That’s true in the current debates about health care, poverty and even gay marriage, he said, at the recent National Prayer Breakfast.

“Surely we can agree to find common ground when possible, parting ways when necessary,” said Obama. “But in doing so, let us be guided by our faith and by prayer. For while prayer can buck us up when we are down, keep us calm in a storm, while prayer can stiffen our spines to surmount an obstacle — and I assure you I’m praying a lot these days — prayer can also do something else. It can touch our hearts with humility. …

“Through faith, but not through faith alone, we can unite people to serve the common good.”

But while the president preached unity, this year’s National Prayer Breakfast was surrounded by controversy. There were signs this event on the semi-official Washington, D.C., calendar may no longer be able to serve as a safe forum in which a wide variety of religious and political leaders can unite their voices. The breakfasts began in 1953 and every president since Dwight Eisenhower has taken part.

Before the event, the leaders of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sent a letter to the White House and to Congressional leaders calling for a boycott. They also urged C-Span not to televise the breakfast. Meanwhile, a coalition of gay-rights activists and religious liberals announced a series of alternative “American Prayer Hour” events in Washington and other cities nationwide.

Both groups focused intense criticism on The Fellowship, the nondenominational Christian organization that sponsors the prayer breakfast and similar networking events in Washington and around the world. The key is that numerous Ugandan leaders are active in Fellowship activities in that country, including the politician who introduced anti-gay legislation that includes capital punishment for some offenses.

The ethics group’s letter accused this organization — often called “The Family” — of being a “cult-like secret society with unknown motivations and backing” that preaches an “unconventional brand of Christianity focusing on meeting Jesus ‘man-to-man.’ ” The American Prayer Hour coalition simply called it a “secretive fundamentalist organization.” The New York Times noted that the group has no “identifiable Internet site, no office number and no official spokesman.”

However, some religious conservatives have also expressed doubts about The Fellowship. In an investigation of its property holdings in and around Washington, World magazine called attention to The Fellowship’s “muddy theology,” its “distain for the established church” and an emphasis on privacy that “grew into an obsessive culture of secrecy.”

Describing the participants in Fellowship events, Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma told World: “Some of them are Muslims. Some of them are Christians. But they meet in the spirit of Jesus, so it’s not a denominational thing, it’s not even a Christian thing, it’s a Jesus thing.”

The ultimate issue is that this organization needs to admit that it exists and talk openly about its activities and goals, said journalist Jeff Sharlet, author of “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.” It’s a sign of progress, for example, that many Americans who are active in the organization have rejected the Ugandan legislation and communicated their dismay to their contacts in Uganda.

When it comes to the National Prayer Breakfast, the Fellowship’s leaders “should go completely public,” said Sharlet, by email. They should “acknowledge their existence, the fact that this is their event, make their account of it accountable (it was not Ike’s idea), explain the process by which people are invited and … make explicit that this is about consecrating leadership to Jesus. Everybody is welcome, but it’s about Jesus.”

This kind of transparency might accelerate what already seems to be happening. Some leaders — on the left and right — might reject the big-tent approach offered by the National Prayer Breakfast and create their own events, which could focus on more explicit messages about faith and politics.

If the Fellowship’s leaders are truly “serious about what they’re about,” noted Sharlet, this “would be great by their lights. They would lose a lot of clout, but the prayer breakfast movement would at last become an actual movement, of many strands.”

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Consider, for example, this reference to health care in its chapter on the biblical instruction, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

“Life and physical health are precious gifts entrusted to us by God,” notes the catechism. “Concern for the health of its citizens requires that society help in the attainment of living-conditions that allow them to grow and reach maturity: food and clothing, housing, health care, basic education, employment and social assistance.”

The implication is that governments — as a matter of social justice — should help citizens obtain basic health care, according to a letter sent to Congress and the White House by the Domestic Justice and Human Development Committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Health care is a human right, not a privilege, argued Bishop William F. Murphy.

“All people need and should have access to comprehensive, quality health care that they can afford, and it should not depend on their stage of life, where or whether they or their parents work, how much they earn, where they live, or where they were born,” wrote Murphy.

But there’s a problem. The letter stresses that the church will support accessible, affordable, universal health-care reform if it “protects and respects the life and dignity of all people from conception until natural death.”

Try telling that to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, surgeon general nominee Regina Benjamin, Vice President Joe Biden and other Catholics who play strategic roles in Washington, D.C., right now — while rejecting Catholic teachings on many critical health-care issues.

That’s the political reality that the bishops are facing, said Leonard J. Nelson III, a health-care law specialist at the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University.

For the bishops, Catholic teachings on the sanctity of human life are crystal clear, from birth to death, from abortion to euthanasia. Yet the bishops also support health-care for all — rich and poor. It’s getting harder and harder to keep these issues woven together.

“The bishops have been talking about social justice and health care for years and years and now the political climate has changed around them,” said Nelson, author of the new book, “Diagnosis Critical: The Urgent Threats Confronting Catholic Health Care.”

“The politicians who are in command are ready to pass some kind of health-care reform and they have all kinds of reasons to include abortion in that package. … That’s the fix that the bishops are in.”

Meanwhile, he said, leaders of Catholic hospitals and health-care systems will almost certainly face challenges in the near future.

For starters, they could be pressured to join networks and cooperatives that have no reason to follow the bioethical guidelines detailed in the “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services” adopted by the U.S. Catholic bishops. It will be hard for Catholic leaders to cooperate with government approved health-care programs and receive government funds while declining to offer services such as contraception, sterilizations and referrals for abortions.

Catholic leaders also know that another life-and-death issue looms in the background. As President Barack Obama noted in a recent New York Times interview, it’s impossible to cut or control costs without government efforts to shape health care in the final years of life.

“That’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues,” said Obama. “But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right? I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.”

The Catholic bishops, noted Nelson, have not addressed these end-of-life scenarios — yet. Will government agencies or advisory boards be given the power to decide whether patients facing Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease receive expensive medications? Who will decide whether elderly patients have a high enough “quality of life” to continue receiving medical care?

“Productive people in the middle years of life are always going to get the health care they need,” said Nelson. “The big threats to the sanctity of life come at the very beginning and at the end. If you’re going to defend the church’s teachings on health care, you have to focus on those threats. The bishops have to find a way to do that.”

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That wasn’t the kind of reassurance Dodd wanted, as a University of Notre Dame senior weeks away from her graduation ceremonies. When she returned to campus, Dodd headed straight to Notre Dame’s grotto — a small cave modeled after the famous Marian shrine in Lourdes, France.

“I knew this: No amount of shame or embarrassment would ever lead me to get rid of my baby. Of all women, Our Lady could surely feel pity for an unplanned pregnancy,” wrote Dodd, in an essay aimed at Father John Jenkins, the university’s president. The text was posted online by the journal First Things.

“In my hour of need, on my knees, I asked Mary for courage and strength. And she did not disappoint,” she added. “My boyfriend was a different story. He was also a Notre Dame senior. When I told him that he was to be a father, he tried to pressure me into having an abortion. … ‘All that talk about abortion is just dining-room talk,’ he said.”

Family and friends stood by Dodd’s side. Today, a decade later, she is a single mother and her daughter’s name is Mary. Dodd serves on the board of Room at the Inn, an organization working to build an on-campus facility for pregnant unwed students at Belmont Abbey College, near Charlotte, N.C.

The timing of Dodd’s essay — “Notre Dame, My Mother” — is, of course, linked to her alma mater’s decision to invite President Barack Obama to deliver its mid-May commencement address and to receive an honorary doctor of laws degree.

Throughout his political career, Obama has opposed all restrictions on abortion rights, even in late-term procedures. But he has also reached out to Catholic and evangelical voters by pledging to help lessen the need for abortions, through government efforts to aid needy mothers and their children.

Catholic traditionalists and many Notre Dame alumni argue that honoring Obama in this way violates a 2004 U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops policy that said: “The Catholic community and Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.”

Three years later, the bishops underlined the importance of this issue, arguing that the “direct and intentional destruction of innocent human life is always wrong and is not just one issue among many.”

However, a recent online count found that only 66 bishops, out of 195 dioceses nationwide, have issued public comments critical of Notre Dame’s decision. So far, the Vatican has remained silent on the issue.

Meanwhile, a Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life poll found that 50 percent of American Catholics approve of Notre Dame’s decision to “invite” Obama, while 28 percent disapprove. However, only 37 percent of white, non-Hispanic Catholics who attend Mass weekly agreed with the Notre Dame decision, compared with 56 percent of those less active in the church. This parallels that fact that 61 percent of these “attend less often” Catholics support abortion rights in all or most cases, as opposed to 30 percent of the “attend weekly” Catholics.

Alumni and current students know that these kinds of divisions also exist at Notre Dame, said Dodd. Notre Dame students also face crisis pregnancies and some young women there are convinced that they must have abortions in order to stay in school.

While others focus on the political implications of honoring Obama, Dodd said she worries about the impact of this symbolic event on women in the commencement audience who are wrestling with the same secret she faced 10 years ago.

Thus, she ended her essay with this question to the priest who currently leads Notre Dame: “Who draws support from your decision to honor President Obama — the young, pregnant Notre Dame woman sitting in that graduating class who wants desperately to keep her baby, or the Notre Dame man who believes that the Catholic teaching on the intrinsic evil of abortion is just dining-room talk?”

These kinds of influences make a difference, said Dodd.

“I think that Notre Dame needs to be in the lead when it comes to supporting women who face unplanned pregnancies,” she said. “Notre Dame needs to be on their side — always.”

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Consider this hypothetical landmine: Would it be discrimination for a Christian AIDS hospice to refuse to hire a worker who believes AIDS is a sign of God’s wrath?

Ponder these scenarios. Can a Muslim school fire a teacher who converts to Christianity? Can a Jewish pre-school discriminate against a job applicant who is active in Jews for Jesus?

Wait, there’s more. Is it job discrimination for an evangelical shelter for parents and children to refuse to hire someone who rejects centuries of Christian teachings on sex and marriage? How about forcing a Catholic hospital to hire doctors and nurses who reject the church’s doctrines on abortion?

These are the kinds of questions swirling around the White House as Obama tries to find a way to embrace a wide variety of religious groups and the faith-based ministries they operate — while rejecting some of the ancient doctrines that guide their work.

“There is no doubt that the very nature of faith means that some of our beliefs will never be the same,” said Obama, at the National Prayer Breakfast in which he promoted his Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. “We read from different texts. We follow different edicts. We subscribe to different accounts of how we came to be here and where we’re going next — and some subscribe to no faith at all.

“But no matter what we choose to believe, let us remember that there is no religion whose central tenet is hate. There is no God who condones taking the life of an innocent human being.”

Then, citing a variety of faith traditions, he said one law can bring unity, which is “the Golden Rule — the call to love one another; to understand one another; to treat with dignity and respect those with whom we share a brief moment on this Earth.”

The audience said, “amen.” But church-state lawyers and packs of social activists began murmuring about the details. There are, after all, secular and religious groups that believe President George W. Bush’s team erred when it allowed many faith-based ministries to receive government funds, while hiring only employees who affirmed their doctrines and mission statements.

These tensions remain, because Obama has decided — for now — to allow this practice to continue, while stressing that the Justice Department will review complaints on a case-by-case basis.

The ground is moving. For decades, a guiding principle of church-state law has been that state officials must avoid becoming “entangled” in doctrinal questions that allow the government to favor some faith groups over others.

In his prayer breakfast speech, the president said his initiative would not “favor one religious group over another — or even religious groups over secular groups.” But will some ministries get to hire according to their doctrines, while others will not, with the government separating the sheep from the goats?

“I really don’t have a clue” what the case-by-case language means, said Stanley Carlson-Thies, who worked with the Bush White House and now leads the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance. “I think they are trying to get out of the fix they’re in. Obama’s people have told so many religious groups that they’re not going to hurt what they do. Yet they have also told groups on the other side, ‘Of course we stand with you. This is discrimination and we’re not going to allow it.’ “

As recently as the 1990s a broad coalition of church-state experts — from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Christian Coalition — managed to work together on some crucial religious liberty issues. The goal was to promote free speech, freedom of association and “equal access” for believers and nonbelievers in the public square.

But today, driven by conflicts over gay rights, the spotlight is on what candidate Obama consistently called “religious discrimination.” The White House must choose between armies of religious believers who follow radically different sets of doctrines.

In the end, it’s impossible to separate the power of faith from the doctrines and traditions that inspire these believers, said Carlson-Thies.

“The faith is where the passion comes from, it’s where the witness is,” he said. “It’s clear that the president admires many of these faith groups and the work they do. The question he faces now is, ‘Do you want to work with them or not?’ “

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The problem was that she didn’t hear much in the way of traditional prayer, in terms of clergy offering words of praise and petition to God. Instead, the prayers sounded like lectures or mini-sermons aimed at the masses on the National Mall.

“Did I think the official prayers were disasters? No,” said Tickle, author of, among many relevant works, “Prayer Is a Place: America’s Religious Landscape Observed.”

“I just thought that they lacked the majesty of a psalm before the throne of God, substituting instead … the mundane and plebian commentary of a human being to other human beings about an established lists of errors and of desirable aims, with a little advice to God thrown in. … I’m not sure why preachers think they have to do that.”

The clergy in the rites surrounding the inauguration, of course, faced the challenge of praying in a political minefield. On one side were the atheists and secularists whose lawsuits failed to keep religious language out of the proceedings. On the other side were religious activists — liberals and conservatives — poised to judge whether the prayers made the grade, politically and doctrinally.

Pity the poor shepherd who has to please his own flock, as well as the New York Times editorial page.

Most of the early analysis focused on the decision to invite the Rev. Rick Warren — an evangelical leader who rejects Obama’s support for abortion and gay rights — to offer the invocation. Warren opened by blending a theme from his own bestseller, “The Purpose Driven Life,” with snippets of Jewish and Muslim prayers.

“Almighty God, our Father, everything we see and everything we can’t see exists because of you alone. It all comes from you. It all belongs to you. It all exists for your glory. History is your story,” he said. “Scripture tells us, ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God. The Lord is One.’ And you are the compassionate and merciful one. And you are loving to everyone you have made.”

The prayer also included words of thanksgiving for the election of an African-American president, an appeal for economic justice and concern for the environment. The California megachurch pastor then dared to close with clear references to Jesus — in Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish and English — and the Lord’s Prayer.

The benediction was by the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, a strong voice from the Civil Rights Movement. He began with the poetic final lines of the “Negro National Anthem,” the classic “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and then ended with an edgy poem based on the work of blues singer Big Bill Broonzy.

“Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning,” he concluded, “we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right. Let all those who do justice and love mercy say, ‘Amen.’ “

In between, Lowery offered sharp shots of political commentary, including a pronouncement that America has recently “sown the seeds of greed,” blown by the “wind of greed and corruption” that have caused the nation to “reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption.” Thus, he asked God to “help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance.”

None of this, stressed Tickle, was all that unusual. Prayers written for use in these kinds of giant civic events are almost always “rather didactic” and “content driven.” As a rule, they also tend to be long.

On this historic inauguration day, anyone seeking the most fervent expressions of faith, hope and love needed to hear the voices in the crowd, not the leaders in the pulpit.

“The real prayers were written by the people on that mall and across the nation, with their bodies, with their voices, with their cries and with their tears,” said Tickle. “That was the religious experience that really mattered on that day.”

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As Aretha Franklin finished singing “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” the queen of soul did what she has done for decades — she improvised.

The result was a soaring bridge between the inauguration of President Barack Obama and a sermon 45 years ago at the Lincoln Memorial.

“Our fathers’ God, to thee, author of liberty, to thee we sing. Long may our land be bright, with freedom’s holy light, protect us by thy might,” sang Franklin, before adding words that echoed some of the final cadences the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., added to his “I Have A Dream” address.

“Let freedom ring … From the red clay of Georgia, all the way to the Allegheny Mountains. … Let freedom ring.”

If anyone ever doubted that themes from the Civil Rights Movement have been blended into America’s “civil religion,” it’s time for those doubts to fade.

Presidential inaugurations are the “high feast days” of the vague, but powerful, faith that binds together a nation of many races and creeds. To no one’s surprise, religion played a major role in the rites for Obama, said Darrin M. Hanson, a political scientist at Xavier University of Louisiana.

“Obama has a preacher’s emotional style of speaking and he uses that to bring people together. It’s a skill he will need in the days ahead,” said Hanson, who will be analyzing the 2009 address as part of his research into the role that presidents play in America’s civil religion.

In this speech, Hanson said, Obama wanted to deliver a few sobering, “prophetic” messages as well as offer “priestly” words to encourage the million-plus people on the National Mall and the millions more watching from coast to coast and worldwide.

Thus, the new president told his listeners: “Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.”

Obama then used religious images — aimed at left and right — to describe bitter divisions in the body politic.

“On this day,” he said, “we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics. We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”

When scholars describe “civil religion,” they discuss words and rituals that try to accomplish four major goals, argued Hanson, in an essay entitled “The High Priest of American Civil Religion: Continuity and Change.”

First, American “civil religion” attempts to promote unity while accepting religious pluralism. Second, this faith must remain separate from both the state and any specific religion, he said. However, if it ever favors a particular creed, it does so in defense of fundamental human rights. Finally, this “civil religion” provides unity by appealing to shared values and beliefs, acted out in common rites that are acceptable to most believers.

In one passage, the new president managed to combine a number of “civil religion” themes, while also evoking deep emotions at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement and his own personal pilgrimage.

“This is the source of our confidence — the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny,” said Obama. “This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed, why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall. And why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.”

The key, said Hanson, is that Obama managed to hit a few hard topics — from global terror to an economic recession — while emphasizing words of hope.

“If you are trying to bring people together, you can’t be too specific when you talk about the things that drive people apart,” he said. “Inaugural addresses, and I’ve read them all, are supposed to be vague — but inspiring. …

“In the end, it’s easier to be a priestly and successful president than it is to be a prophetic and successful president. It’s hard to tell people, ‘We have really messed up and all of us are going to have to change.’ “

NEXT: The politics of prayer, in two dramatic acts.

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Pope Gregory XVI proclaimed that “no one in the future dare to vex anyone, despoil him of his possessions, reduce to servitude, or lend aid and favor to those who give themselves up to these practices, or exercise that inhuman traffic by which the Blacks, as if they were not men but rather animals, having been brought into servitude, in no matter what way, are, without any distinction, in contempt of the rights of justice and humanity, bought, sold and devoted sometimes to the hardest labor.”

Nevertheless, the first bishop of Charleston, S.C., attempted to soften the blow. Quoting scripture and Catholic doctrine, Bishop John England wrote a series of letters arguing that the pope didn’t mean to attack those — including Catholics — who already owned slaves.

“Bishop England was not a bad man. He was not personally in favor of slavery, nor was he a racist,” noted Father John Raphael of New Orleans, at a rally organized as an alternative to the University of Notre Dame’s graduation rites.

“In fact, Bishop England exercised a cherished and personal ministry to black Catholics,” he added. “But in the face of strong, anti-Catholic sentiment and prejudice, he simply wanted to show his fellow antebellum Southerners that Catholics could be just as American as everybody else and that tolerance of their cherished institution — slavery — was not in any way opposed by the Catholic church.”

It was wrong for Catholics of that era to seek any compromise on slavery, stressed Raphael, who serves as principal of St. Augustine High School, one of Louisiana’s most prominent African-American institutions. It is just as wrong, today, for Catholic leaders to compromise on abortion. At least the slaves were allowed to live, to be baptized and to receive the sacraments, he said.

The symbolism was obvious, since the priest is a prominent African-American graduate of Notre Dame.

The symbolism was more than obvious, since he was speaking at a rally protesting Notre Dame’s decision to grant President Barack Obama an honorary doctor of laws degree, clashing with a U.S. Catholic bishops policy that states: “Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.”

The Mass and rally on Notre Dame’s south quad followed hours of prayers in the university’s Alumni Hall and famous Marian grotto. These solemn, peaceful events received little media attention, even though they drew several hundred or several thousand participants, depending on who did the counting, as well as 25 Notre Dame faculty members, 26 graduating seniors and Bishop John D’Arcy of the Catholic Diocese of Ft. Wayne-South Bend. A louder standoff between police and 100 off-campus activists — led by anti-abortion leader Randall Terry — received most of the news coverage.

During the actual commencement address, a few protesters yelled, “Stop killing our children.” Most of the graduates booed the protesters, then chanted, “Yes we can,” Obama’s campaign slogan, and “We are ND” as they were removed.

Notre Dame President John Jenkins stressed that Obama accepted Notre Dame’s invitation knowing that “we are fully supportive of church teaching on the sanctity of human life and we oppose his policies on abortion and embryonic stem cell research.”

“President Obama is not someone who stops talking to those who differ with him,” stressed Father Jenkins. Then he added, “Mr. President, this is a principle we share.”

Meanwhile, many of the speakers at the “Notre Dame Rally for Life” openly criticized Obama’s policies, but consistently focused their harshest words on the actions of the current Notre Dame administration.

“Faith without works is dead, words without actions are meaningless,” said Father Raphael. “If, as we have been told, a dialogue is actually taking place … between the presidents of Notre Dame and the United States, between the university and the nation, then, for the university at least, that dialogue must be shaped by truth and charity, and protecting the sanctity of all human life, as the church understands life, must be its goal. …

“Actively building a culture of life at Notre Dame must become central to the university’s witness and mission to the nation and to the world.”

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Then there was the landmark Nevada trip to interview Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his wife Landra at their home. Landing a face-to-face interview with Sen. Hillary Clinton for “The 700 Club”? Say no more.

Finally, after a year of negotiations, Sen. Barack Obama’s staff took a leap of faith and scheduled an interview with the news team at the Rev. Pat Robertson’s flagship network. Then Obama came back for another interview, then another and another.

Before that fourth interview, Brody expected to shake hands once again. But Obama caught him off guard by moving in for one of those “Hey, how are you doing?” shoulder-to-shoulder bumps that colleagues use when greeting one another.

“It was strange,” said Brody, speaking at the annual Baptist Press Collegiate Journalism Conference. “You really don’t want to be chest-bumping White House candidates. It just doesn’t look right.”

Indeed, these are strange times. In the past year, Democrats have been talking more about their faith than the Republicans — part of a strategic attempt to capture a slice of a voting bloc that was so crucial in the 2004 elections. But in the age of talk radio, 24-hour cable TV coverage, weblogs and other forms of niche news, politicos are learning that they need to talk to a wider array of journalists to reach these values voters.

All kinds of doors are opening and “you have to be ready for your close-up,” Brody told an audience of student journalists in Nashville, mostly from Christian campuses across the Bible Belt.

“Go after it hard. Be very, very aggressive. I can’t tell you this enough,” he said. “You need to make multiple phone calls a day to get your source to talk. You need to make sure that you are constantly really going after the story. Don’t ever let up. …

“Make sure you really find your niche, and make sure you know what you are passionate about.”

After two decades in broadcasting — mostly in mainstream newsrooms — Brody has become a go-to commentator inside the Beltway, primarily by gaining a reputation as a fair-minded, even sympathetic sounding board for politicians on both sides of the aisle. Thus, Brody has even started turning up on MSNBC, CNN and NBC’s “Meet The Press.”

Democrats turn to his occasionally goofy weblog, “The Brody File,” for insights into the views of conservative, centrist and progressive evangelicals. Republicans do the same thing, often to see how Democrats answer his frequent questions about hot-button social questions.

Brody stressed that he isn’t interested in asking “gotcha questions” about faith in an attempt to trip them up. The journalist has heard his own share of loaded questions during his lifetime, since he was raised as a Jew in New York City before converting to Christianity while in college. Brody isn’t fond of labels.

“I don’t have an agenda, but I am going to ask questions about faith” during CBN news broadcasts, he said. “I am going to ask personal questions about how the candidates go about making their decisions. Still, I know that there are shades of gray when people start talking about faith. … So much of our politics in the age of talk radio is totally back and white, but we really do try to avoid polarizing language.”

Take the Obama interviews, for example. It’s one thing, said Brody, to ask Obama specific questions about his liberal approach to Christianity, his support for abortion rights and commitment to expanding civil rights of gays and lesbians. It’s something else to “play judge and jury” and try to challenge the reality of Obama’s faith.

“There is no question that his sincerity shines through when he’s talking to you about his Christian beliefs and the role that his faith plays in his life,” said Brody. “This man says what he believes and he believes what he says. Obama has said over and over that he has given his life to Jesus Christ and I think people need to take his word on that. …

“The question is whether this kind of dialogue with Obama will continue. Are we going to be able to keep talking, without trying to demonize each other? That’s the big question.”

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The Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners saw a campaign button based on this one liner and, on the “Interfaith Voices” public radio show, said it was a fine response to Gov. Sarah Palin’s jab at the work of “community organizers.”

Donna Brazile — who ran Al Gore’s 2000 White House campaign — saw the same gag and, on CNN, quickly linked it to the Bible’s message that “to whom much is given, much is required.”

But this cyberspace quip finally made the crucial jump to YouTube when U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen took to the House floor to remind conservatives “Barack Obama was a community organizer like Jesus. … Pontius Pilate was a governor.”

Cohen later emphasized that, “I didn?t and I wouldn’t compare anyone to Jesus. … What I pointed out was that Jesus was a force of change.” But the apology came too late to douse the fiery rhetoric raging on talk radio and weblogs.

In particular, the soundbite used by Cohen and others captured the rising tide of religious tensions in this White House race. This conflict has been heightened by the powerful role played by religious liberals in Obama’s groundbreaking outreach efforts in a wide variety of sanctuaries.

Obama is, after all, an articulate, proud member of the denomination — the United Church of Christ — that has in recent decades boldly pushed mainline Protestant to the doctrinal left on issues such as gay rights, abortion and the tolerance of other world religions. His running mate, Sen. Joe Biden, is an outspoken American Catholic whose progressive views have often placed him in dangerous territory between his political party and the Vatican.

Sen. John McCain, meanwhile, used to be an Episcopalian married to a beer-empire heiress, the very model of a mainline Protestant gentleman from the 1950s. Then he started visiting Southern Baptist pews while mending fences on the religious right. Finally, McCain shuffled the 2008 deck by naming Palin — an enthusiastic evangelical mother of five children — as his running mate.

This move rocked the pews on both sides of the sanctuary aisle, but Palin’s ascension has caused an unusual degree of shock, anger, dismay and distain on the secular and religious left.

The political weblog Instapundit summed up the mood on the cultural left with this headline: “She’s the freakin’ Antichrist, I tell you!”

For author Deepak Chopra, a superstar in the spirituality marketplace, Palin is, quite literally, the anti-Obama. She is a living symbol of all that is wrong with small-town, parochial, ignorant, reactionary Middle America, especially with her “family values” code language that opposes expanding doctrines of civil rights.

“She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses,” he argued, at The Huffington Post. “In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of ‘the other.’ ”

Obama, however, is “calling for us to reach for our higher selves,” said Chopra.

The ultimate irony is the GOP’s assumption that Palin will appeal to women just because “she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies,” argued religious historian Wendy Doniger of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School.

“Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman,” she wrote, in an “On Faith” essay for the Washington Post. “She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women.”

But can anyone, in the current political atmosphere, top the Palin as Pontius Pilate smack down? University of Michigan historian Juan Cole, a specialist in Middle Eastern and South Asian affairs, offered Salon.com his best shot.

When it comes to faith and politics, he said, the values of McCain’s “handpicked running mate, Sarah Palin, more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers. On censorship, the teaching of creationism in schools, reproductive rights, attributing government policy to God’s will and climate change, Palin agrees with Hamas and Saudi Arabia rather than supporting tolerance and democratic precepts.

“What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick.”

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middle-of-the-night telephone calls often bring bad news.

But for many pastors there is one kind of call that is uniquely

painful. There are times when the shock of death is easier to handle

than questions about eternal life.

“It happens like this,” noted the Rev. J. Gerald Harris, who became

editor of the Southern Baptist newspaper of Georgia after 40 years in

ministry. “A grieving widow would call and say with a broken heart

and with tears in her voice, ‘Pastor, my husband had a heart attack

last night and we took him to the hospital, but he was dead on

arrival. I can’t believe it has happened, but we need your help. I

know he was not a church member, but we would like for you to preach

his funeral.’ “

The pastor says “yes,” of course. Then, while talking with the

family, it often becomes apparent that the deceased was not a

believer or may even have been someone who — by word or deed —

flaunted his status as an unbeliever. Others may join the church,

then walk away for decades.

This is awkward, noted Harris, for clergy who believe salvation is

found through faith in Jesus Christ, alone. It’s one thing to step

into the pulpit and preach on the mercy of God and to speak words of

comfort to a grieving family. It’s something else for a pastor to go

a step further and do what loved ones may want him to do — openly

proclaim they will be reunited with the deceased in heaven.

Harris said he started receiving calls and emails soon after he wrote

about this subject in the Christian Index, in part because this

dilemma pivots where the minister draws a theological line, a line

that many liberal Christians no longer believe needs to be drawn at

all.

There is no question, Harris stressed, that pastors should provide

comfort and care for families in these circumstances. Obviously,

there is no need for preachers to speak words that would cause

grieving relatives pain. However, he also is convinced that it’s

wrong for pastors to deliver messages they sincerely believe are not

true — to embrace the doctrine of “universalism,” which proclaims

that all people find eternal salvation, no matter what they believe

or how they live their lives.

This is tricky doctrinal territory, as Sen. Barack Obama learned

during a June 10 meeting with clergy behind closed doors in Chicago.

While other conservative leaders asked Obama about controversial

social issues, the Rev. Franklin Graham — son of evangelist Billy

Graham — asked an openly theological question: Did the candidate

believe that “Jesus was the way to God, or merely a way.”

Later, Obama told Newsweek that — in a candid, personal answer — he

replied: “It is a precept of my Christian faith that my redemption

comes through Christ, but I am also a big believer in the Golden

Rule, which I think is an essential pillar not only of my faith but

of my values and my ideals and my experience here on Earth. I’ve said

this before, and I know this raises questions in the minds of some

evangelicals. I do not believe that my mother, who never formally

embraced Christianity as far as I know … I do not believe she went

to hell.”

In the end, Harris said, it’s all but impossible to ignore this kind

of doctrinal division. However, pastors do have options when handling

these situations, other than delivering sermons that violate their

own consciences.

In many Christian traditions, funeral rites consist of hymns and

prayers that place more attention on the words of scriptures than on

a minister’s message. But if the family insists on a sermon that

focuses on the deceased, he said, pastors can suggest that a friend

deliver this message. In some congregations, loved ones offer

eulogies during gatherings — fellowship meals, perhaps — following

funerals.

“These questions aren’t going away,” said Harris. “For many people

today it’s not enough to be tolerant of other people’s decisions and

religious beliefs. Now they want a kind of positive tolerance, they

want you to accept and praise other people’s beliefs. You have to be

willing to say what they want you to say. …

“That just isn’t possible, for a lot of us.”

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