This will be a short response: I'd advise both candidates the same way. Don't mention religion a single time in the upcoming campaign. Various reverends and pastors have already embarrassed both McCain and Obama, proving that the clergy is even more fickle than the general public. (The fact that these reverends and pastors throw in their private brand of anti-Semitism, reverse racism, social paranoia, apocalyptic fantasies, and other flavors of kookism is even more embarrassing and offensive.) Courting the Christian right worked for the Republican party because the Democrats largely left the field open. Their distaste for wooing fundamentalists was well-founded and remains well-founded.

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For me, the God quiz that Barack Obama endured with barely concealed sweaty palms and that John McCain breezed through with seasoned casualness has no place in American politics. Rick Warren is a feel-good preacher who softened the interrogation and administered no canings, but that's irrelevant. To claim that "faith and politics" is different -- and more acceptable -- than "church and state" is semantic sleight of hand. The reason that any contemporary presidential candidate is forced to suffer the indignity of confessing his religious beliefs in public goes back to the Reagan revolution.

Pandora's box was opened by the right wing in 1980, admitting not just inappropriate matters of religion into political life but also making acceptable a range of prejudice, bigotry, and divisiveness that had been banished by an era of liberal social legislation. Reagan, after all, was the president who, if left to his own devices, would have let thousands more AIDS victims die through neglect and lack of funding for basic medical research.

The implicit reason, well understood by the right and endorsed by fundamentalists, was that gays deserve what they get if they pursue a lifestyle that doesn't match right-wing Christian ideology. Minorities, women, immigrants, and progressivism in general were given the same back hand.

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My preference would be for questions that clear the air of accumulated hypocrisy that has clogged the political system for decades.

1. Both parties have had to placate the South's racist history and tiptoe around continued de facto segregation. Are you ready to lead a second civil rights movement that would accomplish something close to real racial equality in this country?

2. It is no secret that Christian fundamentalists have held the Republican Party hostage and caused a sharp decline in Democratic popularity. Do they deserve to have such lopsided power, and if not, what would you do about it?

A cynic might say, in the wake of so many adulterous politicians, that in future they should issue a preemptive confession before running for President to save The National Enquirer excess ink. Why wait until you are caught? John Edwards' gotcha moment hasn't stirred much glee, perhaps because a rich personal-injury lawyer was an unlikely figure to mold into presidential stature to begin with. On the more humane side, his wife's illness and Edwards' own political failures create a sense of sadness. They both deserve sympathy and the right to retreat into the shelter of home, family, and hopefully a marriage whose wounds will heal. The confession itself smacked of hypocrisy -- as with other cheating politicians, one suspects that Edwards is mostly sorry that he got caught. that he would cheat on a devoted spouse with cancer is best passed over with a cringing silence.

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The new poll on poverty has a certain brazen quality about it, or is it rubbing salt in the wound accidentally? The poorest people in any society are the most vulnerable to economic anxiety. They are the least able to afford downturns and have almost no power to improve their lot through political leverage. The poll revealed that the poor are aware of their teetering situation. Did anyone expect that they would discover anything other than pessimism?

To the degree that the poor still believe in the American dream, a Marxist would say that they have been duped. There are more opiates of the masses than just religion. However, there are no unbesmirched Marxists left, it seems, so the social wheel must turn in a new direction. Having abandoned the welfare state in its most liberal and generous aspects, America ignores the poor as never before -- the idealism of the "respectable poor," the compassion shown to victims of the Great Depression, and the social crusades of the sixties are gone. Is there a new idea that can bridge the immense gap between rich and poor in income, education, health, and opportunities?

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It's very hard not to see God in color. From childhood everyone is taught to imagine God as a person, and inevitably that person has skin the color of those who worship him. Not that the gender "him" is any more accurate than the color black, white, or brown skin would be. A humanized God in any faith is a projection, not a reality. Blue-skinned Krishna is symbolically to Hindus but not to believers who see that image as pagan and primitive. Cultural judgments abound in religion, and these quickly deteriorate into the inane argument over whose God is better than someone else's. Matters grow worse when the argument turns violent.

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Speaking realistically, patriotism can't be divorced from religion. Every war is fought with God on our side -- on both sides. And the prevailing notion is always that the enemy is godless. The ACLU may prevail legally, on the basis of separating church and state, but psychology works massively against them. Soldiers know that they may die in battle, and the armed forces must create an ethos that protects their psyches from the impending danger of the conflict. Team spirit and protecting your buddy is one aspect of feeling safe. Trusting your weaponry is another. But so is the idea that God approves of your cause and implicitly will take you to Heaven if the worst befalls.

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In general, it's fair to say that the popular belief in the paranormal falls outside the official picture of reality. The official picture is grounded in science, rationalism, and materialism. It takes a definition of "natural," after all, before "supernatural" can exist. God was natural in the medieval world, and thus miracles, healings, apparitions of the Virgin Mary, stigmatics, and so on, were considered natural. At the moment, it doesn't matter how many people believe in the supernatural. Until the official picture changes, astrology is bogus, astronomy is legitimate. Ghosts are bogus, apparitions of the Virgin Mary are -- well, that's the rub. Religious people are allowed to cling to a different model of reality, tolerated by the official gatekeepers but not believed in. This gives rise to the curious phenomenon of religious scientists, who manage to hold on to two totally conflicting worldviews at the same time.

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All religious rituals, regardless of faith, are two-edged. The participants receive confirmation that they belong within a charmed circle while shutting out those who don't. As a child in India, I joined celebrations among Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and Parsis. I attended a Catholic school for several years and developed a loving relationship to Jesus and Mary. In a carefree way I felt that I belonged to all of these faiths, but that was childish. I was merely a guest, and the do's and don't of hospitality applied. No matter how many Passover seders you attend, only conversion would make a guest Jewish, and some faiths, such as Hinduism, lack even a conversion process -- unless you are born with a membership card, you are ipso facto excluded.

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The Pew poll results could simply be a curiosity. Without a definition of “God” or “atheism,” who really knows the state of unbelief that an atheist feels? If you take the common image of God as a patriarch sitting above the clouds, it’s entirely possible to reject a personal God while retaining a religious spirit. Einstein spent years explaining this as his position, and few understood what he meant. The fact that Judaism forbids physical representations of God and that Christ describes no such image, either, hasn’t stopped the literalists. They demand comforting pictures and mindlessly equate “abstract” with “Godless.” By the same standard Buddhists are atheists, along with non-dual Hindus and many other flavors of Eastern spirituality.

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There's a single book that I reread every year: "I Am That" by Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897-1981). The title is a quotation. In India the goal of enlightenment is to see reality as a whole. When all illusion has fallen away, one looks around and can say, with complete confidence, "I am That, you are That, and all this is That."

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The inability of some religious people to laugh at themselves betrays, I think, a great deal of insecurity. What if God was a two-year-old toddler and you were his mother? You'd spend your day keeping close watch and only find calm when your child was taking a nap. But God isn't two years old, and he /she doesn't need taking care of. I wish religious people took the analogy seriously, because they are constantly rushing in to protect God, screaming in outrage when he /she is surely laughing. God may very well see the universe as a divine comedy. Every exploding nova could be an explosion of laughter. Nobody knows. But when we look around us, Nature is at play. Every wild animal -- at least when young -- spends its day playing, apparently in innocent delight. A tiger cub and a human infant have that in common. The difference is that the tiger grows up in peace with its ferocity. Humans grow up to find themselves burdened with guilt, shame, and anxiety.

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Faith is too vast a subject to generalize about, -- its effects are indisputably not "New Age nonsense," unless you want to call Jesus nonsense. When he performed healings, he ascribed them to the faith of the one being healed, not to his own miraculous powers. Now that society has shifted its values radically toward materialism, faith healing is a suspect phenomenon. Proof requires an agent one can see -- such as neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, and others -- to "explain" how the brain might trigger the immune system.

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After Barack Obama resigned his church membership, one could hear a collective sigh of relief. The standard reactions were "He had no choice," "It's the right thing to do," and "About time." Trinity Church scares white America, and the appearance of another openly racist preacher made it even scarier. On the YouTube excerpts that show an out-of-control Father Pfleger, it was bizarre to see a white demagogue putting on a black inner-city accent to mercilessly deride a white politician.

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Greed is a moral bad but a functional good. Greedy entrepreneurs have benefited the world with more than a few things without which we wouldn't want to live. It was greed, for example, that led investors in the 1980s to buy so-called junk bonds. Junk bonds combined high yield with high risk. They were roundly condemned at the time by gatekeepers of public morality (at least one national politician, Rudy Giuliani, used this as a springboard, loudly prosecuting Michael Milken, the one-man brain trust of junk bonds). Yet junk bonds allowed FedEx and MCI to get off the ground, two budding ventures scorned by established financial lenders. There's even an argument that junk bonds, had they not been vilified, could have financed enormous changes in the developing world, providing desperately needed funds that otherwise weren't available.

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It's strange to think that America's view of love might be four hundred years behind the times. In Sonnet 116 ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments") Shakespeare devotes the whole poem to extolling love as immortal. "Love's not Time's fool," he declares, praising its constancy in all ages. We, on the other hand, seem quite eager to throw impediments in the way of marriage. I was struck by a news piece on TV a few weeks ago in which a hidden camera was set up in downtown Atlanta to watch people's reactions to a romantic couple necking in public.

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The strikingly new note in the Evangelical Manifesto is that it intends to be conciliatory. In affirming that they totally identify with their faith, the writers quickly declare that their purpose is "not to attack or exclude." This seems to reverse the very impulse that brought the religious right to power politically. By erasing the line between faith and the voting booth, evangelicals absolutely excluded anyone who believes in a secular Constitution and its separation of church and state. They also vehemently attacked candidates who didn't share their viewpoint.

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Half-truths are the bread and butter of politics. This must be so where compromise is the only way to move ahead and warring constituencies have to be placated. But after Watergate personal dishonesty became a central issue, and the simmering contempt that Americans have casually felt toward "lying politicians" was ignited into something far more contentious. Bill Clinton was impeached for a lie that most husbands would at least attempt if caught cheating. This wasn't an indication that America sets a high standard of personal integrity but exactly the opposite: politics has become an arena for vitriol and personal attack. Everybody's untrustworthy if your opponent is cynical enough to keep hurling false accusations (hence the 20% of the public who believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim.)

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The Question: Jeremiah Wright's sermons continue to be an issue in the presidential campaign. Why? What do you think of his preaching style? What do you wish you understood better about it?

I can't help but wonder if the surfacing of Jeremiah Wright -- and his
recent resurfacing on PBS and other venues -- didn't send a shiver of fear
through campaign central in the Obama camp. In himself Sen. Obama
exemplifies the success of racial integration, having lived in both worlds
and understanding each with unaffected sympathy. Rev. Wright is not such a
person. His manner was gentler when talking to Bill Moyers -- you wouldn't
recognize the firebrand from those YouTube video clips -- and he attempted
to sound reasonable without backing down, however, from anything he has said
in the past.

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The Question: In his speech to U.S. bishops last week, Pope Benedict XVI said: "Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted . . . To the extent that religion becomes a purely private affair, it loses its very soul." Do you agree or disagree? Why?

The Pope was on a mission to do more than inspire. He came to stop the steady sinking of a leaky boat. Faced with declining membership and widespread disgruntlement, the Catholic Church in America shows every sign of emptying out its parish churches and cathedrals. They are already empty, more or less, in Europe. Therefore the phrase "private matter" means, "Don't go off on your own." And faith losing its soul is code for a familiar theme to lay Catholics: without the Mother Church you are lost.

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