I knew I didn’t like Jonathan Chait’s TRB on Mitt Romney and religion, I just didn’t realize all the reasons I didn’t like it until I read Ross Douthat’s powerful response to it.

My basic problem with liberal opposition to faith-based politics is that 9.9 times out of 10 it boils down to liberals objecting to the other guy’s faith influencing politics. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a prominent liberal — who wasn’t an activist for atheism or hyper-secularism — sincerely object to liberal politicians who invoke religion as the wellspring of their politics. When the Catholic Church comes out for sanctuary cities, the New York Times applauds. Liberals hate Pat Robertson for all the usual reasons, but do not blink at the Reverend Jesse Jackson or the Reverend Al Sharpton being involved in politics. They despise the Christian coalition but have no problem with the mobilization of black churches. They cheer Democratic politicians who want to take back “the faith issue.” Indeed, lame attempts to dog whistle evangelicals back to the Democratic fold are greeted as smart politics. Environmentalists who consider anti-Christian fringe elements in their ranks to be well-intentioned members of the team, cheer when they see a wedge issue on the environment that might divide evangelical community (out the window goes the usual lament about wedge issues as well). Hillary Clinton has a deep and abiding connection with the Social Gospel tradition of the American left, but no one cares because the religious left has the same public policy goals as the secular left on most if not all issues.

Anyway, what drives me nuts is the attempt — recently personified by John Kerry — to have it both ways: denouncing conservatives for trying to impose their faith while at the same time insisting that God is on the side of liberalism. If you don’t like God in politics, stop trying to draft Him to your cause. If you do like God in politics, stop denouncing the other guys for trying to draft Him to their cause.

This points to why I don’t really care that much about religious motivations in politics, so long as those motivations are checked by the right philosophical and legal limitations (politics cannot safely do what religion does, and vice versa). As I’ve said for years (borrowing from Irving Kristol) Americans are divided theologically but more or less united morally. That is particularly true — and more importantly should be particularly true — within ideological camps. I don’t much care if you’re an atheist a Mormon or a Muslim so long as our basic conceptions of right and wrong, wise and dumb, line up. Similarly, it makes not a bit of difference to me if I have the same theology of someone whose actions and preferred policies differ from mine. Indeed, as Peter Viereck noted half a century ago, the rising ideologicalization of politics renders the Old Differences less important. Anti-Communists loved to have black anti-Communists, Jewish anti-Communists, Catholic anti-Communists all on-board the same boat just as pro-Communists loved as broad a Popular Front as possible. Today, we generally see conservative Catholics, Protestants and Jews on the same page, their theological differences minimized by their common agreement on actual policies. And liberal Catholics, Protestants and Jews line up on the other side. Viereck called this self-sifting transtolerance and it remains alive and well today.