In politics, Lord's sword can cut 2 ways

WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's involvement with a fiery preacher is only the latest in a number of religious controversies in the 2008 race for the White House.

The campaign also has featured Democrats attempting to close the "God gap," Republican Sen. John McCain trying to make amends with the GOP's evangelical base, Mitt Romney trying to become the country's first Mormon president and Mike Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, surviving longer than expected in the Republican contest on the strength of support from evangelical Christians.

The 2008 brand of faith-based presidential politics has prompted some political elders to suggest it may be time to reel in political debate steeped in religion.

"I think we should be moving away from so much discussion of public policy in terms of religious beliefs," said Roy Romer, the former governor of Colorado, who was general chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1997 to 2000. "We have to be careful of religious zealotry."

But few in the Democratic Party have heeded Romer's advice as the party has tried to close what is widely described as the "God gap" between Democrats and Republicans.

Sen. Obama, of Illinois, and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, of New York, have spoken often about the deep influence their personal faith has had in shaping their progressive politics, much more often than most candidates in previous Democratic contests.

It was Obama's religious ties that led to the current controversy over some of the inflammatory rhetoric by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, which Obama has attended for more than two decades.

Clinton controversies

Even before the Wright controversy erupted, Obama often professed his Christian faith, occasionally saying "secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square."

Similarly, last summer at a forum sponsored by the liberal Sojourners/Call to Renewal evangelical organization, Clinton called for "interject[ing] faith into policy."

Clinton raised eyebrows at the beginning of her campaign by hiring Burns Strider, a strategist on winning "values-driven" voters, as director of faith-based operations and the six-page talking-points memo he produced for Clinton's Faith Steering Committee.

The memo highlighted Clinton's "strong Methodist family" and childhood, how the principles of the Methodist church were "the guiding light" of her life, how she "learned the value and power of prayer" at an early age, how her faith is "deeply personal and real" and how she often finds "inspiration from scripture."

Attention to Clinton's religious faith peaked at the Sojourners forum when she was asked how she coped with her marital problems and the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.

"I had a grounding in faith that gave me the courage and the strength to do what I thought was right, regardless of what the world thought," she answered, crediting an "extended faith family" that had come to her spiritual aid.

Subsequently, in its September 2007 issue, the liberal Mother Jones magazine described Clinton's "faith family" as a confederation of "conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as 'The Fellowship,' " a connection reprised last week under the headline "Hillary's Nasty Pastorate" in The Nation, a liberal magazine that has endorsed Obama.

The group reportedly included such notable Republicans as former Attorney General Ed Meese, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Sens. Sam Brownback of Kansas and James Inhofe of Oklahoma.

McCain makes amends

McCain ran afoul of the Republican Party's evangelical base when he ran for the presidential nomination in 2000 against George W. Bush and called the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson "agents of intolerance." In his bid for the party's nomination this year, he has sought to make amends with the religious right, and not without controversies.

The McCain camp is trying to distance the candidate from the anti-Islamic rhetoric of the Rev. Rod Parsley, an Ohio megachurch and TV pastor who endorsed McCain and appeared with him at a Cincinnati campaign rally last month.

At that event, a week before the Ohio primary, McCain praised Parsley as a "spiritual guide." The campaign, concerned about Parsley's inflammatory rhetoric, now explains that Parsley is not and never has been the spiritual guide for McCain, who attends the North Phoenix Baptist Church.

Parsley has used the pulpit, books, TV and the Internet to rail about Islam, brand Europe a "Godless pit" and criticize a welfare system under which "out-of-wedlock births are generously rewarded, while morally pure women are penalized."

McCain's campaign refused to comment on specific statements from Parsley, including a passage in his 2005 book, "Silent No More," that discussed a "war between Islam and Christian civilization," a war he said must end with the destruction of Islam, which he branded an "anti-Christ religion."

Despite the campaign's effort to make a distinction between being "a" spiritual guide and McCain's spiritual guide, a connection is being made by McCain detractors.

YouTube clips of some of Parsley's more controversial comments have been posted with comments incorrectly identifying him as "McCain's anti-gay 'spiritual guide' " and "John McCain's 'spiritual guide.' "

The campaign's effort to put distance between McCain and Parsley follows a similar move after he received an endorsement from the Rev. John Hagee of Texas, who has called the Roman Catholic Church "the great whore" and a "false cult system."

McCain told reporters, "When [Hagee] endorses me, it does not mean that I embrace everything that he stands for or believes in. ... I repudiate any comments that are made, including Pastor Hagee's, if they are anti-Catholic or offensive to Catholics."

Romney, Huckabee

Two GOP candidates now out of the race, Romney and Huckabee, dealt with religious issues involving themselves. As a Mormon, Romney, an ex-governor of Massachusetts, acknowledged he had to overcome biases against his religion.

"Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions," he said in a December speech.

Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher and former Arkansas governor, used humor to fend off concerns about his religious background, recalling that a voter once asked if he is "one of those narrow-minded Baptist preachers who believe only Baptists are going to heaven."

"I'm even more narrow-minded than that," Huckabee said he responded. "I don't even think all the Baptists are going."