Rick Warren's Blessing and Obama's

The furor over the minister selected to deliver the invocation at the Inaugural is a measure of how the traditional separation of church and state for more than two centuries has broken down in American life over the past eight years.

In decades of acting out his informal role as the "President's pastor," Billy Graham affirmed the values of Christianity without applying them to political issues and without suggesting a state-sponsored religion at the expense of those with other beliefs or none. No President would have welcomed him to the White House if he had.

Now we have Obama defending his choice of Rick Warren on the grounds that the best-selling minister is tolerant of the President-Elect's political views:

"I would note that a couple of years ago, I was invited to Rick Warren's church to speak, despite his awareness that I held views that were entirely contrary to his when it came to gay and lesbian rights, when it came to issues like abortion...

"And that dialogue, I think, is part of what my campaign's been all about: That we're not going to agree on every single issue, but what we have to do is to be able to create an atmosphere...where we can disagree without being disagreeable and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans."

Barack Obama did not go to Warren's church to discuss politics, but Warren's invitation to offer a blessing at the Inaugural, by his activism on political issues, inevitably is seen as tolerance for if not approval of that commingling of church and state.

The new president has promised Change from what George W. Bush brought to the White House. This, sad to say, looks like more of the same.

Praying for a Doubt-Based Presidency

"God wants me to be president," George W. Bush told fellow believers before 2000. If the rest of us had known His intentions, we would have started building an ark.

After eight years of war and political plague from this faith-based presidency, most voters may be ready for some rational doubt and ambivalence in the White House. Yet the candidates still seem mesmerized by Bush's breakdown between the separation of church and state.

After Barack Obama gaffed about "bitter" voters turning to God and guns, Hillary Clinton was quick to play the God card. “I grew up in a church-going family, a family that believed in the importance of living out and expressing our faith,” she is telling Indiana voters. “The people of faith I know don’t ‘cling to’ religion because they’re bitter. People embrace faith not because they are materially poor, but because they are spiritually rich.”

John McCain left it to a spokesman to do the piety pandering, decrying Obama's elitism and disrespect for "the American traditions that have contributed to the identity and greatness of this country."

Ironically, Obama may take his religion more seriously than either Clinton or McCain. What damaged him in the Jeremiah Wright affair was not rejecting his pastor quickly enough to suit otherwise pious voters who want a president with the "right" kind of religious belief.

In the century before Bush, politicians stopped having to "pour God over everything like ketchup," as Gore Vidal put it during John F. Kennedy's presidency.

JFK himself said it best: "I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed upon him by the nation, nor imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office...

"I want a Chief Executive whose public acts are responsible to all and obligated to none...and whose fulfillment of his Presidential office is not limited or conditioned by any religious oath, ritual, or obligation."

With that attitude, he couldn't get elected today.

What's Offensive Is Romney's Religiosity

He has painted himself into a corner and, no matter where Mitt Romney goes in tonight's speech on religion, he is going to leave messy footprints.

Even the locale is a mistake. Meant to evoke a parallel with John F. Kennedy's deft defense of his Catholicism in 1960, it only underscores how much the role of religion has changed in American politics and, in the Bush era, for the worse.

In Kennedy's time, separation of church and state was an article of faith for mainstream politicians of both parties. Until then, Presidents had all been white Protestant men. Kennedy, in trying to broaden the definition to white Protestant or Catholic men, was arguing that religious belief may be a reflection of a President's principles but is not substantively involved in how he governs.

"I believe," he told Protestant ministers in Houston, "in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish...where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials, and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all...

"I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed upon him by the nation, nor imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office."

Voters agreed and, in Gore Vidal’s 1960 play, “The Best Man,” as a former President recalls the old days when politicians “had to pour God over everything like ketchup,” audiences laughed at the anachronism.

Nobody is laughing now. George W. Bush has erased the line between church and state to the point where Romney, as a candidate, has been pandering to the Religious Right to win the nomination. It is that religiosity, not his religion, that is offensive.

Now Romney, still holding the ketchup bottle, will try to persuade voters that as President he would "maintain our religious heritage in this country," as he recently put it, but that his own particular religious beliefs are beside the point.

Romney is essentially a salesman (in amassing millions, associates say he was the "presenter") who has tailored his pitch on many issues this year to what voters want to hear. If he can sell this one, maybe he deserves to be President and use his skills to persuade the world to stop hating us.