From a netfriend:

I have been somewhat disturbed by the negative attitudes on the list to the “supermodel” making a religious comment.I don’t know whether he did this well or badly, but in a sense I don’t care. It seems to me that one of the greatest difficulties facing the church is that religious language is rarely used in the public sphere. We need words like God, Jesus Christ, faith, prayer and worship to be part of public language. We need it to be OK to mention one’s faith in public. We need to feel OK about mentioning our own faith in public. In my experience, if we do it the right way then it is acceptable to people. For example, I try to always mention God when I explain why as a minister of the UCA I am involved in a rally or meeting about globalisation. When we are too critical of people expressing their faith, we discourage everyone from doing it. Better to live with some expressions of faith that we don’t agree with than to create demons of silence that render us all incapable of sharing the Gospel with anyone in any form. Good communication requires that we express our belief in a way appropriate to the context. We are unlikely to do this if we keep inhibiting one another when we try to communicate. For example, why pick on the Pharisees as those who expressed their faith in the New Testament – why not pick on the apostles, who preached publicly, and on Paul? Surely these are our role models and they were not silent.