Two winter breaks ago, I worked in a small running-shoe store in my little home town of Gig Harbor, Wash.  Snow had gently started to fall, peppermint hot chocolate sales were booming at the local Starbucks and Christmas lights were popping up all over nearby homes — so needless to say, I was in a cheerful, festive mood as I helped customers try on shoes and choose the best specialty flavor of holiday Clif Bar.

One day that break, as I scanned the bar code on some spiffy new shoes for a middle-aged blond woman, I decided to take a chance with my newfound customer-relations skills. “Happy Holidays,” I said with a smile as I handed her a brand-new pair of Nikes. The look on her face — somewhere between Rush Limbaugh talking about Barack Obama and Jerry Falwell fulminating against the War on Christianity — immediately made me realize I’d made a horrible, horrible mistake. “Merry Christmas,” she sniffed back haughtily as she stormed out, making me feel like some spectacularly ugly combination of the Grinch and Ebenezer Scrooge.

Reasoning that I did live, after all, in a primarily white, Christian, middle-class town, I resolved to do better with the next customer, who turned out to be an equally middle-aged brunette with a small child. “Merry Christmas!” I grinned as I handed her a new waterproof running jacket. “Happy Holidays,” she snapped back with a glare, looking at me as though I were some arrogant 19th-century missionary hurling fire and brimstone from the pulpit.

As the Christmas (or holiday, if you prefer) season approaches, I’ve started thinking again about how tricky dealing with religion can be, both individually and as a society. It is a subject that has divided persons of a liberal political persuasion, like myself, into two main camps: those believing that we ought to be free to choose our own religion and those believing that society ought to be free from religion altogether.

The latter view is appealing to those among us who resent religion’s irritating tendency to clash with the most basic values of a free society. It is a view espoused eloquently and forcefully by authors like Jon Krakauer in “Under the Banner of Heaven,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her provocative and widely debated “Infidel” and the inimitable Christopher Hitchens in “God is not Great.” And it is a view to which I’ve often found myself attracted.

The illiberal, irrational, obscurantist side of organized religion can be frustrating and even reprehensible. It’s the side that inhibits scientific progress by promoting “intelligent design” in the public schools. It’s the side that causes Muslim and Jewish fundamentalists to dig in their heels over Jerusalem, preventing the establishment of a just and lasting peace. It’s the side that prompted Islamist assassins to target British author Salman Rushdie for death. It’s the side that leads Fundamentalist Mormons to take dozens of wives, forcing girls as young as 12 into marriages with men four times their age. It’s the side that seems inevitably to clash with basic Enlightenment ideas: ideas about free speech, women’s equality, scientific inquiry, human rationality and agency, individual freedom and independent thought. And it’s the side that has sometimes led me to think that the best society would be a society with no religion at all — a sort of latter-day collective Temple of Reason.

This is a view, it seems to me, that a fair number of Stanford students have quite understandably adopted. Anti-religionism looks to be popular across campus, from far-left liberals to far-right libertarians — and I don’t blame them.

But there’s another option, and it’s the option I think the founders had in mind when they drafted the Constitution. It’s a vision of inter-faith cooperation, rather than anti-faith agitation. It’s a vision that you can see at work during the many interfaith services Stanford holds in Memorial Church each year, where Muslims, Hindus, Baha’is, Christians of all denominations, Jews and even people of no faith at all come together to affirm common ground. And it’s a vision that I’m hopeful will continue to grow and develop in this nation of many faiths and beliefs as we move forward together.

I think we’re succeeding, if slowly and messily, in moving toward that reality, and I hope we can continue to negotiate with skill through the thorny First Amendment tangles of free exercise and non-establishment.

But most of all, I hope it won’t matter whether I say “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays” to you this year. I promise I mean well either way.

Miles is sure of one thing — that’d he’d love an email from you. Fulfill his holiday wish by dropping him a line at milesu1 “at” stanford “dot” edu.