can get us past these parts' inadequacies right now. The faith needn't be "religious" but it must be deep enough to face down great dangers and seductions. And many of us will have to share it, as I suggest in a World Affairs Journal essay I hope (against hope?) that you'll read. Here's why.

A republic and its social movements depend on virtues and beliefs that neither the liberal state nor free markets can nourish or defend, because they're too committed to individual autonomy and rights to distinguish the society's free spirits from its free riders. "Great Awakenings" arise as people despair at this system's inability to separate out those who are gaming it, at the cost of social trust and individual well-being.

The religious right bemoans the gaming but settles for easy answers, on earth as it does in heaven. That leaves the rest of us in a quandary: Somehow, citizens and leaders have to be nourished intensively enough to survive and resist the seductions and vagaries of the capitalist free-for all, which is really a free-for-none, graceless and corrosive of public and private dignity.

Today's conservatives can't admit this, even though it's happening all around them in ways they can't keep blaming on radicals and hippies from "The 'Sixties." No longer can conservatives finesse the contradiction between their own yearnings for a sacred, ordered liberty with their own obeisance to global capitalist riptides that disrupt and degrade the very values and communities they claim to cherish.

So they give us sermons about good behavior. And they grasp for national-security-state militarism or -- like the late Richard John Neuhaus or the young Ross Douthat -- for a religion that reconciles you to a fallen world by focusing your hopes on the next. Sometimes they even look for scapegoats in Muslims, gays, or welfare recipients (the poor ones, not the rich ones), -- anything but look to themselves and the free riders they always front for and to whom they always give absolution.

Montesquieu observed that a republic's virtues aren't Christian but classically pagan. Our republic's best founders and leaders have understood this and melded classical virtues with Christian ones, at least during interludes between Great Awakenings.

They've also drawn on Puritan traditions that Hebraized Christianity, re-introducing an Old Testament wisdom about law and community that Rome and Canterbury had forgotten. I describe this in The World Affairs Journal.

But neo-conservative Jews have miscarried this American synthesis, as is evident in books by David Gelernter, Norman Podhoretz, Elliott Abrams, and others. Most American Jews have been poster children for the best of the synthesis, and 78% of them voted for Obama against the neo-conservative miscarriage of the Hebraic contribution.

American youths have encountered the strong meld of Puritan, Hebraic, and classical, Enlightenment wisdom in crucibles of civic-republican leadership training such as the preparatory school, where FDR underwent his rites of passage. I describe such training a bit poetically in a profile of Ned Lamont's uncle, Thomas Lamont II, here.

Others have found civic faith in Methodist or - like Martin Luther King, Jr., in Baptist - traditions inflected by dark, quasi-Calvinist understandings of the human heart. Obama got some residues of this in Hawaii at the Punahou School -- founded by Calvinist missionaries from Maine, as the historian Paul Burlin explains in his fascinating Imperial Maine and Hawai'i. Obama got it also in his Trinity United Church of Christ, a black branch of the original Congregational Church that was founded by the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay.

This training is hard. It implants in its adepts a civic spine and an intelligence strong enough to understand how power really flows -- not how the supposedly powerful and their neo-conservative apologists always think it flows.

The American civic faith has to be intrepid enough to hew a stone of hope out of a mountain of despair, as King put it and as the historian David Chappell explains unforgettably in A Stone of Hope. The odds against this kind of faith always seem dauntingly long. It's not for the fainthearted.

Is Obama's civic faith as strong as FDR's and King's? Is it strong and supple enough to face down vast concentrations of power, even at the risk of his own political and personal well-being? Is it strong enough in enough of the rest of us to push and support him against bought-and-paid-for majorities in Congress?

The health-care reform battle is so important a test of this, and of us as Americans, that I hesitate to ask you to take time to read more about civic faith's hidden depths and perils. But keepers of a republic always do get thrown back onto the question of how its faith can be nourished and mobilized. I don't have The Answer, but it helps to look at those who thought they did, and sometimes really did.