In a recent display of incredibly clever, creative and insightful journalism from, say, every news source in America, religious faith is turning out to be somewhat important in the 2008 election. This week, nascent seminarians Barack Obama and John McCain sat down with sectarian, denominational Protestant Christian pastor Rick Warren to be asked about their religious beliefs. Throughout the campaign we’ve heard about Hillary’s lukewarm mainline Protestantism, McCain’s confusing denominational affiliation, and Obama’s fiery black gospel church. Even during the primary season, candidates were asked what their favorite Bible verses were (none of them picked mine), what church they went to, and how superstition was important in their lives. Hillary thanked Jesus for getting him through Bill’s philandering, McCain said he believes in intelligent design, and Obama told us he was a regular churchgoer, except for those weekends where his pastor was saying that the government invented HIV or that white people are evil.

The effort is, of course, to please the so-called “values voters,” which basically means Evangelicals and conservative Catholics. Those fickle Evangelicals, long spoiled by the two parties vying for their votes, now support McCain less than they did Bush in 2004, and Obama even less than they did Kerry. So, this whiny political bloc, long bloated with a sense of the Dominionists being entitled to be kings of America, has snagged a far unequal share of its time in the media. Meanwhile in the Catholic phylum, there is much hand-wringing going on over the fact that the Democrats typically support safe-sex practices and the protection of abortion access rights, but the other guy has earned the adoration of anti-Catholic nutzos like John Hagee and that Obama Nation clown. And so to satisfy them, candidates are endlessly grilled on their beliefs about abortion, equal rights for non-heterosexuals, medical science, and none of them are skimping on the appeasement.

This of course is a far cry from the days when it was the issues that mattered. Why has economic and foreign policy taken a backseat to how many minutes the candidates pray every day? Why are we hearing less about Obama’s plans for environmental change or McCain’s plan to establish a permanent military presence in Iraq and more about Obama’s “journey of faith” and McCain’s Liberty University speech? Does either candidate have any idea that America’s second-largest religious demographic, the “non-affiliated,” actually follows politics every now and then?

Take Obama for instance. One of the most noxious symptoms of this whole religious fervor is his cowardly drive to the center, particularly in his spectacularly Unconstitutional plan to expand the Faith-Based Initiatives office. This office, whose existence is predicated on the idea that religious people know how to spend your money better than either you or the government do, has cost Obama my vote (for now). The secular left’s mantra for many years has been that, when all else fails, vote for the Democrat, but not even McCain has become so downright fundamentalist in his subservience to the theocrat vote as to promise to start giving your money to religious people to bribe them into doing what they claim to do already. What McCain has done instead is to assume the rhetorical default position of the clergyman’s handmaiden, spouting nonsensical blather about Christian Nations and God-given values.

Obama’s stance seems to be that atheists are either too stupid or too greedy to make charitable donations to religious groups, so we’d better just take their money and do it for them, while McCain’s seems to just be that atheism is unAmerican. Neither candidate seems to care that there are 40 million non-religious voters out there whose votes have been carelessly discarded in the name of getting these religionists out of their pews and into the voting booths.

We might disagree on a lot of things, but I think we can all agree that we do not want the government spending our money on religious charities doing their evangelism disguised as good works, and most of us agree that embryonic stem cells do not have moral interests that supersede the moral interests of people with Alzheimers. We do not want you using Leviticus to inform your decision on gay marriage, nor do we want fanatical pro-Israel eschatologists to tell you how long to park the Abrams in the Babylon lot. We want you to be sensible, we want you to reason your way through your platform, and, oh yeah, maybe actually start talking about the issues again. You don’t need the Bible’s permission for this one, don’t worry.

Last 5 posts by Chris Ray

• How much goat’s blood do I have to gargle in order to get a little recognition around here? - December 12th, 2008
• It is time to restore the original meaning of Christmas! - December 2nd, 2008
• Christian theocracy group accuses American Humanist Association of collaborating with “America’s enemies” - November 12th, 2008
• Suppose Colorado’s “life at conception” ballot initiative had succeeded… - November 10th, 2008
• More data is needed to confirm Bloom’s hypothesis about why American atheists are so mean - November 7th, 2008

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