My goodness. No, Thanksgiving is not a religious holiday! And of course, “non-believers” can celebrate it. Just yesterday on our God’s Politics blog, a Native American leader talked about how they can even find ways to celebrate Thanksgiving, despite the dubious origins of the holiday between early settlers and American Indians. And if our indigenous citizens, whom we almost made extinct after the first Thanksgiving dinner, can find a way to re-interpret and redeem the holiday, certainly the rest of us can. My English wife says that her fellow citizens sometimes celebrate July 4 as their “Thanksgiving,” the day they got rid of us!

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As a Christian, and an evangelical Christian at that, I want to say emphatically that America is not, and should not be, a “Christian nation.”

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That Jesus called us to non-violence and not to “just wars” is painfully clear. And the fact that Jesus said the peacemakers, not the war-makers, are the ones who will be blessed; and that when he commanded us to love our enemies he really meant it—is also quite evident.

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I have said and written many times that I think a good and fair discussion of how a candidate’s faith shapes his or her political values should be viewed as an appropriate and positive thing—it’s as relevant as any other fact about a politician’s background, convictions, and experience for public office.

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Yes, I pray. But there are many misunderstandings about prayer. For many, prayer is talking to God, sometimes with a great list of requests and needs—sort of like children’s Christmas lists mailed to Santa Claus.

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Yes, I pray. But there are many misunderstandings about prayer. For many, prayer is talking to God, sometimes with a great list of requests and needs—sort of like children’s Christmas lists mailed to Santa Claus.

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It already is. The “greening” of the Evangelicals, in particular is the major new development.

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Well, that’s a funny way to put the question: Is sex sacred or sin? In the Bible, and most religious traditions, sex can, of course, be either.

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On Monday night, we saw the three Democratic front-runners for the Presidential nomination deal with questions about faith in a comfortable way. They showed that faith is both personal and real for them.

When John Edwards spoke of how he and his wife Elizabeth were actually “dysfunctional” for a time after the tragic death of their son and that only “the Lord” got him through that—nobody on either side of the political aisle could have doubted the authenticity. After what many thought was an inappropriate question about Hillary Clinton’s marriage, the Senator responded with a spiritual depth and maturity that deeply impressed everyone who was watching—even her political enemies. The questions about faith, as they often do, ended up revealing more of the honest humanity of these candidates than we often see, and took them off their stump speeches.

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Well that’s complicated. The chief motivator for American foreign policy in the Middle East is clearly geo-political, with a large and primary emphasis on oil. But for a vocal constituency in a segment of the American evangelical community, an unquestioning and unequivocal support for the Israeli government’s policies is clearly a religious conviction. And that religious conviction of a key political constituency (especially for the Bush administration) bolsters the demonstrably uneven U.S. policy toward to Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The completely one-sided support for Israel from some conservative evangelicals rests on two things: one, a very dubious interpretation (I’m being generous here) of biblical prophecy and eschatology (the theology of the “end times”) in which the modern state of Israel is still equated with the Old Testament notion of “God’s chosen people;” and two, a complete denial of even the existence of Palestinian Christians.

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Is adultery a sin? Yes it is and if we can’t still draw that line in the sand, there are no more moral lines. And is marital infidelity a public concern? I think it is.

Some say that leaders should only be judged on the basis of their policies, and that personal moral failures, while regrettable, are not really relevant to the job. It is true that those who focus incessantly on personal morality often end up looking like the Pharisees who were ready to stone the woman taken in adultery. But what can we learn from the Washington-produced dramas of the combustible mix of sex, money, and power?

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