The element that’s been missing from the public discussion of gay marriage is religion. Sometimes, it appears as though some considerable effort is being exerted in this respect, as in an article in the metro section of this Sunday’s New York Times that went on for 1,500 words about same-sex marriage without mention of religion or God. You had to go to the chart that ran alongside the article to find out that only 34% of Protestants and 34% of Catholics among New York State Democrats say that gay couples should be allowed to marry legally. Among New York Democrats with no religious affiliation, 73% support gay marriage, according to an exit poll of 1,420 Democratic primary voters on March 2. (The poll showed 56% of Jewish New York Democrats support gay marriage.) That gap is more newsworthy than anything else covered in the Times dispatch.

Similarly, the Times’s editorial of Sunday, while mentioning “the world’s largest Baptist university” and “Almighty God,” stopped short of addressing marriage as a religious question. Yet for many Americans, it is one, far more than other public policy matters such as taxes or tort reform. For Catholics, marriage is one of the seven sacraments. For Jews, it is a religious contract. Sure, plenty of rank-and-file Christians and Jews disagree with their religious authorities about homosexuality, as they do on other matters, and there are denominations and branches within both Christianity and Judaism that conduct same-sex marriages and that ordain gay and lesbian clergy.

It’s true, too, that religion was invoked as an argument in favor of the laws banning interracial marriage, laws that thankfully have been cast aside. And it’s true, too, that religions have a way of modernizing with the times, as the Catholic Church showed at Vatican II and as Judaism has shown as its modern-day sages wrestle with medical ethics problems.

America, by the First Amendment to the Constitution, has no established religion, which is an argument for making the state neutral on the question of same-sex marriage. But America is also a country with a strong religious majority — polls show about 60% of Americans say religion is “very important” in their lives, and about the same percentage say that the Biblical accounts of the parting of the Red Sea, Noah and the flood, and the Creation of the world are “literally true.”

We’re sympathetic to the arguments for gay civil marriage on separation of church and state grounds, and we support the free exercise rights of individual religious denominations and clergy to officiate or refuse to officiate at whatever ceremonies they wish to. But until advocates of gay marriage begin addressing the lack of support for the practice among Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Jews, and growing numbers of Muslims, without insulting as bias what adherents believe to be God-given law, they’ll be fighting an uphill struggle in the battle for public opinion in a country with a religious majority.