I need to start this morning's sermon with a warning: I am going to be talking about God. This will make some of you uncomfortable, I know, and you will probably tell me about it afterward. But I want to invite you to suspend your skepticism, and remember that the word God can be taken in many senses, with a small g and a capital one, and can simply be used to represent whatever it is that we worship. As my colleague Forrest Church is fond of saying, God is not God's real name anyway.

I think that the discomfort many of you feel is real and needs to be taken seriously, but I think we can take it seriously in part by talking about it. Here is what my colleague Marge Keip said this summer:

"Faith is a journey, as life is. Certainly, no matter what we each believe now, no one of us is still where we started, way back when we learned of the word "god" for the first time and struggled to attach it to something familiar. Our understanding of such intangible ideas as love or hope or courage or trust or integrity or truth or god grows and deepens as we engage with them in the journeys of our lives. Our Unitarian Universalist way of faith is intentionally creedless, to enable freedom and diversity and change. Because we cherish freedom and value diversity and honor change, and know these to be vital and real.

Having said that, we can turn to the subject at hand, God and politics. In 1993, Yale Law Professor Stephen Carter came out with a book entitled The culture of disbelief : how American law and politics trivialize religious devotion. Carter's argument was that the political left in America had become thoroughly hostile to religious belief, and thus strong public devotion had come to be viewed as exclusively the province of the right. Carter took pains to show how historically progressive movements, such as the Temperance, Abolitionist, Women's Suffrage, pacifist and Civil Rights movements had been religiously inspired and fueled by religious sentiments. Can we think of the Civil Rights movement, for example without "we Shall Overcome" or Martin Luther King's stirring invocations of religious images?

Carter's book caused quite a stir in its day, and the stir was still echoing when I attended Divinity School two years later, for there was a considerable amount of talk about whether liberals had driven religion from the public square, and if so, what should be done about it.

In this electoral season, the question seems to assert itself again in new forms. Back during the primaries, Governor Bush was asked who was his favorite philosopher, and he replied it was Jesus. Jesus is, of course, many things to many people, but it surprised a few of us to see him identified as a philosopher. An inspiration for and a subject of many philosophers, yes, such as Augustine and Aquinas and Kierkegaard

And then when the two major parties had settled on their candidates, Vice President Gore surprised everyone by selecting Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut as his running mate. Not only was Sen. Lieberman the only Jewish candidate ever nominated by a major party for Vice President, he is an Orthodox Jew and a devout one who doesn't mind bringing morality into politics. The most notable example of this, and the one which probably got him the nod from Al Gore, was his statement on the Senate Floor that the President's affair with Monica Lewinsky was immoral.

Lieberman also talks about his faith, and his selection back in August prompted a lot of speculation that this political season would see God come back into political discourse. There was a certain amount of hand wringing about what this development would do to the wall of separation between church and state. There was an uneasiness about having God discussed in a political campaign.

For example, a cartoon in this week's New Yorker shows a man kneeling at the side of his bed saying his prayers. Above the bed hovers a little angel who looks a bit like Shirley Temple, and she is saying to the man, "I'm sorry, the line is tied up; he's still exchanging pleasantries with Senator Lieberman.

By and large the theologization of political discourse has not materialized yet, though there are still three weeks to go. I have accessed the transcript of the first Presidential debate and find that the word God was not mentioned by either candidate. I also did a search of the stump speeches of both Presidential candidates, and the only mention of God I found was once when Al Gore finished his speech by saying to the audience "God bless you."

In the vice presidential debate, Lieberman did mention God three times. Two of these were in discussing sensitive social issues: on abortion, he said that the abortion decision was between a woman and her conscience and her God, and on same sex marriages he said this:

SEN. LIEBERMAN: A very current and difficult question, and I've been thinking about it, and I want to explain what my thoughts have been. Maybe I should begin this answer by going back to the beginning of the country and the Declaration of Independence, which says right there at the outset that all of us are created equal and that we're endowed not by any bunch of politicians or philosophers but by our creator with those inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

At the beginning of our history, that promise, that ideal was not realized or experienced by all Americans. But over time since then, we have extended the orbit of that promise. And in our time, at the frontier of that effort is extending those kinds of rights to gay and lesbian Americans who are citizens of this country and children of the same awesome God just as much as any of the rest of us are.

Now I can disagree with Lieberman here; he makes the same mistake Pat Robertson does. Yes the Founding Fathers were nominally Christians and yes the Declaration does talk about a creator. But many of the Fathers were Deists, and many of them, Jefferson included, ended up as Unitarians. Jefferson is often called the fifth of our four Unitarian presidents. The Declaration and the Constitution and the American Revolution were products of Judeo-Christian morality to an extent, but they were more directly products of the Enlightenment and a belief in reason.

The third example came when Cheney criticized him for not pouncing on a comedian's distasteful joke about Bush's religion, Lieberman said:

If anybody has devoted his life to respecting the role of religion in American life and understands that Americans, from the beginning of our history, have turned to God for strength and purpose, it's me.

But besides being bad history, does this really scare us? What are we scared of? To get the wide view on this question of God in politics, I decided to start by looking back at the extreme case of God's involvement in politics, a theocracy. Ancient Israel had a theocracy from the time Moses led them to the Promised Land until the time Samuel selected Saul to be the first king. During this period, the capital-G God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was the direct head of the state as well as being the object of their worship, and the highest human rulers were called Judges, but I gather they were clerics somewhat like the Imams in present-day Iran.

The reading today is from the transition period, when the Israelites are petitioning God to give them a king just like their neighboring tribes have. Samuel doesn't want to do it, but God persuades Samuel to give them their way, even though it is an unwise course. What I find most delightful about this passage is the picture it paints of what a pestilence it is to have a king. It makes you kind of think that life under a theocracy must be kind of ideal, like a utopian socialist community or Jefferson's never-realized dream of an agrarian democracy.

Well, the Israelites got a king in the form of Saul, and then David succeeded him and then Solomon succeeded David and built the temple at Jerusalem in which it was believed that God resided. But the idea of theocracy didn't die. Our fair commonwealth was founded by people who believed they were establishing God's kingdom in the new world. The Puritans thought they had found in Massachusetts just the territory they needed to establish God's kingdom free of the interference of the English ecclesiastical and political hierarchy.

But they soon found out the big problem with theocracy: God has to work through people. And people can have different ideas about how God is supposed to work. So there was religious strife within the Massachusetts Bay Colony almost from day 1. Boston was supposed to be a city on a Hill, but soon it had hanged Mary Dyer and expelled Anne Hutchison and Roger Williams because they sought God in different ways. Our neighbor to the south, Rhode Island, was founded on religious toleration, a principle conspicuously lacking in Puritan Massachusetts.

It may surprise you to know that my native state of South Carolina also had religious toleration written in to its first constitution. This was not, however, a bow to enlightened ideals but a shrewd business decision. South Carolina was founded as a for=profit entity, a payoff by Charles II to eight of his henchmen who had engineered his ascension to the throne of England in 1660. The land grant was only going to be valuable to these gentlemen if colonists could be induced to settle there, and since many of the people wishing to leave England at that time were the dispossessed Puritans and other Dissenters, it made sense to offer them the enticement of religious freedom.

Unlike Massachusetts, Carolina never wanted to be governed by God. But it did place some religious restrictions on the people that governed it, and though these were liberalized over the years, there was still one in place ast late as 1989, a clause in the state constitution which said that no religious test would be required for public office, except that anyone who denied the existence of a supreme being could not hold office.

This provision had lain dormant in the state constitution for 120 years; it was passed by the Reconstruction Convention, the most radical political body ever assembled in the state, in 1869. It seems to have had no effect on the course of law, history or politics in the state. But in 1989, Herb Silverman, a math professor at the College of Charleston who was a militant atheist, walked into my law office and educated me on the provision. I was as offended by it as he was, and resolved to take the case. Can you imagine how you would feel if there was a clause in the law that said you couldn't hold office because you didn't believe in God? Over the next seven years we had to run him for governor, file a federal lawsuit, take an appeal to Richmond, run him for the exalted office of Notary Public and take depositions of the former Governor, but we finally won in 1997, after I had already started Divinity School. The state supreme court ruled that it violated the First Amendment to the United States Constitution to deny public office to those who do not believe in God. A lot of UUs applauded. It was reported that when Silverman heard of the decision, he said, Thank God, but I don't believe this.

We had struck a blow for religious liberty. Religious liberty has two aspects, corresponding to the two religion clauses in the Bill of Rights: one prohibiting an Establishment of Religion, which we call the Establishment clause, and the other prohibiting interference with the Free Exercise of religion, which we call the Free Exercise Clause. The Silverman case had been decided under the Establishment clause: restricting public office to those who believed in God was, in effect, an establishment of religion.

But the two clauses are interrelated. The American theory is that the best way to guarantee free exercise is to be rigid on Establishment. In other cultures, this theory doesn't necessarily work. England, for example, tolerates a wide variety of religious practices, a great deal of Free Exercise while still maintaining an established church. The Anglican church rarely exerts any influence in British politics.

However, we have only to look across the Irish Sea from England to see a land riven by bitter religious disputes and having, in the Republic if Ireland, a state-sanctioned church which has thrown its weight around in the political realm many times.

Having examples like that before us, we have adopted in this country a metaphor which does not appear in the Constitution – it actually originated in a letter written by Jefferson – but which is now firmly enshrined in law and our culture: the wall of separation between church and state. Particularly for those of us who are in the religious minority, we see that wall as our protection from tyranny of the majority.

And we know that, as an Orthodox Jew, Joseph Lieberman is very much a minority in this country, and thus there is no realistic fear that his devotion is going to translate into policies that impinge on our own freedoms.

Ellen Good man had an interesting column on Lieberman in which she pointed out that he went to a synagogue where the women sit separately from the men, and in a denomination where women cannot be rabbis, yet on the Senate floor he is vociferous champion of women's rights. She said,

"Much has been written in this campaign about bringing God to the ballot box, about wearing too much faith on too many sleeves. But the separation of church and state holds fast for the Catholic who attends Mass on Sunday and votes for family planning on Monday. And it holds for the Orthodox Jew who sits in segregated seating in Georgetown on Sabbath and votes for women's rights on Capitol Hill on Monday. In America, the separation of church and state, religious and secular life, is not just in the Constitution. It exists, not always easily, in hearts and minds."

We as religions people, should not feel threatened by politicians who say they are motivated by religious morality. We should be wary of those who claim that there is only one morality. We should not fear those who talk about God, but those who claim God as their exclusive property.

Whatever your idea of God is, you will agree that if God acts, God acts through humans and through natural processes. Perhaps God is infallible, but humans are certainly fallible.

Abraham Lincoln captured this poignantly in his second inaugural, in the thick of the greatest internal conflict this country has ever known:

"Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other.... The prayers of both could not be answered--that of neither has been answered fully."

In today's terms, God does not belong exclusively to one political party or faction. Yet I think we have more to fear from those who put all religious conviction aside before acting than from those whose actions are informed by their religious convictions. Our own convictions of the inherent worth and dignity of every person and the right of every vote in a democracy to be counted may lead us to oppose the Massachusetts referendum on the ballot to deny the vote to those in prison. In another referendum issue, the same conviction, and our familiarity with the casualties of the war on drugs rotting in our state and federal prisons may lead some of us to vote for more treatment alternatives and the funding of those alternatives from forfeited drug proceeds, on the grounds that we affirm the worth of the drug addict by using the money to try to turn him around rather than throw him in jail and use the money to buy more helicopters for the police departments. Many of us who are passionate about animal rights as part of the interconnected web of all existence might want to vote to shut down greyhound racing.

We may disagree on these positions or on what votes are most likely to advance the religious values we agree on. The point is not whether we are right or wrong about these judgments. The point is that if we take our religious precepts seriously, we could not make these judgments without them.

You see, as a constitutional lawyer I was willing to put religion in a box, and for purposes of public display of religion in the public square, each person's religion should be confined narrowly to avoid impinging on the other person's. But as a minister, I take an expansive view of religion. Religion permeates our values and how we live our lives, and within the confines of our own consciences we should allow it as free reign as possible.

Yes, God gets a vote. God gets to vote in the person of the radical and the conservative and the reactionary and the liberal. God gets all the votes. But, we are governed by people. As Ellen Goodman says,

"In America, the separation of church and state, religious and secular life, is not just in the Constitution. It exists, not always easily, in hearts and minds."

Amen.