Maybe Religious Freedom Isn't Most Important

Of all the potentially explosive issues of 2012, none has fizzled quite like religion. Mitt Romney’s Mormonism never mattered as much as expected, and questions about Barack Obama’s faith remain relevant only to his most obdurate detractors. Yet there is one way in which religion has been a constant in this campaign, and, surprisingly, it concerns something on which the candidates claim to agree.

At last week’s Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner in New York, while Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney used their attempts at stand-up comedy to throw punches disguised as punchlines, it fell to the event’s host, Cardinal Timothy Michael Dolan, to offer words intended to bring both sides together. Addressing the bipartisan, religiously diverse crowd, Dolan greeted them collectively as “people of faith and loyal Americans, loving a country which considers religious liberty our first and most cherished freedom.”