[Mark Edmundson teaches English at the University of Virginia. His book "The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days" is being published this month.]

Late in life - he was in his 80s, in fact - Sigmund Freud got religion. No, Freud didn't begin showing up at temple every Saturday, wrapping himself in a prayer shawl and reading from the Torah. To the end of his life, he maintained his stance as an uncompromising atheist, the stance he is best known for down to the present. In "The Future of an Illusion," he described belief in God as a collective neurosis: he called it "longing for a father." But in his last completed book, "Moses and Monotheism," something new emerges. There Freud, without abandoning his atheism, begins to see the Jewish faith that he was born into as a source of cultural progress in the past and of personal inspiration in the present. Close to his own death, Freud starts to recognize the poetry and promise in religion.

A good deal of the antireligious polemic that has recently been abroad in our culture proceeds in the spirit of Freud's earlier work. In his defense of atheism, "God Is Not Great," Christopher Hitchens cites Freud as an ally who, he believes, exposed the weak-minded childishness of religion. Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins come out of the same Enlightenment spirit of hostile skepticism to faith that infuses "The Future of an Illusion." All three contemporary writers want to get rid of religion immediately and with no remainder. But there's more to Freud's take on religion than that. In his last book, written when he was old and ill, suffering badly from cancer of the jaw, Freud offers another perspective on faith. He argues that Judaism helped free humanity from bondage to the immediate empirical world, opening up fresh possibilities for human thought and action. He also suggests that faith in God facilitated a turn toward the life within, helping to make a rich life of introspection possible.

"Moses and Monotheism" was not an easy book for Freud to write or to publish. He began it in the 1930s while he was living in Vienna, and he was well aware that when and if he brought the book out he could expect trouble from the Austrian Catholic Church. The book, after all, insisted on some strange and disturbing things. Most startling, it argued that Moses himself was not a Jew. How did Freud know? First of all, he claimed that Moses is not a Jewish name but an Egyptian one; second, Freud's study of dreams and fairy tales convinced him that the Bible had inverted things. In the Exodus story, Moses' mother, fearing Pharaoh's order to kill all Jewish boys, leaves the infant Moses in a basket on the river's edge, where he is discovered by Pharaoh's daughter. But Freud maintained that the Jews were the ones who had found him by the river. (In fairy tales and dreams, the child always begins with rich parents and is adopted by poor ones, yet his noble nature wins out - or so Freud insisted.) Freud also said that monotheism was not a Jewish but an Egyptian invention, descending from the cult of the Egyptian sun god Aton.

In March 1938, the Nazis invaded Austria and put Freud and his family in mortal danger. Freud managed to escape from Vienna with the help of the wealthy Princess Marie Bonaparte, whom he adored, and of the government of the United States of America, which he relentlessly disliked. President Roosevelt even took a measure of interest in Freud's case, but that did not change Freud's mind about the rogue republic at all. America is enormous, he liked to say, but it is an enormous mistake.

Before leaving Vienna, Freud gave the Nazis a parting gift. They had made it clear to him that his emigration was contingent on signing a statement saying that he had not been molested in any way and that he had been able to continue with his scientific work. Freud signed, but then added a coda of his own devising: "I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone."

In London, where Freud arrived in June 1938, he encountered another sort of resistance to finishing and publishing the Moses book. The first person who came to see him at his house on Elsworthy Road was his neighbor, a Jewish scholar named Abraham Yahuda. Yahuda had gotten wind of the contents of the volume and had come to beseech Freud not to publish. Didn't the Jews have enough trouble in the world without one of their number saying that Moses was not Jewish and that - in contrast to the peaceful death depicted in the Bible - Moses had been murdered by the Jews themselves, who resented the harsh laws he had tried to impose on them? Did Freud actually intend to claim that over time guilt for the murder had enhanced Moses' status and his legacy of monotheism, creating in the Jews what Freud liked to call a "reaction formation"? Yahuda was far from being the last of such petitioners. During his early days in London, Freud received no end of entreaties to let the project go.

What did Freud do? He published of course - and not just in German but, as quickly and conspicuously as possible, in English. The reviews were terrible. The private response was often bitter. And Freud was delighted. He reveled in the strong sales figures, shrugged off the nasty reviews and sang his own praises. "Quite a worthy exit," he called the Moses book.

And it was, but not chiefly because of the strange speculations about Moses' identity that worried Yahuda and scandalized the book's first readers. There is a more subtle and original dimension to the book, and perhaps it was that dimension that made Freud so determined to complete and publish it, despite all the resistance. For in "Moses and Monotheism" Freud has something truly fresh to say about religion.

About two-thirds of the way into the volume, he makes a point that is simple and rather profound - the sort of point that Freud at his best excels in making. Judaism's distinction as a faith, he says, comes from its commitment to belief in an invisible God, and from this commitment, many consequential things follow. Freud argues that taking God into the mind enriches the individual immeasurably. The ability to believe in an internal, invisible God vastly improves people's capacity for abstraction. "The prohibition against making an image of God - the compulsion to worship a God whom one cannot see," he says, meant that in Judaism "a sensory perception was given second place to what may be called an abstract idea - a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality."

If people can worship what is not there, they can also reflect on what is not there, or on what is presented to them in symbolic and not immediate terms. So the mental labor of monotheism prepared the Jews - as it would eventually prepare others in the West - to achieve distinction in law, in mathematics, in science and in literary art. It gave them an advantage in all activities that involved making an abstract model of experience, in words or numbers or lines, and working with the abstraction to achieve control over nature or to bring humane order to life. Freud calls this internalizing process an "advance in intellectuality," and he credits it directly to religion.

Freud speculates that one of the strongest human desires is to encounter God - or the gods - directly. We want to see our deities and to know them. Part of the appeal of Greek religion lay in the fact that it offered adherents direct, and often gorgeous, renderings of the immortals - and also, perhaps, the possibility of meeting them on earth. With its panoply of saints, Christianity restored visual intensity to religion; it took a step back from Judaism in the direction of the pagan faiths. And that, Freud says, is one of the reasons it prospered. Judaism, on the other hand, never let go of the great renunciation. The renunciation, according to Freud, gave the Jews remarkable strength of intellect, which he admired, but it also made them rather proud, for they felt that they, among all peoples, were the ones who could sustain such belief.

Freud's argument suggests that belief in an unseen God may prepare the ground not only for science and literature and law but also for intense introspection. Someone who can contemplate an invisible God, Freud implies, is in a strong position to take seriously the invisible, but perhaps determining, dynamics of inner life. He is in a better position to know himself. To live well, the modern individual must learn to understand himself in all his singularity. He must be able to pause and consider his own character, his desires, his inhibitions and values, his inner contradictions. And Judaism, with its commitment to one unseen God, opens the way for doing so. It gives us the gift of inwardness.

Freud was aware that there were many modes of introspection abroad in the world, but he of course thought psychoanalysis was by far the best. He said that the poets were there before him as discoverers of the inner life but that they had never been able to make their knowledge about it systematic and accessible. So throughout the Moses book, Freud subtly identifies himself with the prophet and implies that psychoanalysis may be the most consequential heir of the Jewish "advance in intellectuality." Freud believed that he had suffered for his commitment to psychoanalysis (which did not and does not lack detractors) and clearly looked to Moses as an example of a great figure who had braved resistance to his beliefs, both by Pharaoh in Egypt and by his own people. Moses hung on to his convictions - much as Freud aspired to do.

Though Freud hoped that mankind would pass beyond religion, he surely took inspiration from the story of Moses, a figure with whom he had been fascinated for many years. (He published his first essay on the prophet in 1914.) Freud wanted to lead people, and he wanted to make conceptual innovations that had staying power and strength: for this there could be no higher exemplar than the prophet.

"Moses and Monotheism" indicates that Freud, irreligious as he was, could still find inspiration in a religious figure. Something similar was true about Freud's predecessor, Nietzsche. Nietzsche is famous for detesting Christianity, and by and large he did. But he did not detest Jesus Christ - whose spontaneity, toughness and freedom of spirit he aspired to emulate. "There has been only one Christian," he once said, one person who truly lived up to the standards of the Gospel, "and he died on the cross."

Schopenhauer, to whom both Nietzsche and Freud were deeply indebted, was himself an unbeliever, as well as being an unrelenting pessimist. To Schopenhauer, life was pain, grief, sorrow and little else. Yet he, too, was able to take inspiration from Christianity, affirming as he did that a faith that had a man being tortured on a cross as its central emblem couldn't be entirely misleading in its overall take on life.

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud were all at times able to recognize religion as being what Harold Bloom has wisely called it: not the opium of the people but the poetry of the people. They read Scripture as though it were poetry, and they learned from it accordingly. They saw that even if someone does not believe in a transcendent God, religion can still be a source of inspiration and of practical wisdom about how to live in the world. To be sure, it often takes hard intellectual work to find that wisdom. (As the proverb has it, "He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.") Yet Freud's late-life turn shows us that there is too much of enduring value in religion - even for nonbelievers - ever to think of abandoning it cold.

Mark Edmundson teaches English at the University of Virginia. His book "The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days" is being published this month.

When Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Democrat who last month was elected the first Muslim in Congress, announced he would take his oath of office on Islam's holy book, the Quran, he provoked sharp criticism from conservatives and some heated discussion on the blogosphere.

The ensuing discussion has revived the debate about whether America's values and legal system are shaped only by Judeo-Christian heritage or if there is room for Islamic and other traditions.

"America is interested in only one book, the Bible. If you are incapable of taking an oath on that book, don't serve in Congress," Dennis Prager, a conservative talk radio host in Los Angeles, wrote in a Nov. 28 TownHall.com editorial. Prager, who is Jewish and serves on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, argued that Ellison should "not be allowed" to take his oath on the Quran.

In a subsequent interview, Prager said his objections were not to Ellison's use of the Quran, but to him not using a Bible.

"This has nothing to do with the Quran. It has to do with the first break of the tradition of having a Bible present at a ceremony of installation of a public official since George Washington inaugurated the tradition," Prager said.

Prager added that he would accept Ellison using a Quran if he also used a Bible. Ellison could not be reached for comment.

But Ellison would not be the first member of Congress to forgo a Bible. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., took her oath in 2005 on a Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, she borrowed from Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., after learning a few hours before that the speaker of the House didn't have any Jewish holy books.

"Each of us has every right to lay our hand on the Bible that we were raised with; that's what America is all about, diversity, understanding and tolerance," said Wasserman Schultz. "It doesn't appear that Dennis Prager has learned anything from his time on the Holocaust commission."

Other politicians have departed from the Bible as well. Hawaii Gov.

Linda Lingle used the Tanakh when she took her oath in 2002, while Madeleine Kunin placed her hand on Jewish prayer books when she was sworn in as the first female governor of Vermont in 1985.

"The books had belonged to my mother, my grandparents and my great-grandfather. I wanted to place my hand on the weight of Jewish history and connect with the generations of men and women who helped bring me to this moment," she wrote on the Jewish Women's Archive Web site.

In 1825, John Quincy Adams took the presidential oath using a law volume instead of a Bible, and in 1853, Franklin Pierce affirmed the oath rather than swearing it. Herbert Hoover, citing his Quaker beliefs, also affirmed his oath in 1929 but did use a Bible, according to the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies. Theodore Roosevelt used no Bible in taking his first oath of office in 1901, but did in 1905.

Neither the House nor the Senate keeps record of what holy books, if any, are used in the unofficial ceremonies. In fact, House members are sworn in together on the House floor in a ceremony without any book, holy or otherwise. But in an unofficial ceremony, individual members re-enact an oath so it can be photographed. The tradition dates to the birth of photography, so congressmen could send photos back to their hometown newspapers.

Still, some conservative Christians have taken Prager's editorial as a clarion call. The American Family Association in Tupelo, Miss., for example, sent out an "action alert" to its 3.4 million members urging them to write their congressmen "to pass a law making the Bible the book used in the swearing-in ceremony of Representatives and Senators."

Swearing in officeholders on Islam's holy book "represents a change in our society, our culture, if we hold up the Quran as equivalent to the Holy Bible," said AFA President Tim Wildmon.

"If calling the Bible superior to the Quran in American tradition and culture is intolerant, then I'm guilty."

The Anti-Defamation League, a leading anti-Semitism watchdog group, issued a statement calling Prager's views "intolerant, misinformed and downright un-American," especially since President Bush appointed him to the Holocaust Memorial Council in August.

Prager said the ADL statement was a result of a personal feud with the group's president, Abe Foxman.

"I am a very big supporter and believer that conservative Christians are the backbone of this society. (Foxman) thinks that the religious right is the greatest enemy of American democracy, and he's very angry at a prominent Jew who defends them."

On Monday (Dec. 4), the Council on American Islamic Relations in Washington, D.C., called on the Holocaust Council, which oversees the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, to remove Prager.

"No one who holds such bigoted, intolerant and divisive views should be in a policymaking position at a taxpayer-funded institution that seeks to educate Americans about the destructive impact hatred has had, and continues to have, on every society," the group wrote in a letter to Fred Zeidman, the council chair.

The museum, in a statement Tuesday, said Prager speaks "solely for himself."

In blogs and elsewhere on the Internet, some people fretted that Islam was taking over America. "Mr. Ellison choosing (and being allowed) to take his oath of office on the Koran is that first step toward the Islamification of America," warned one poster on the conservative blog RiehlWorldView.com, while another chimed in that the Bible has "been good enough for Jews, Mormons and others so it's damn well good enough for him."

In Germany, Gerhard Schroeder became the country's first chancellor to pass on the Bible and simply affirmed his oath, while in Iran, religious minorities are allowed to take their oaths on scripture of their choice.

"Affirming" an oath without reference to God or sacred works is an option the founding fathers provided for in the Constitution to protect the rights of atheists and agnostics, argued Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor specializing in free speech and religious issues, on National Review Online, in response to the Prager piece.

"Why would Muslims and others not be equally protected from having to perform a religious ritual that expressly invokes a religion in which they do not believe?"

Many say prohibiting Ellison from taking his oath on the Quran would violate the constitutional provision that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."

Kevin J. "Seamus" Hasson, president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, said, "It makes no sense at all to have him violate the Constitution in order to affirm his duty to uphold the Constitution."?

Catholics, who compose a massive 67 million-person slice of the electorate, favored Democrats in Tuesday's election by 55 percent to 45 percent, according to National Election Pool exit polls.

That's a marked difference from 2004, when President Bush, a Republican United Methodist, won 52 percent of the Catholic vote and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., a Catholic, received 47 percent.

Catholic voting patterns varied by state, but the overall shift helped Democrats in several big states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, according to John Green, a senior fellow at Washington's Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

For much of the 20th century, American Catholics were loyal Democrats, but in recent elections their voting patterns have been largely indistinguishable from the general population.

And for the last quarter-century, conservative Catholics and white evangelicals have increasingly voted Republican, making opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage their top political issues.

Yet since the 2004 presidential election, liberal religious groups have worked to get the Catholic vote back to the Democratic Party, using the issues of poverty, health care and environmentalism as ways to get voters' attention. A liberal group called Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good credits those efforts for the shifts reflected in Tuesday's voting.

Green says the shift is harder to explain.

"It could be that many Catholics that had voted Republican in the past were not real happy with that vote," he said. "And it's entirely plausible that efforts by religious progressives did move some Catholics to vote Democratic."

For years, polls have shown that people who attend religious services at least once a week are more likely to vote Republican, and people who attend infrequently are more likely to vote for Democrats. Democrats did better this year with both groups than in 2004.

The Rev. Tony Campolo, a liberal evangelist and professor emeritus at Eastern University in Pennsylvania, says that since 2004, when Kerry was widely perceived as uncomfortable talking about his faith, Democratic candidates have tried harder to attract religious voters.

"Democrats have learned that when you want to speak to the religious community, you can't do it simply by saying 'I went to church when I was a kid,' or quote a few Bible verses in your speech," Campolo said. "What you have to do," he said, is convince people who are religious that one's views "on things like torture, on things like war, on things like poverty, emerge out of your spiritual convictions."

White evangelicals, who have collectively voted Republican since the 1980s, had been widely expected to sit out the election because of anger over sex scandals and the war in Iraq. But polling indicates they voted in full force, and that Republicans came away with a healthy 70 percent of their votes, down only 8 percentage points from what they gave President Bush in 2004.

Jewish voters, longtime Democratic loyalists as a group, gave congressional Democrats nationwide 87 percent of their vote.

"What the Bleep Do We Know!?," - a quirky cinematic look at the intersection of science and spirituality - spawned worldwide study groups, a cottage "Bleep" industry and a coterie of fans who have been clamoring for a sequel since the film's release two years ago.

That follow-up, "What the Bleep!? Down the Rabbit Hole," is to open in theaters in New York, California, Arizona, Washington and Oregon next month. The first film drew gross revenues of more than $11 million, not bad for a film with no immediately identifiable audience.

But Hollywood still seems to be scratching its head over the little hybrid that combined a narrative starring Marlee Matlin, animation and interviews with scientists discussing how quantum physics, molecular biology and neuroscience can affect one's everyday reality.

The new film is being distributed by the independent Samuel Goldwyn Films, in association with Roadside Attractions, the same team that stepped in to handle the first "Bleep" only after the filmmakers had begun placing it in theaters themselves. But it's not as if bigger companies didn't have a shot at what is starting to look like a valuable franchise. "I took the movie to every major studio in Hollywood and every one passed," said Betsy Chasse, one of the three filmmakers behind "Bleep," about her efforts to find a distributor for the first movie. "We had to prove to the gatekeepers that this film was going to fly before they'd touch it."

Some time after that initial presentation, Ms. Chasse recounted, an executive from a studio that had declined to take on the film leveled with her. "The person said, 'Not only did we not acknowledge and realize that this market existed, but we don't even understand how to get to that market, and we want to know,' " said Ms. Chasse. In other conversations with Hollywood officials, she said, this kind of statement became fairly typical.

According to Ms. Chasse, what puzzles Hollywood is the absence of any defined blueprint for "Bleep." "This type of film isn't a genre - it doesn't have three acts or a formula," she said. "And the Hollywood system is based on genre and formula."

Mark Vicente, another of the "Bleep" filmmakers, said he believed that "Hollywood may not have recognized the large size of the human potential movement and so they're watching this emerging consciousness-inspirational film genre very carefully."

Mr. Vicente, who is now working on some of his own projects "about science and human potential," also suggested that the film might have appeared more unusual because the ideas it presented had been "generally relegated to books."

If studio executives are still bewildered by the film's fans, William Arntz - a longtime student of metaphysical subjects who financed the films with profits from selling two software companies - is not.

"Part of the phenomena is people realizing it's not some weird fringe thing," he said, adding that many viewers had told him they simply had their notions about how the universe worked validated, rather than changed, by the scientific information contained in the film. "It was a conscious decision to use the language of science which, by its very nature, is much more neutral. If you use the language of spirituality, everyone thinks you're talking about religion."

From the start, Mr. Arntz said, people inundated him with requests for more information, asking for transcripts - and even unedited DVD's - of the film's interviews with the scientists. A study guide can be downloaded from the film's Web site (www.whatthebleep.com). The filmmakers followed "The Little Book of Bleeps," a paperback published at the end of 2004 containing quotations from the movie , with "What the Bleep Do We Know!? Discovering the Endless Possibilities for Altering Your Everyday Reality" (HCI), a hardcover book published at the end of last year.

There's apparel, too: "Bleep" T-shirts, baseball caps, necklaces and scarves. Branding? "We trademarked 'Bleep,' 'What the Bleep,' 'What the Bleep Do We Know!?' and 'What the Bleep!? Down the Rabbit Hole,' in multiple categories and in the stylized way they appeared in the titles," Ms. Chasse said.

Mr. Arntz said the new film is an advanced version of the first. "It's like the first movie was Bleep 101 and now it's senior year Bleep 482," he said.

"What the Bleep" is now on DVD, and by summer's end Mr. Arntz and company expect to release a "big box set" including the theatrical version of "Down the Rabbit Hole," a five-hour version of the same film, and another five hours of interviews with the scientists. "We decided, to the best of our ability, to empty our archives and give people more," he said.

As the phenomenon grows, mainstream studios are beginning to see its, well, potential.

Deepak Chopra, a leader in the mind-body-spirit movement, has almost finished production for "How to Know God," a DVD based on his book. He said that 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, which financed the production and distribution, and is also the distributor of the "Bleep" DVD, told him the decision to pursue his project was a result of the first "Bleep" movie's success.

"It takes a very long time for Hollywood to catch up," Mr. Chopra said.

Ms. Chasse is not convinced that doors are opening. "I still hear, 'Don't you think it was a fluke or a one-off?'" she said. "It's easier for them to hope the 'Bleep' goes away than to figure out how to make films that audiences want."