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Using My Religion
How Faith-Based Politicking Degrades Democracy and Christianity

...Throughout this long and torturous presidential campaign, something has been causing many Americans of good will to feel uneasy, fidget, or get up to make a snack: the sometimes solemn, often cynically manipulative insertion of "faith" into virtually every campaign speech and political discussion. Rock'em-sock-em Christian candidates trade holier-than-thou barbs and jabber endlessly about that poor exhausted word "faith", all in an effort to prove who's got the biggest pipeline to God. Faith-based politicking is the crowd-pleasing campaign smartbomb that's supposed to blast through every ounce of reason in our heads, and pretty much force us to vote for whichever man wins that round. It works because it scares people, particularly religious people: As the thinking goes, and the chain emails filling Christian voters, inboxes shout, Dare you cast a vote against the Almighty?

Implying that one's values, "character", and decisions come straight from God, hence are inerrant and infallible, is a timeless and shameless trick to short-circuit questions and prevail over others. But when politicians get into this bad habit, Americans, including those of us residing in the much-courted and much-maligned "evangelical bloc", sense that something is terribly amiss.

While Christians of every denomination are viewed by political strategists as mere sheep to be herded this way and that, many of us are not fooled by all the threats that we'd better vote for George W. Bush if we want to take communion or get to heaven. We know, deep in our hearts and minds, that our democracy AND our religion are tainted when preachers tell us how to vote rather than how to be better Christians.

And those of us who were raised in evanglical churches are especially suspicious--though we may not say so for fear of making our neighbors or family members angry--when candidates claim to be spokesmen for God, or imply that they're something even more....