America is not and its Christians should not want it to be "a Christian Nation."

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Yes, Islam is a violent religion. So are Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and all the rest.

Islam is also a non-violent religon. So are Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and all the rest.

(The exception would be those which had not had much "earthly" power, such as Baha'i.)

How can they all be violent and non-violent?

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"Social revolutionary" is not a concept that would fit in the time of the 8th century B.C.E. prophets or of Jesus; "social" is a modern understanding and "revolution" is a word invented in recent centuries. So, no, it'd be unfitting to put Jesus in that category.

HOWEVER, in the gospel portraits of Jesus we find plenty of attitudes, expressions, sayings, and teachings which are more readily appropriable by people we call "social revolutionaries" than they would be to those who oppose them.

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My former colleague, emeritus professor and senior super-historian (world history) recently wrote an article pointing out that there have been few, very very few, years of recorded history that does not record wars going on. Since there has presumably been faith, some sort of faith, all sorts of faith, throughout recorded history, believers must have been taking wars into account when they have and express faith.

So it would be a matter of generational egocentrism for us to think that we should be or are unique in dreaming up the question about how war and faith can coexist in mind and in the same century: they always have.

Sad to say, often they coexisted because or so that one could invoke God or the gods in the unholy causes of war. So such believers "kept their faith." The vast majority of believers, we must presume, were benumbed, befuddled, puzzled, often grieving, probably prayerful, sometimes reflecting on human folly, on occasion praising the courageous.

War can indded obscure thoughts of the goodness of God and inspire vivid thoughts about the outrageousness of evil. For some it can mean a loss of faith, or self-examination if they never had it. Albert Camus told the Dominicans who admired him in the French Resistance that if he could believe in a God who let the war go on and let babies die, he would - but he could not. He wanted the priests to respect him in his unbelief if their virtues matched and they inspired each other, and he would respect them. War or no war, he kept unbelieving and they kept believing.

Faith is born, love extended, hope magnified in the face of and in spite of human finitude, chance in nature and history, and transience. I keep my faith, or my faith is kept for me, in the face of the same. I have no secret or special techniques for faith-holding: accept a gift as a gift, and ponder, and wonder.

It is important to separate three questions:

First: should there be prayers to open U. S. Senate sessions?

Second: should Hindus and others of "other religions" be assigned the task of offering prayer there?

Third: is the extraordinary occasion of a Hindu prayer a good opportunity to debate the first question?

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Whether a candidate were intensely religious, indifferent to religion, or indescribably complex about it, I'd welcome a chance to include knowledge of it in an overall appraisal. Religion, non-religion, weak-religion tells us, or may tell us, something valuable about a candidate. We are still seeing book length works on candidate/president Abraham Lincoln, the only non-church member but perhaps the most biblically shaped of all our presidents. And what scholars set forth on that subject helps us evaluate Lincoln's fateful actions.

Having said so and done so, however, I'd be very careful about making the religious commitment determinative; the candidate is running for president, not archbishop of ayatollah.

I'd prefer Deist Thomas Jefferson to many a Bible-spouting galoot who "gets religion" when the cameras come by.

John McCain is not a Bible-spouting galoot. I do think, though, that he is playing into the hands of--maybe he WANTS to play into the hands of those who exploit and manipulate religion or want to be exploited or manipulated by reference to it. There is a blurry line between his talk of "admiration" and feeling at ease with a candidate who is pronouncedly religious, in a time when some come close to violating Article VI of the Constitution and Amendment I of same.

We have enough people around who are mis-writing history, as if the Founders were giving legislative preference to Christianity. James Madison was sure that such a move would lead to hypocrisy and delusions and misuse. Let McCain specify exactly what in what part of the Christian tradition moves him and would affect the way he carries out his duties, and we could vote him or it up or down--and then retreat to quieter forms of national, political, religious, and Christian witness on this subject.

"Is health care for children a parental responsibility or a moral imperative for society?

My answer: an emphatic 'yes'.

Wherever parents can provide most of the care, they will want to, and should. Most of such care occurs in the home or not at clinics. When it occurs at clinics, those who can afford it, will make use of their own resources.

HOWEVER, that version of the question all but implies that responsible parents are in position to provide the care. The horrendous statistics which reveal how many children are not under parental care, or find their parental homes to dysfunctional, so broken, so broke, that they are beyond the range of even reasonable and sometimes of emergency care.

Parents are part of "society." "Society" can be an abstraction, but we remember that it is in the end, people, and people can be agents and use all kinds of agencies. There are voluntary institutions which perform many services. But in the end, societies have to reckon with the role of government. Talking about that leaves the faint-hearted faint. There are all kinds of excuses given by people who do not care if children suffer and die needlessly, and their not caring is based either in political ideologies or resentment or greed.

A generous society, especially one that claims to be influenced by biblical thought, will find ways to provide where other institutions and agencies do not and cannot. All the scriptures that I know commend the weakest, the most vulnerable, the littlest, to the care of the strong, well-established and larger people and institutions.

Other, poorer, nations provide care more readily than we. Rethinking the role of government is a top pirority item. If we can spend $2 billion, which is two-housand million dollars on one of our wars, we can peacefulliy find ways to do some reapportioing of assets and perhasp assauge te consciences of many (religious) citizens, and inspire others to find ways to meet needs.

It has been said that the American founders, as in the First Amendment to the Constitution, "solved the religious question by not solving the religious question." The religious question was: which religion should be established, which should be dominant in the new nation, where nine of thirteen colonies had established and dominant churches. The Bill of Rights took care of that by not taking care of it--by taking it off the table.

Today candidate Mitt Romney "solved the Mormon question by not solving the Mormon question," in an attempt to show that with no religions established or dominant, no one should have to deal with a specific faith, in his case, the Latter-day Saints version. To say that he solved the Mormon problem by not solving it is clear in that, while people of all political stripes listened to him to see how he would deal with Mormonism, he only mentioned it passingly in part of one sentence.

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In 1786 Thomas Jefferson's bill on religious freedom was passed in Virginia. James Madison reported that some legislators wanted to insert the words "'Jesus Christ.' He and the legislature rejected it because it would have worked for "a restriction of the liberty defined in the bill to those professing his religion only. Jefferson saw rejection of the restrictive bill to be "proof" that the legislature "mean to comprehend within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination."

After the passage Maryland's Luther Martin spoke for a few delegates who were "so unfashionable as to think. . . that in a Christian country, it would be at least decent to hold our some distinction between the professors of Christianity and downright infidelity and paganism." As the states ratified the Constitution with its Article VI against religious tests for office, here and there someone would speak up fearing, in one celebrated instance, that the Constitution would be an invitation to Jews and Catholics to come to the United States,, and be a threat to its survival. Another feared that "a Turk, a Jew, a Roman Catholic, and what is worse than all, a Universalist, may be President of the United States." Such advocates always lost badly, and we are stuck with the Constitution the founders gave us. It is godless mentioning only that it was passed "in the Year of Our Lord. . . "

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Three of the four major surviving candidates would "fight to a draw" on religious values and their use in campaigns.

Governor Huckabee is the exception. He is a Baptist minister, is "up front"' about his faith-commitments, definitely "uses" his religion to gain support and cannot not speak of it and, his opponents would say, exploit it.

As for the other three:

They are all more-or-less "standard brand" Protestants.

Senator Obama's is expressed with an African-American resonance that comes with his home church, Trinity United Church of Christ. He cannot not reflect the mantra of his church: "Aunashamedly Black/Unapologetically Christian.

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Somewhat more than daily someone known by someone who endorsed some presidential candidate embarrasses the candidate and gives opponents an occasion to play a game of "Pounce! Gotcha!"

The game threatens to trivialize politics and distract candidates and the public from worthwhile debate.

At the moment we are spending $5,000 per second to wage a war whose origins, prosecution, and possible some-day conclusion deserve most serious attention We are told that the current financial crisis could portend disaster unmatched since the Great Depression, after 1929. All sides agree that the health care system is broken and millions of citizens, especially children, have little access to what is left of it. All the surviving candidates are capable of seriously addressing this topic, but when victims of 'Gotcha!' they victimize the other candidates, giving sick pleasure to those whose vision of politics is narrow, small, and threatened.

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