Political-religious debates color election optimism

This piece in today's New York Times takes a religion angle on the upcoming Pennsylvania primary and the thinking of the voters there. The introduction revisits the controversy over the introduction of intelligent design to the public school curriculum in Dover, Pennsylvania, in 2004. There exists in the town "a communal vow of silence" according to the article, as residents try to pretend that cultural divides inspired by religion do not really exist.

The article then changes tack to talk about political correctness and polite, civil discourse in general, returning to a religious theme in a discussion of how new residents created religious plurality that was one of the causes of the split.