Religion and politics don’t mix.  And if nothing else comes of this interminable primary season perhaps the wisdom of the age old fundamental principle of separation of church and state will finally be reaffirmed. 
The insidious and irrational move to discredit and discount this bedrock principle of democracy is ironic because it was Jesus himself who established the principle of separation of church and state when he said, “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.”  Yet the ones who are trying to disavow the principle are those who claim to be the best Christians among us.  Moreover, many are priests or preachers whose tax exempt status is entirely dependent on their remaining free of political activity.  
     Let’s lay down a few aphorisms.  
    1) In general, people who adopt “holier than thou” attitudes never are.  
    2) And people who wear their religion on their sleeves usually do so because they aren’t carrying it comfortably in their hearts.  
    3) Therefore, to mingle religion and politics together is to corrupt the essential purpose of each.  You wind up with self-serving, bigoted and materialistic religion on the one hand and moralizing, demagogic, and exclusionary government on the other.  
    4) Finally, for someone to go to church to learn about politics makes no more sense than someone going to Congress to learn about religion.
     Still, despite the dangers, when one considers our current preacher follies, this clear, bright line distinction between church and state is often intentionally blurred to invisibility.  This is doubly unfortunate in this instance because most of these religious peoples’ quotes on politics, social affairs, current events and history prove they are completely ignorant of the very topics on which they are pontificating.  Nor are they noticeably Christian or democratic in the opinions they express.
     To give a few examples, Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor, is prone to wild conspiracy theories about AIDS and other things and harbors anti-Jewish sympathies besides.  John Hagee, who endorsed McCain, claims that Hitler was an instrument of God sent as scourge to encourage the remainder of the Jewish people to emigrate to Israel by the murder of six million of them.  Hagee also pulls out the old canard and damns Catholicism as a whore of Satan.  So did Bob Jones who also condemned interracial dating on moral grounds.  
    Meanwhile, the Catholic priest recently caught on YouTube speaking from the same Chicago pulpit Rev. Wright previously used, indulged himself in a racially charged, misogynistic, polemical smear against Hillary Clinton more suited to Saturday Night Live than Sunday Morning prime time.  Somehow, like airline luggage, the humor of the caricature got lost somewhere along the way.  
     And these excesses have been going on for some time.  Many other preachers have hatefully demonized their political enemies as well as homosexuals, Muslims, and virtually any other American who might disagree with them.  Pat Robertson claimed that due to his spiritual intimacy with God he could control the path of hurricanes with the strength of his prayer at the same time he was invoking a slightly less divine intervention by calling for the physical assassination of a foreign leader.  Jerry Falwell, Robertson and Wright each expressed barely disguised satisfaction with 9/11 as God’s vengeance upon the part of America they happen not to agree with.
     Or even more recently, to follow a pernicious trend, the Catholic Archbishop of Kansas City is threatening to deny communion to the democratic, Catholic governor of Kansas because she supports abortion rights.  But when the archbishop doesn’t similarly threaten spiritual sanctions against Republicans who vote for torture, the Iraq war and the death penalty – all positions condemned by the pope – the good Archbishop’s morality seems arch, selective and hypocritical, more political than religious.
    But what do any of these harebrained theories and rants really have to do with politics in the first place?  Nothing.  No respectable political figure would ever endorse any of them.  
    Well, then what does the obnoxious ego-centrism of these buffoonish preachers and priests have to do with religion?  Again, nothing.  They are proof more of what Jesus preached against than for.  
    In fact, it is sobering when you realize that these so called spiritual leaders, if they were running for office, would not even be thought ethical or rational enough to be elected to a Congress not particularly noted for either virtue.
     Here is what Jesus knew.  The job of government is not to suppress ideas and beliefs but to let them flourish. At the same time organized religions are hierarchical and their theologies are put down in black and white to limit inquiry and debate in order to ensure the internal coherence of their organization.  Structurally these two systems do not mix but operate in healthy opposition and fundamental creative tension with each other. 
In a well run democracy, constituted to equally accept all the rights and opinions (within reason) of all its citizens, many belief systems may exist and prosper comfortably side by side.  But if one belief system is allowed to take over and become dominant, as many fundamentalist would have it, the few come to dictate to the many and democracy itself becomes the first casualty of the absence of separation of church and state.  Freedom of religion and belief soon follows.
     Therefore, religious people do us no good and themselves no credit by proselytizing with religious certainty on changeable temporal and political issues.  Real life has many twists and turns unknown and unacknowledged by theology.  Those who try to infuse political arguments with self-righteousness and sanctimony are invariably exposed sooner or later as frauds to their own principles.  To resurrect a useful word for the occasion, it is not god or even country these self-aggrandizing televangelists and pseudo religious lobbyists are serving, but mammon.  Let a few of these churches be sanctioned by the removal of their tax exempt status and watch how quickly their leaders learn to govern their tongues.  
    Both Church and State would be better off for it.