Faith-based politics

In last Saturday's Des Moines Register, the religion editor reported that she is once more planning to quiz the major parties' candidates for governor about their religious faith, its effects on their political views, and its role in the policy decisions that they will make if elected.

I read this announcement with some disgust, since such interviews nearly always bring out the worst kind of hypocritical, sanctimonious pseudo-piety in the candidates, while allowing them to state their policy views as if they were divine revelations, instead of having to provide some semblance of rational or empirical justification for them.

You would think that the editors of the Register would realize that their subscribers, in the sixth year of the Bush regime, have had many opportunities to observe the disastrous consequences of basing policy on faith (rather than on reason, evidence, or common sense), and that, by publishing the candidates' unreliable speculations about what God might want them to do in office, they are actually doing a disservice to the public and to the political process.