That is one of the many reasons why religious tests for public office and religious oaths were specifically banned in Article 6.  Who can judge the authenticity of a polititian's faith?  And how will a polititian know when he or she has abused their faith for political gain, such that they maybe no longer even know what they believe? Should we care? I am not sure. But it is healthy, I think to raise the question since the public political faith wars are well underway.

Less well known, is that covert faith wars are always being waged Inside the Beltway. The permanent war for influence is waged by those seeking power via the spiritual lives of our political leaders. Its something that rarely surfaces and the  media is loath to report. Some pols enter this arena with their eyes open, some probably not.  One of the competitors is a shadowy group known as The Family.  One of the members of The Family is Hillary Clinton.  

Journalists Jeff Sharlet and Kathryn Joyce report on Sen. Clinton's involvement in The Family in the current issue of Mother Jones. The text has just been published online.

Although she usually can't wait to talk about her faith in public these days, Clinton refused to talk to Sharlet and Joyce.  I think that she should have. While I have no problem with pols expressing their faith, and explaining how their faith relates to their public life, they do not get to hide when they are asked about the details.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have not yet decided who I support for president, and this is certainly not intended as a hit piece on Sen. Clinton.  Rather, as most readers know, I write about the religious right, and am interested in the way it functions in American political life. In that regard, this is an important article that deserves to be discussed.

Here are a few excerpts from the article:

Clinton's God talk is more complicated--and more deeply rooted--than either fans or foes would have it, a revelation not just of her determination to out-Jesus the gop, but of the powerful religious strand in her own politics....

Through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship. Her collaborations with right-wingers such as Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) grow in part from that connection.

When Clinton first came to Washington in 1993, one of her first steps was to join a Bible study group. For the next eight years, she regularly met with a Christian "cell" whose members included Susan Baker, wife of Bush consigliere James Baker; Joanne Kemp, wife of conservative icon Jack Kemp; Eileen Bakke, wife of Dennis Bakke, a leader in the anti-union Christian management movement; and Grace Nelson, the wife of Senator Bill Nelson, a conservative Florida Democrat.

Clinton's prayer group was part of the Fellowship (or "the Family"), a network of sex-segregated cells of political, business, and military leaders dedicated to "spiritual war" on behalf of Christ, many of them recruited at the Fellowship's only public event, the annual National Prayer Breakfast. (Aside from the breakfast, the group has "made a fetish of being invisible," former Republican Senator William Armstrong has said.) The Fellowship believes that the elite win power by the will of God, who uses them for his purposes. Its mission is to help the powerful understand their role in God's plan.

The Fellowship isn't out to turn liberals into conservatives; rather, it convinces politicians they can transcend left and right with an ecumenical faith that rises above politics. Only the faith is always evangelical, and the politics always move rightward.

This is in line with the Christian right's long-term strategy. Francis Schaeffer, late guru of the movement, coined the term "cobelligerency" to describe the alliances evangelicals must forge with conservative Catholics. Colson, his most influential disciple, has refined the concept of cobelligerency to deal with less-than-pure politicians. In this application, conservatives sit pretty and wait for liberals looking for common ground to come to them. Clinton, Colson told us, "has a lot of history" to overcome, but he sees her making the right moves.

The article makes clear that although Clinton is deeply involved in this murky group, she is not a religious right ideologue. She remains firmly pro-choice, for example. But on a number of issues detailed in the article, she is also firmly, and disturbingly in the religigious right camp in ways that no doubt bring joy to those seeking to errode the wall of separation between church and state.

But the senator's project isn't the conversion of her adversaries; it's tempering their opposition so she can court a new generation of Clinton Republicans, values voters who have grown estranged from the Christian right. And while such crossover conservatives may never agree with her on the old litmus-test issues, there is an important, and broader, common ground--the kind of faith-based politics that, under the right circumstances, will permit majority morality to trump individual rights.

Read the whole article here: