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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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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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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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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