In their heart of hearts I'm sure most people wish God would stop interfering in politics. Pres. Bush refers to God's helping hand in making war in the Middle East, which is derided by those who don't talk to God regularly. But God is invoked in every war by both sides. It would be a cheap shot to point at Bush, or born-agains in general. God keeps making contact, and he's politically broad-minded. The New Age book "Conversations With God" has been a mega-bestseller, and Al Gore, along with thousands of other believing Christians who have no affiliation with fundamentalism, is guided by WWJD--What Would Jesus Do?--when confronted with dilemmas of importance. Praying for divine guidance is a time-honored tradition that touches almost everyone in a wrenching crisis.
Our society couldn't be more different from traditional Muslim society, but we have in common that people in both places want to know what God thinks. They yearn for the voice of absolute authority. Fundamentalist Muslims share this yearning with their Jewish counterparts in Israel. This has resulted in the sad spectacle of competing Gods and religious hatred fueled by the delusion that God belongs only to one sect--the one you were born into, or born again into.
In a recent post Prof. Susan Smalley says, quite realistically, that no one can "let go" of a belief until the void it would leave behind is filled. One can assert that war, violence, intolerance, and suffering have been inflicted in the name of God. This argument appeals strongly to those who have already "let go" of God. To someone yearning to be close to God, however, faith and revelation are the cause of hope, joy, reassurance, and the solution to fear and loneliness.
God won't go away as long as human beings feel afraid and lonely. He might evolve--so one hopes--into something other than a white-bearded authority figure with a taste for vengeance. In moderate denominations that happened a long, long time ago. But modern life couldn't handle a nicer God. Millions of people feel too hollow and afraid, angry and attacked, lonely and disconnected. This phenomenon is called alienation. It was well diagnosed by Marx and Freud, who pointed out that the human psyche suffers terribly when people are yanked out of a connection with Nature, when traditions stop being a safety net, and when dislocation and insecurity are the daily norm.
The reason that 87% of people tell pollsters that they never had a doubt about the existence of God isn't rock-ribbed faith. It's fear of the alternative, a cosmos where the void between the stars is small compared to the void left by an absent God. Whatever our beliefs, we all have to fill that void one person at a time. It would be an act of good faith if the religious right could concede that we're all in this together. It would be an equal act of faith if the enemies of the religious right made the same concession.