BOOK REVIEW / RELIGION : A Spirited Plea for Religious Tolerance : THE CULTURE OF DISBELIEF: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion : <i> by Stephen L. Carter</i> . Basic Books:$25, 328 pages

“For Americans to take their religion seriously,” writes Stephen L. Carter in “The Culture of Disbelief, “is to risk assignment to the lunatic fringe.”

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No one is likely to regard Carter as a lunatic, but he clearly takes his religion--and all religion--quite seriously. “The Culture of Disbelief” is Carter’s spirited call for greater tolerance of religious diversity in what he calls “the public square,” a manifesto in favor of the accommodation of religion by law and government.

Carter, author of “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby,” is a classic liberal, but he is not the least bit afraid to strike stances that some people may view as politically incorrect. In that sense, he is a true iconoclast, but the icons he is smashing are the sacred cows of our secular democracy.

For example, Carter declares himself in favor of separation of church and state, but he loudly bemoans “a trend in our political and legal cultures toward treating religious beliefs as arbitrary and unimportant.” And he calls for a degree of respect and real tolerance toward religion that he finds lacking in the politics and public discourse of contemporary America.

“More and more, our culture seems to take the position that believing deeply in the tenets of one’s faith represents a kind of mystical irrationality,” he writes, “something that thoughtful, public-spirited citizens would do better to avoid.”

“The Culture of Disbelief” touches on all the flash points of the encounter between politics and religion: capital punishment, creationism, euthanasia, school prayer and so on. But Carter does not really ask us to accept one or another point of view on any of these controversies; rather, he calls on us to “(allow) the religious to enter the public square to participate in political debate alongside everybody else.”

Carter, a law professor at Yale and an eminent constitutional scholar, argues that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights should not be used as barriers to exclude religion from politics. The First Amendment, he writes, “originated in an effort to protect religion from the state, not the state from religion.” And he calls on government to make room for religion in public life.

At the heart of Carter’s book is an argument for accommodation as the preferred approach to the dealings between church and state. Thus, for example, he praises the presidential pardon of a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses convicted on charges of refusing to register for military service in the ‘40s and ‘50s.

“The accommodation of a religious group’s faith traditions in an otherwise applicable legal framework can best be envisioned as a form of affirmative action,” Carter writes. “When President Bush pardoned the Jehovah’s Witnesses, he was not endorsing their religious claims, but he was seeking ways to accommodate them within a political structure that generally favors the adherents of the mainstream religions.”

Carter, an Episcopalian, brings an open mind and a measure of genuine courage to his book when he confronts us with our discomfort over so-called minority religions, ranging from the Old Order Amish to the Unification Church. And he has the courage of his convictions--he is not afraid to conclude that David Koresh and the Branch Davidians should be afforded the same freedom of expression and right of participation that are enjoyed by, for example, Baptists or Jews.

“We must be able . . . to distinguish a critique of the content of a belief from a critique of its source,” he writes. “Otherwise, the putative ‘fanaticism’ of the Davidians becomes virtually indistinguishable from the ‘fanaticism’ of Martin Luther King Jr.--for both were willing to risk the wrath of secular society for what they believed.”

Carter says he would take his family out of the country if the government ever gets to decide whether his children should attend a religious private school. It’s a rare moment of zeal--and, indeed, it can be seen as the fervor of a civil libertarian rather than of a true believer. Carter is, above all, a reasonable and refined man who is able to regard even the most outlandish and ominous expressions of religious belief with aplomb.

“What is needed, then, is the willingness to listen ,” Carter concludes, “not because the speaker has the right voice but because the speaker has the right to speak .”