It may have been a shrewd flanking move, although Hollywood will probably -- and correctly -- interpret Lieberman's sermon as an attack on its R-rated ways and may hastily zip up that most intimate of Tinseltown unmentionables, its pocketbook. And it may very well have been sincere -- making the doubtful assumption that you can use the word "sincere" to refer to pronouncements made by politicians about religion. But it is fundamentally pernicious. Like all attempts to drag religion into the public sphere, Lieberman's call for a heightened American religiosity erodes the church-state distinction that is one of the foundations of American civil society, cheapening religion by using it as a political tool and raising the specter of theocracy.

In time-honored fashion, Lieberman wrapped himself in the soothing mantle of the Founders to deliver his Khomeini-lite oration. "John Adams, second president of the United States, wrote that our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people," he said, adding that "George Washington warned us never to indulge the supposition 'that morality can be maintained without religion.'" Not surprisingly, he failed to quote a far more important intellectual architect of American society, Thomas Jefferson, an Enlightenment deist who denied the divinity of Jesus, called Christianity "the most sublime and benevolent, but most perverted system that ever shone on man," and wrote "the interests of society require the observation of those moral precepts only in which all nations agree (for all forbid us to murder, steal, plunder, or bear false witness,) and that we should not intermeddle with the particular dogmas in which all religions differ, and which are totally unconnected with morality."

It would certainly not seem that the sage of Monticello would support Lieberman's assertion that "there must be a place for faith in America's public life" -- unless "faith" is stripped of all its "particular dogmas" (i.e. institutional religious content) and taken to mean simply the belief that it's wrong to kill or steal. But this is not what Lieberman wants to say: Even those depraved Hollywood hacks and atheistic Upper West Side pointy-heads subscribe to those "moral precepts." Lieberman is arguing something stronger: that institutional religion, not just generalized secular goodwill, is necessary for morality.

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