America is entering a dangerous time. With every mass killing there will be a growing hunger to restore a spirituality to American public life. With every call for more religion, there will be those, on the outside of our communal life, enraged by the sight of young people holding hands and bowing their heads together. PNS editor Richard Rodriguez is an author and essayist for the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

What we should learn from the murders at Wedgewood Baptist Church -- seven people killed by a crazed gunman -- is threefold: There is a white male rage in America and, at the same time, (and partly in response to that violence), there is a growing religious yearning for national restoration. And our government doesn't know what to do about either.

First, the blazing white male anger in America: it is aimed at institutional America, communal America -- post offices and government buildings, libraries and school cafeterias. Most tellingly, the white male rage has turned in recent months against religious institutions.

In years past, our politicians appointed commissions to study black and brown rage. Everyone knew to be afraid of the dark kid on the sidewalk at night. Black and brown violence, except for racial riots, had a certain intimacy about it. The thug seized on your particular vulnerability, wanted your wallet or sex, or was at war with your rival gang.

The new white male violence is cooler than any we have ever seen. It pits loners against those who belong. We saw it, dramatically, at Columbine High school.

The kids targeted were athletes (the favored insiders) and a black student (who belonged, after all, to a distinct racial group and a government-sanctioned minority group, at that). And two self-professed Christians.

Suddenly, Jewish temples are burned in California and Jewish day care centers are under attack. Christian teenagers are gunned down in a Kentucky junior high school after their morning prayer service. A Korean Protestant is murdered in the Midwest after leaving church. And now Fort Worth, Texas.

The killers in each of these instances may have been crazed, but they were not stupid. What more logical target of a loner's wrath? Religious institutions marry that hunger within us that is most public with those feelings in us that are most private. No one knows this better than the white male loner, which is why he is constructing his own altars.

It is the constant within religion the world over -- the need to worship together, and to worship in league with generations past, to profess "the faith of our fathers". Often religions become so highly communal, however, that nations go to war with each other, neighborhoods fight over orthodoxies, or families split, irreparably, when one member changes faith.

The United States was constructed on a fear of the communal power of religion. Our Founding Fathers separated church from state, seeking always to protect the individual from the tyranny of the group's belief.

We remain a nation sensitive to the rights of sex and the unorthodox. Just last week, our State Department issued a report critical of the persecution of religious minorities in foreign countries, including two of our allies -- Saudi Arabia's treatment of non-Muslims, and Germany's treatment of Scientologist.

The secular left is content with the status quo. But on the right a growing number of Americans are discontent having their religious beliefs remain only private. They want prayer at the start of the school day and at graduation exercises. Clearly, they say, America needs spiritual renewal.

For almost a decade, a student-led movement, begun in Texas, has called upon teenagers to pray at their school's flag pole for a national moral and spiritual awakening. That's what the teenagers were doing at the Wedgewood Baptist Church at Fort Worth Wednesday night, conducting a "see you at the pole" service.

The white male loner, on the other hand, grows crazed at the sight of teenagers holding hands, praying together. Their communal faith only reminds him of his terrible exclusion.

With every mass killing, after Fort Worth inevitably, there will be louder calls for more spirituality in our public life. One event will lead to the other.

Meanwhile, secular Americans hope to resolve the impasse by calling for more gun control. But clearly, larger difficulties remain. Our judges turn skeptical toward the growing public religiosity in America. And federal agents claim not to know why the young gun man is aiming at them or at those teenagers sweetly praying their faith so that all can hear.