Update on Religion & Politics in America

Just the other day, I fulminated at length against injecting God into politics, specifically right-wing Republican politics, in A Morality Play: Why Religion & Politics Don't Mix, and said I saw a backlash in the making.

I noted that:

In the end, the problem with mixing church and state is that believers are called to try to change the world from the inside out and politics tries to change the world from the outside in. The Christians who usurp politics ultimately debase both their faith and democracy.

Well, a slew of new books more or less say the same thing, among them “Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America — an Evangelical’s Lament” by Randall Balmer, a religion professor at Barnard College and an evangelical. (Check it out here.)

Then there's the Rev. Gregory A. Boyd, whose evangelical megachurch in Minnesota has been convulsed by the rev's refusal to comingle religion with politics.

Boyd lost a big chunk of his congregation after he preached six sermons before the last presidential election entitled “The Cross and the Sword” in which he said the church should stay away from politics, stop moralizing on sexual issues and claiming that the U.S. was a “Christian nation.”

More here.

(Cartoon by Pat Oliphant © 2006 Universal Press Syndicate)