Four and a half decades ago, Congress established the National Endowment for the Humanities to address "the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life." As head of this unique federal agency, I have embarked on a 50-state tour to discuss the consequences of a break-down of civility in the land.

Citizens are increasingly losing confidence in the institutions of our nation, particularly government, and are becoming disrespectful of their fellow citizens, their leaders, and even of faith systems other than their own. The great American virtue of tolerance is being eroded as a Florida church announces a Qur'an-burning ceremony on September 11th and citizens attempt to block the building of a mosque near the site of the World Trade Center.

Civility is about respectful engagement, with the assumption that we are all connected and rely upon each other. At its core, civility demands that we show a willingness to consider other views and place them in the context of history, philosophy and life experiences.

Civility is not simply or principally about manners; it doesn't mean that vigorous advocacy is to be avoided. In the context of American history, the tradition of civil discourse symbolized by the New England town hall and the Virginia House of Burgesses was considered by our founders to be the key to holding government accountable.

Spirited debate is a social good. Indeed, it is a prerequisite to avoiding dogmatism and blocking tyranny. In 1776 it led to revolution and, in 1917 and 1941, to declarations of war. Excepting the Civil War where the gravity of the human issues at stake trumped concerns for unity, great care has historically been taken to insure that, even at our gravest moments, we pulled together rather than apart.

There is always a tension in a society that is based on firmly held moral values but which protects diversity of thought as a fundamental right. Transforming this tension into unifying political energy is the genius of our Constitutional system. Central to this transformation are the temper and the integrity of debate, which are often more important than the precise outcome of any issue. Process is our most important product.

This emphasis on process has never been more important. Seldom is there only one proper path determinable by only one individual or one political party. Public decision-making, particularly in a constitutional democracy, does not lend itself to certitude.

Imperfect judgment characterizes the human condition. The best and brightest are not immune from great mistakes. Everybody can learn from somebody else. That is why humility is a valued character trait and why civility is a central ingredient of a democratic society.

Tolerance is the issue of our times, if not all ages. There are, of course, certain things such as hate and intolerance, untruth and hypocrisy, violence and aggression that are intolerable. Nevertheless, bending over backwards to understand how others think and why they act as they do is a never-ending social imperative.

In this philosophical framework, it is impossible not to be concerned with growing bifurcation in America. It is true that we have had other periods of dissension in what Walt Whitman once labeled our "athletic democracy." A former Vice President, Aaron Burr, after all, killed Alexander Hamilton, our greatest Secretary of the Treasury, in a legal act of incivility -- a duel -- and five decades later, a Congressman viciously caned a Senator in an argument over slavery.

But today's political dialogue is nonetheless debilitating. Our last vice president was called a "fascist," and our current President has been referred to as both a "fascist" and a "communist," sometimes at the same time. And in the past year a history-blind word, "secession," has crept into public speech.

One might ask: what's the problem with a little hyperbole? Plenty.

Certain frameworks of thought describe rival ideas. Others define enemies.

If 400,000 American soldiers sacrificed their lives to defeat fascism, if tens of thousands more gave their lives to hold communism at bay, and if we fought a civil war to preserve the union, isn't it a citizen's obligation to apply perspective to incendiary words that once summoned the country to war?

And shouldn't we think through the implications for social cohesion at home and national security abroad when individuals object to fellow citizens practicing their chosen faith? Qur'an-burning and mosque-bashing are not the American way.

The Bill of Rights that our founders insisted be appended to the Constitution protects freedom of religion. The First Amendment was a reaction both to the integration of church and state throughout most of Europe and to coercive practices that had taken hold in parts of the colonies. The Puritans, for instance, had stocks and pillories and witchcraft trials, and in Virginia a seventeenth century statute gave authorities the right to thrust a bodkin through the tongue of anyone who refused to embrace the doctrines of the Church of England.

Several years ago, Muslims around the world were offended when a Danish cartoonist caricatured the Prophet Mohammed. In a Western setting, caricature of many kinds is a norm. Criticism, including ridicule, of the most established institutions of society, even of a particular faith or cherished religious figure, is tolerated as a prerogative of free speech. From our perspective the Muslim reaction seemed thoroughly out of context with the Enlightenment and freedom of expression. Muslims, on the other hand, saw the West as being profoundly disrespectful.

In the Christian tradition, it is appropriate to find inspiration in visual, often sculptural, images of Christ, but the vast majority of Muslims hold that because Mohammed is sacrosanct any visual portrayal, whether praiseworthy or derogatory, is offensive. The Muslim faith eschews idolatry and finds inspiration principally in the words of the Prophet. Accordingly, if Americans burn copies of the Qur'an and don't respect mosques, the prospect increases that religious conflict will be accentuated. How can this be in our national interest?

Wouldn't it be wiser to make clear that Islam is not the enemy and that we are only concerned about those who hijack a faith system to establish a vocabulary and action plan of hate? And wouldn't it be thoughtful to respect places of worship and make clear that we abhor book burning, especially of anyone's religious texts? Wouldn't this noticeably distinguish our actions from the Taliban's desecration of Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan?

It is true that some Muslim countries allow neither churches nor synagogues. Nevertheless, the Constitutional tradition of the United States is remarkably different. All citizens have the right to worship as their consciences guide them. The social question of the moment is how the religious polarization in geo-politics affects social cohesion at home and vice-versa.

The world is watching and judging. We no longer have the luxury to consider issues of human rights and religious respect exclusively within a community context. Our national security as well as national spirit is affected by whether American citizens of the Muslim faith are received as neighbors and respected in their chosen manner of worship in every corner of the land.

America is a mosaic of subcultures relating to factors like geography, immigration and ethnicity, but we are also a unique national culture that embraces a melting pot tradition. When we fail to respect each other, as we did under slavery; as we did when we established internment camps for Japanese-Americans in World War II; as we did when we incarcerated labor leaders during World War I, we later regretted our narrowness and came to our senses as a people.

Two centuries ago our fledgling Republic rubbed up against problems in the Muslim world when the Barbary pirates plundered the shipping lanes off North Africa. Instead of burning Qur'ans, both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams studied Islam, and each had a Qur'an in his personal library. Jefferson, in fact, was a student of comparative religion and argued that what mattered most was not where the major faith systems differed but where they conjoined.

What could be a more uplifting way of looking at the world than Jefferson's emphasis on the conjunction of religious values rather than the contrasting nature of religious practices?

Citizenship is hard. It takes a commitment to listen, watch, read and think in ways that allow citizens to understand that words reflect emotion as well as meaning. They clarify - or cloud - thought and energize action, sometimes bringing out the better angels of our nature and sometimes baser instincts.

Inflammatory hate speech too easily impels violence. Healing language, on the other hand, such as Lincoln's plea in his Second Inaugural for the union to move forward with "malice toward none, with charity for all" can help reconcile peoples, even in the wake of war.

Likewise, President Obama's call in Cairo for shared respect among peoples of varying faiths can, if heeded, help dampen the prospect of conflict in the world.

Seldom has it been more important to pull together and morally rearm, not with intolerance for others, but with faith in traditional American ideals - honor, dignity, love, or at least respect for neighbors, near and far. As Lincoln noted in words borrowed from Scripture, a house divided cannot stand.