It’s the customary sign off to every presidential address: “God Bless the United States of America”

Our money is imprinted with the motto: “In God we trust”

The generally accepted version of the Pledge of Allegiance includes the words “One nation, under God” (yes I am aware they were added well after the original pledge was written)

On the other hand, the First Amendment to the United States constitution clearly states in part: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

All of these facts lead us to an important question: How big a role should religion play in politics?

It’s easy to look at the text of the First Amendment and say: “Well, obviously none”

But it’s not quite so cut and dry.

According to a recent AP article:

Nationally, more than 70 percent of Republicans and more than half of Democrats say it’s somewhat or very important that a presidential candidate have very strong religious beliefs, according to the Public Religion Research Institute.

I wonder, why is the religion of a candidate so important to voters? Is it because they believe a religious President is better than an Atheistic one?

Is it because they feel that someone who is religious will have stronger ethical and moral beliefs than someone who is not?

Or maybe it’s just because America has had Presidents who believe in God from the beginning and they believe that it simply should be no other way?

Note the quote above does not make a distinction over WHICH religion the beliefs of a President should originate from. I think it’s reasonable to assume Democrats would be far more accepting of, say a Buddhist President than Republicans would.

The article goes on to say:

Politicians are evaluated not only by what church they attend, but also by what their congregation teaches and what their pastor says on Sundays.

“Candidates often have to make tough choices about their religion — whether to talk about it, what to say about it and even what to do about it — such as leaving a church,” said John Green, director of the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron, Ohio. “These tensions are quite strong among Republicans as the presidential nomination contest heats up, partly because of religious disagreements among key constituencies, but partly because of differences in issue priorities — economic versus social issues.”

The writer then goes on to use the examples of Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith being an issue with the heavily Christian GOP base (yes Mormon’s believe in Christ but many Christians do not consider Mormons true believers) and Michelle Bachmann’s recent comments pertaining to wively submission as prime examples of the potential religious minefield candidates can find themselves walking through.

Rick Perry’s prayer rally and its sponsors also get a mention:

Perry largely dismissed the outcry over his July prayer rally, held the week before he announced he was running for president.

The event was his idea and was financed by the American Family Association, a Tupelo, Miss.-based group whose policy director believes that freedom of religion applies only to Christians.

Among the supporters were well-known Christian conservative leaders such as the Rev. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention and Focus on the Family founder James Dobson.

Other endorsers were Pastor John Hagee, a Christian Zionist who had called the Catholic Church “the great whore,” though he later apologized for the statement. Activist and historian David Barton, who argues that the United States was founded to be a Christian nation, was another backer.

Ask yourselves this: If Rick Perry were the sitting President and agreed to host and/or appear at an event such as this, would you have an issue with that?

This is just another circumstance where politics and religion face each other head to head.

The article notes correctly there has been a shift in perception amongst voters over the importance of a candidate’s religious beliefs:

Voters have started pushing for specifics because they no longer consider belief separate from action and faith unrelated to policymaking, said Kathleen Flake, who specializes in American religious history at Vanderbilt University. The nation’s Catholic bishops, more vocal than ever on the duty of Catholic lawmakers to follow church teaching, underscored that way of thinking. Bishops have said repeatedly that a true Catholic cannot support any policy that allows abortion.

“The voting public no longer believes, as they did as late as the 1950s, that religion was about what you thought and not what you did,” Flake said.

I would argue that since the election of Barack Obama and the re-energizing of the Christian right in the Republican party, religion and politics have become even more intertwined.

Democratic strategists can see the role religion is playing on the Republican side, they can tell that evangelical voters will be one of the most highly motivated groups that go to the polls in 2012.

The article states:

Some Democrats are trying to persuade Obama to return to the religious language he used in the 2008 race as one way to clarify his values and inspire voters, even though the strategy will raise questions about Wright and about the misperception among some voters that the president is Muslim.

That, in my opinion, is a dangerous path to be walking. I see no problem with the President stating his religious convictions, but I think it’s clear the right (and in particular the religious right) will absolutely tear apart anything Obama says based on his religion. The fact is, most voters, regardless of whether they are Liberal or Conservative, have made up their minds about Obama’s religion (supposed or stated) and nothing he or his PR people say or do is going to change that.

The piece closes with this quote regarding the religious beliefs of politicians:

“For the first time, we’re not only interested in whether someone is religious, which is essentially a question of, ‘Do you have a morality that the voter can identify with?’” Flake said. “It appears that there’s a significant portion of the electorate that’s interested in what the particular theology of the candidate is. Do they believe in Jesus? If so, what kind of Jesus do you believe in?”

The final sentence is telling as to a lot of Christians there are no “kinds” of Jesus, there’s just one real Jesus and a bunch of fake, false prophets out there.

From a personal standpoint, a candidate’s track record and policy positions, as well as his plans if elected, are more important to me than religion. I certainly wouldn’t be inclined to vote for a candidate who say, has known ties to a satanic cult or something of the sort, but I certainly wouldn’t decline to vote for someone simply because he or she was a Mormon or Jehovah’s witness or whatever.

The First Amendment is in the Constitution for a reason. The Founding Fathers were religious men, there’s no doubt about it. But they believed religion should be between a man and his God (or Gods) and a man and his church and that’s it. They wanted the government to stay out of it.

We forget so easily about the world they left behind in Europe. They saw religion corrupt people and governments and cause all kinds of suffering and destruction. They didn’t want that in the New World because that’s exactly what they came here to get away from.

The coming election will probably be one of the most religiously charged in recent history.

So the question is now more relevant than ever: What role should religion have in politics?

There’s a hell of a lot hinging on the answer.