Protecting God’s creation is, I have found in my travels, perhaps the most intuitively religious social issue of our day. Because it is shared by so many faiths, a genuinely interfaith effort on this issue could forge a powerful religious response whose potential would be staggering.

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Fifty years from now, most religious communities will look back with astonishment on the controversy over same sex relations the way we do today on yesterday’s bans on miscegenation.

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One can list about 20 basic dos and don’ts regarding the appropriate use of religion in our elections. Governor Romney got a number right – but disturbingly, three crucial ones wrong.

What he got right was his affirmation that there should be no religious test for office, that no religious authority would control his actions as president, that the oath of office he would take as President to preserve the Constitution would be his relevant promise to God, that the separation of church and state has been indispensable to the strength of religion in American culture, that America’s religious pluralism has been indispensable to our success and that electoral candidates should, inclusively, focus on the moral values that America’s religions share: equality; liberty, commitment to help each other . This could be a primer for electoral candidates to study in getting the use of religion in our elections right.

So what did he get wrong?

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