c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.)

UNDATED _ The most frightening news on the spiritual front is that the Democrats have got religion.

Vice President Al Gore has announced he is going to get God back into American life, that he is running, as unashamedly as William Jennings Bryan a century ago, on the theological express that confounds politics, religion and everyday life.

At the very moment that prominent members of its entourage, such as Cal Thomas and Paul Wyrich, are urging the Religious Right to get out of Republican politics, the leading Democratic candidate is calling for a Religious Left to enter Democratic politics.

Where, we might ask, is the American Civil Liberties Union in this moment of peril?

Like pyromaniacs, its staff is usually first on the scene when the slightest spark is ignited in the tinder box of American church-state relations. But this organization has had no comment on candidate Gore’s plan to put a pro-Deity plank into the Democratic platform next year.

For generations, in their support of the separation of church and state, the ACLU has been fighting to keep parsons and bishops out of politics. It is even more crucial now to keep politicians out of parsonages.

The vice president’s new emphasis on God in American life and on faith in his own should be regarded as a deathbed conversion, that is, a cry for help from a man whose continued breathing surprises everybody in his bedeviled campaign.

Perhaps Gore feels that only Satan could have led him into the Faustian pact President Clinton had him sign. God knows his role has called forth religious imagery. He has been the Old Testament scapegoat and the New Testament Lazarus wrapped loosely into one being. Some see him typecast as the Tree in the Garden of Eden, unmoving and unmoved by the frolics that went on beneath it.

Before people begin to think of him as Job, with steady insult added to the plague of boils, he needs a theological exit strategy from the deal he got into by getting on the Democratic ticket back in 1992. The devil is asking for his due as Gore sadly learns that as vice president, he got blamed for the vice and received no credits toward the presidency.

In short, religion faces the prospect of being abused politically by the Left even more sacrilegiously than it has at times been by the Right. It is not, as in the old play, Death that needs a holiday. It is God who needs time away from the public relations/advertising complex that is reversing roles with him by trying to re-style him in their image and likeness in the coming campaign.

Every religious leader who believes in eternity has been warned many times not to climb over the fence into the political field. They should now denounce with prophets’ wrath this crass effort by politicians who don’t even believe in tomorrow to enter their own territory.

The Gore campaign is trying to appropriate religion because it understands that the generation that once supported the Democrats unswervingly is now passing away. That was the generation typified by Aunt Margaret whom, on her 80th birthday because of her failing eyesight, I accompanied, with proper permissions, into the voting booth. How do you want to vote?

Straight Democratic ticket, she replied, as she had automatically for elections beyond numbering.

Those good people who counted their world complete if they were closely connected to the Catholic Church, the Democratic Party and the A&P grocery store, are dead or dying.

Now people over 60 tend to remember Ronald Reagan rather than FDR and they are showing signs, according to The New York Times, of turning Republican rather than Democratic.

Capturing this group, whose members vote at higher rates than any other, is the sole object of this effort to bring God into the next campaign.

The institutions of religion have prospered in America more than in any other country in the history of the world. Keeping church out of state and vice versa has been very helpful for faith and politics.

At the present time, religion is far more in danger of being corrupted and co-opted by politics than the other way around. Religion isn’t sacred to political managers. It’s just another variable, a cohort of voters, to be pursued and wooed, all this, with school vouchers besides, can be yours, if you will worship at our shrine of power. My Aunt Margaret’s generation wouldn’t buy that old temptation. Neither should we.

DEA END KENNEDY