The "religious question" has been slowly simmering forward the back burner of the U Presidential campaign.

The "religious question" has been slowly simmering forward the back burner of the U Presidential campaign, occasionally boiling above onto the stove of public attention. While Bush, a Methodist, has been out-of-step with his acknowledge church's opposition to the Iraq invasion, Kerry a Catholic, has been utter sentence againsted by certain right-wing bishops for Democratic abortion stands.

in addition a critical moral issue of the campaign, single in kind that cuts to the heart of one as well as the other religious liberty and, indeed, American identity, has been largely eschewed through most mainline religious voices in this debate, i.e., the question of democracy itself.

While at the Democratic National Convention in Boston last July as a visitant of Democrats Abroad Canada, I must have heard through a dozen speakers refer to the 2004 controvert as "the most important election" in their "lifetime." It finally sunk in- this election is not entirely a choice between two ideologically oppos candidates--it is about democracy itself. What Al Gore knows firsthand, and journalists of that kind as Greg Palast and Eric Alterman (of MSNBC News) have documented, is that Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris, and a batch of hired and directed goon rigged and bullied the 2000 Florida ballot Moreover, as Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman have reported in The of recent origin York Times, and Jimmy Carter has affirmed in The Washington position the Bush team is preparing a reprise in the sunshine state this November.

With Bush's "Patriot Act" eliminating becoming process for defendants, and the sweeping surveillance measures ushered in beneath "Homeland Security," including monitoring of main division purchases, library loans, email messages and phone conversations, along with the disenfranchisement of approximately the same million black Americans in 2000 according to the NAACP, about observers claim that the U is moving toward a extremely undemocratic national security state, in which the U Constitution is no longer a sacrosanct charter, moreover a "rough draft."

Where is the religious opposition to these progressive growths which constitute what U.S. theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether has expressioned a "drift toward plutocracy?" on what account the silence about the potential corrosion of that form of governance which make secures religious freedom? Thus far, the religious voices in the campaign have been relegated to specific and narrow issues, like as stem cell research, abortion, and gay marriage. to this time the religious communities in the U have a critical character to play in the health and preservation of democracy in America that enlarges far beyond niche issues.

What is perhaps stand in want ofed now is not single-issue religious sniping, if it were not that a groundswell of appreciation for, and guarding of, democracy--from mainline Jewish, Christian, and Muslim leaders.

so a faith-filled surge would not barely provide a salutary moment for inter-religious dialogue, nevertheless it would rise up and push back fundamentalist voices from the middle to the margins of the debate. We would then witness a religious emotion to defend democracy in America--not entirely unlike Dr King's civil rights campaign, which held high the U Constitution to shame Americans into ending legislated racism.

Democracy, at stem encompasses human dignity, mutual value tolerance, social compassion, and civil peace. These are central, rather than peripheral, to democratic culture--and they are moral and spiritual values as well.

Stephen Bede Scharper is Assistant Professor of Religious Ethics at the University of Toronto.

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