Why is faith used as a political weapon fatal to the nations future?
Faith is as embedded in this country as baseball. So that’s not going anywhere. But being used for political purposes—this running subtly on “I’m a Christian and my opponent here says he’s a Christian,” like Mike Huckabee suggested about Mitt Romney, that Mormons aren’t really Christians, or Hillary Clinton suggesting that Barack Obama might be a Muslim, saying, “I take him at his word” that he’s not a Muslim—clearly are attempts to use religion to divide the voting electorate, to use faith to get somebody elected or not elected. It’s damaging to our public discussion about politics and who we are as a nation. The more that we use religion in the public arena to justify positions or to make the case that you should vote for me because of my faith or against someone else because of their faith, what we really do is kill conversations, we stop them, we don’t open them up, we really just end them. That’s why people use this kind of terminology. You don’t help the conversation about Iraq b
