c. 2000 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 pundits and prophets have got the church-state issue backwards in this election season. Like actors relishing Shakespeare’s greatest speeches, these observers lick their borrowed phrases as children do ice cream, letting them loll on the tongue, reluctant to let them disappear. They are all for maintaining the wall of separation between church and state.

But, as Robert Frost once famously asked, are they sure of what they are walling in or walling out? To which they bow in unison, unaware that they look like the monks they fear in a choir, that church must be kept out of the state, don’t you know how dangerous right-wing religion would be in the West Wing of the White House?

The readiness with which many people recite this sentiment suggests it is a safe and politically correct position, laundered, like Mafia money, in the vats of the Public Relations Complex so it will pass as real American thinking.

The real danger, however, is, and has been for some time, just the opposite. We need to keep politics out of religion, out of churches, temples, storefront chapels, and Quaker meeting houses, too.

Let us start by refusing to allow any candidate to make a visit to the University of Notre Dame during this election season. The men who want to be president of the United States don’t stop in South Bend, Ind., to get the student vote. Hopeful commanders-in-chief want to use this Catholic symbol par excellence not to extol faith but to ravish it for their own purposes.

Is Catholicism made stronger or its teachings better understood because some politician utters words written by someone else with the Golden Dome in the background?

Or do we find here the subtraction of grandeur and mystery that is the predictable side effect of political posturing in sacred places?

Can we possibly think Buddhism was left untarnished by the sordid political fund-raising in a California temple and the indictments, denials and downright lies that have followed ever since?

What has been the effect on Orthodox Judaism of Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s becoming the first Jew to run on a national ticket? We are all delighted a Jew has been chosen at last for such an honor. But does it honor or manipulate the Jewish faith? Do we respect it more, as we hope, or less, as we fear, as a result?

Lieberman has spoken, with mixed effect and reaction, about the need for religious faith in American life, but is he championing authentic commitment to his tradition or employing it, even with a salting of sincerity, not to reveal the power of prayer but his prayer for power? Is our respect for Judaism enhanced or in some way diminished by seeing its traditions and teachings interpreted and applied by politicians in conversations with people like Larry King? What can we be thinking?

Do politicians enter African-American churches to celebrate the living faith of their congregations or, in the style of vampires, to drain off their spiritual vitality for themselves?

Candidates do not climb into these pulpits to be religious, they want to seem religious, for the common characteristic of politicians is to like the idea of being religious more than really being religious.

Does Protestantism seem a more lively and inspiring faith because the candidates tell us that they are born-again or that they often ask themselves, “What would Jesus do?”

You want to know what Jesus would do? He would drive all these vote-seekers out of houses of worship as swiftly as he did the money-changers from the Temple.

For Jesus recognized that using religion is always more harmful than persecuting it. At least persecutors are not hypocritical, while it would be hard to find politicians who are not when they involve themselves in religion as they pursue high offices in a low manner.

Common sense, as we know, is the sense of the community. And most Americans do not want church and state confounded in public life. They understand that the danger is far less that theologians will violate politics than that politicians will corrupt belief.

DEA END KENNEDY