More and more we find members of the "Religious Right" contrasting themselves with the "Irreligious Left," as if there weren't any other positions. As far as they are concerned, only they represent religion and Christianity in America; anyone who disagrees with their agenda must be a secularist, an atheist, a leftists, and irreligious. God exists, and God votes for the GOP. Reality, however, is nothing at all like this.

Anna Quindlen writes for MSNBC:

When did it first become gospel that only conservatives knew God? It sure wasn't true 40 years ago for a Roman Catholic kid in a Catholic neighborhood, when the knock on John F. Kennedy was that religion was likely to be too much a part of his politics and he'd be on the phone to the Holy See so often, the pope would be a de facto cabinet member. ... All that made perfect sense to me because I had long ago concluded that I had become a liberal largely through religion. Loving your neighbor as yourself, giving your cloak to the man who had none, blessed are the peacemakers: taken together, all of it seemed a clarion call to social justice and the obligation of individuals and institutions to help those who needed help.

Yet the other night I listened to Bill O'Reilly speak of "secularists" on Fox News, and as I tried to parse out who those secularists might be, I discovered to my surprise that they would be me. ... The connection between politics and religion for me lies in the motto of Cornelia Connelly, the Philadelphia wife and mother who founded the order of nuns by whom I was lucky enough to be educated. Actions, not words. Touch the sick, the poor, the children, the powerless, as Christ did, and never mind quoting Leviticus.

One of the things conservatives rely upon in order to portray themselves as the only true defenders of religion is a poll which showed that those who went to church more than once a week supported George W. Bush for president by a 2-1 margin while those who never go to church supported Al Gore for president by a similar margin. But what about all of the Americans who don't fall into either category? For them, the "religion" gap hardly exists - they are as likely to vote Republican as they are to vote Democratic. In fact, as Quindlen notes, those who say that they go to church "a few times a month" are more likely to support a liberal Democrat than a conservative Republican.

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