"Please set aside time daily to cry out to God...Judge Alito...is a man who cares about the sovereignty of God..."
---Family Research Council "Prayer Team Target" e-mail

Is it just me, or wasn't there some provision or other in the Constitution that mandated a separation of church and state?

I could swear I read something about that in my history books, and the reason makes perfect sense when you realize that, back in the 1770's, most all the framers of the fledgling constitution had ancestors--fairly recent ones--who had escaped to the New World in the first place because...why? Anybody? You, back there in the back with your hand up. That's RIGHT. They had to get on a boat with all their worldly possessions that could be carried, and their children, and grandma, and flee to this raw, unexplored wilderness because...well, because they were being persecuted. Punished, imprisoned, ostracized, harrassed, even put to death for the simple reason that they chose to worship God in a way which was not sanctioned by the State.

Back when Queen Elizabeth I was a motherless pipsqueak and her half-sister, Mary, sat on the throne, little Elizabeth was imprisoned because her daddy, King Henry VIII, had created a whole new religion, Anglicanism, because the Catholic church would not sanction his marriage to her mother, Anne. The new church gave him a divorce from his first wife, Katherine, and she never forgave him for it, and neither did her daughter. So upon her father's death, the first thing Queen Mary did was send the child Elizabeth away and threw her in a dungeon. She even considered having her beheaded, like her mama.

Meanwhile, anyone who did not worship at the Catholic church was rounded up and put to death.

Things happened. Wars were fought, whatever, and then it was Elizabeth's turn to ascend the throne. First thing she did? You guessed it. Threw her loving sister into a prison and left her to rot. Turnabout being fair play, she then proceeded to give the Catholics hell and to make Anglicanism the state church.

But if you wanted to be, say, a Presbyterian, then life was made so miserable for you that you had no choice but to pack up your family and take them across an ocean to a wild and untamed land and take your chances there, but at least you could read your Bible any way you pleased.

So the "founding fathers" wanted to make sure that, in this brand-new country, anybody could worship God any way he or she saw fit, or not at all, if that's what they wanted, and the government could not write church doctrine into law.

The Supreme Court has been pretty good to honor that provision.

But things have changed. In an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, Charles Marsh, professor of religion at the University of Virginia, writes, "In the past several years, American evangelicals, and I am one of them, have amassed greater political power than at any other time in our history. But at what cost to our witness and the integrity of our message?"

He goes on to examine excerpts from pro-war sermons given in the run-up to the war in Iraq that sounded, "as if from a slate of evangelical talking points."

(And, I'd like to add an aside here. One church in California delivered a blistering anti-war sermon one Sunday and were consequently targeted by the IRS as being "too political" and in danger of losing their tax-free status. I refer you to the paragraphs re Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth. Whichever church has the power then persecutes whichever one does not.)

Marsh goes on to say that he agrees with John Stott, a revered evangelical writer and reverand, that, "The church is the community of God's people rather than an institution, and must not be identified with any particular culture, social, or political system..."

Now, before you light up your torches and come looking for me, I must tell you that back in college, I was a member of Campus Crusades for Christ and literally went door to door saving souls. When my kids were growing up, we had Bible study every single week and they read the entire New Testament and memorized chunks of it. We are a close and spiritual family, and that gives me a membership card into this elite little club and therefore every right to protest.

And before you rush to inundate me with comments about how the evil liberal judiciary needed to be balanced with a godly conservative one, let me say that I'm not commenting on whether or not Alito would be a good justice. The American Bar Association seems to think he's well qualified. In fact, I'm not commenting on the Supreme Court at all, here.

Recently, Focus on the Family and another powerful evangelical lobbying group were approached by some activists who were deeply worried about a budget which was about to be passed in the Republican Congress that would supposedly help to pay down the towering national debt by deep cuts in Medicaire, Medicaid, food stamps, school lunch programs, and college student loans--this just a couple weeks after Hurricane Katrina had wiped out half the Gulf coast, causing the poorest among us to suffer the most.

As Christians, the activists begged, shouldn't we DO something to protect these innocents? You're a powerful group, they said. Can't you petition your congresspeople to back off on this measure?

The group was told that Focus on the Family and other big Christian organizations had chosen to, well, focus, their considerable resources and power on two issues: abortion rights and the Supreme Court nominations. "We have to have our priorities," they were told.

Now, see, this is the problem you get into when you get religion all tangled up with the state. For one thing, WHOSE religion? Jews? Muslims? Hindus? New Age pagans? We've got a lot of them in this country, but apparently, no, not them. Only Christian evangelicals, it seems, know what's best for our country. No one else needs to be consulted because, well, they're just wrong and probably going to hell, anyway.

Secondly, WHOSE PRIORITIES? Middle and upper-middle class white folks? That's pretty much who you see in the talking-head television circuit, representing Christian evangelical activists. And some of them are pretty embarrassing to other, less nutty, Christians. (Try googling "Pat Robertson.")

So when Christians are directed to "cry out to God" over a Supreme Court nominee, or a political candidate, or a law that is before Congress that is considered Anti Our Agenda, then I call foul.

Because when I cry out to God, when I fall to my knees and pray, I don't waste my valuable prayer time trying to tell God what to do re the Supreme Court. Instead, I agonize about how 80% of Marine Corps casualties in this war could have been PREVENTED with $260 worth of BODY ARMOR. (And no, my son did not think it would be too heavy. Now that they have decent armor, which they did not have in his last deployment, he's thrilled. It may not save his life but it will damn sure help. And I cry out to God that he, his cousin, and all their buddies will come home from this bloody war with all their arms and legs and most of their sanity.)

I cry out to God because there are still 3200 people MISSING due to Hurricane Katrina, and along the Gulf coast--not just New Oreans--where entire towns were washed off their foundations, families still live in TENTS PITCHED BESIDE THEIR HOUSE FOUNDATIONS while they wait on HeckuvajobBrownie's FEMA to help them. Maybe God does help those who help themselves, but when your job, your bank, and your school have all been washed away, what, exactly, are you supposed to do? (Oh yeah, I forgot. Use your tax-cut money to rebuild, unless, of course, you don't earn $100,000 and up a year, in which case, you live in a tent.)

I cry out to God because we have a health care system where many oncologists (cancer doctors) refuse to see cancer-stricken patients until they pay in full their bills, which could run in the thousands, but which their health insurance is insufficient to cover, and their chemotherapy drugs cost hundreds each and every month, which means, only the rich or those with plenty of assets and savings to run through can afford to survive cancer. (I have a family member who may have to file for bankruptcy just so he can continue to receive his cancer treatments without having to sell his home and squander his savings and live to be penniless. I cry out to God, not only for his healing, but for his financial survival.)

I cry out to God because my beautiful daughter, 25, vibrant, hard-working, independent and resourceful and talented, who was busy building an acting career in New York City, was struck down with, of all things, tuberculosis, and is living under "house arrest"--strict quarantine in her cramped little apartment, which she has not been able to leave in a month and will not be able for another month. (Which means, of course, that she can't pay her rent, bills, or buy food. If she did not have a loving family and cadre of friends, she'd be homeless.) She was prevented from coming home Christmas and was therefore unable to see her brother before he departed for war, and my heart breaks because I am helpless and powerless to do anything for her other than wire money and send care packages and call her and e-mail her and pray for her and her brother.

That last one was purely personal, and I included it because life can just be so damn hard sometimes, and we need our spiritual brothers and sisters to gather round us in times of suffering and difficulty. The Christian community needs to focus far more of their considerable manpower and resources on the sick and the hungry and the homeless, not their political agenda.

"There is no denying that our Faustian bargain for access and power has undermined the credibility of our moral and evangelistic witness in the world," wrote Marsh. "The Hebrew prophets might call us to repentance, but repentance is a tough demand for a people convinced of their righteousness."

When Jesus walked the earth, he healed the sick and encouraged the hopeless and reached out to people society shunned. He questioned a legalistic, judgemental culture. Politics? Well, He left it up to the Saducees and Pharisees to do the politicking. And look how good their judgement turned out to be.