These findings are important to America for two reasons.

First, they tell us that, contrary to evidence in the United States, the intersection of religion and politics doesn’t have to be fraught with hypocrisy. Britain is a Christian-dominated country, and the Christian Bible is filled with liberal economic sentiment. It makes perfect sense, then, that the more devoutly loyal to that Bible one is, the more progressive one would be on economics.

That highlights the second reason this data is significant: The findings underscore an obvious contradiction in our own religious politics.

Here in the United States, those who self-identify as religious tend to be exactly the opposite of their British counterparts when it comes to politics. As the Pew Research Center recently discovered, “Most people who agree with the religious right also support the Tea Party” and its ultra-conservative economic agenda. Summing up the situation, scholar Gregory Paul wrote in the Washington Post that many religious Christians in America simply ignore the Word and “proudly proclaim that the creator of the universe favors free wheeling, deregulated union busting, minimal taxes, especially for wealthy investors, and plutocrat-boosting capitalism as the ideal earthly scheme for his human creations.”

The good news is that this may be starting to change. In recent years, for instance, Pew has found that younger evangelicals are less devoutly committed to the Republican Party and its Tea Party-inspired agenda than older evangelicals. Additionally, surveys show a near majority of evangelicals agree with liberals that the tax system is unfair and that the wealthy aren’t paying their fair share. Meanwhile, the organization Faith in Public LIfe has highlighted new academic research showing that even in America there is growing “correlation between increased Bible reading and support for progressive views, including abolishing the death penalty, seeking economic justice, and reducing material consumption.”

Of course, many Americans who cite Christianity to justify their economic conservatism may not have actually read the Bible. In that sense, religion has become more of a superficial brand than a distinct catechism, and brands can be easily manipulated by self-serving partisans and demagogues. To know that is to read the Sermon on the Mount and then marvel at how anyone still justifies right-wing beliefs by invoking Jesus.

No doubt, only a few generations ago, such a conflation of religion and right-wing economics would never fly in America. Whether William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” crusade or the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s poor people’s campaign, religion and political activism used to meet squarely on the left — where they naturally should.

Thus, the findings from Britain, a country similar to the United States, evoke our own history and potential. They remind us that such a congruent convergence of theology and political ideology is not some far-fetched fantasy: It is still possible right here at home

“We’ll do what everyone does,” I said, slightly annoyed at the suggestion of impiety. Many of my friends had cassette players, and when the device came with a built-in radio tuner, there was a standard procedure for it: Krazy Glue the switch into the tape-playing position, paste a strip of masking tape over the channel indicators, and put the antenna out with the next day’s trash. As Talmud students, we were nothing if not resourceful; loopholes and work-arounds were our forte.

It was several weeks after our marriage, and Gitty and I, both 18 at the time, were still nearly strangers (Gitty is not her real name). Our match, like all the others in our community, had been an arranged one, the whim of a local matchmaker. We’d had a 10-minute meeting during which little was said, followed by a brief celebration with cake and wine at the home of the rebbe, the grand rabbi of our sect. When the rebbe said, “Mazel tov!” the match was official. Six months later, without seeing or speaking to each other during that entire period, Gitty and I were married. And now, several weeks later, we tiptoed around each other, still concealing personal quirks and character flaws, such as forgetting to put out the trash Tuesday nights or secretly picking a bone from the carp during the Sabbath afternoon lunch — a violation of the Sabbath laws.

Upon my assurance that the radio would be disabled, Gitty only shook her head and went back to her housework. The cassette player soon went up on top of our refrigerator, where it would remain, through four different apartments and across the births of our five children, for the next decade or so. In point of fact, however, I never disabled the radio. I don’t recall if it was simple forgetfulness, procrastination or a secret concern that in the event of an emergency — an incoming nuclear missile, say, from a rogue Soviet submarine, or an overflowing Hudson River — we would be the only ones without access to evacuation plans. But we never switched the radio on, allowing it to serve only as a phantom decadent presence in our otherwise pure and pious home. Eventually, the tape players would serve mostly to entertain our children, who would haul their Legos, Tonka trucks, and American Girl dolls out onto the kitchen floor, and the decks would spin an endless spool of musical tales featuring Yanky, Chaneleh and Rivky, good Jewish children who spoke no lies, loved the Sabbath and always, without fail, honored their parents.

There were few radios to be found when I was growing up, but I do remember one incident when I was around 10. It was a late Saturday night, and my father, a Hasidic teacher and scholar, was being interviewed by a Jewish radio station about his work, which involved reaching out to secular and unaffiliated Jews to teach them about our brand of Orthodoxy. My mother borrowed a radio from one of our neighbors for the evening, and our family gathered around the table in our small kitchen as my father, from his study down the hall, gave his interview over the phone. I remember little of the interview itself, as I spent most of the 30-minute segment marveling at the mystery of my father’s voice being transported from the other end of our apartment to a studio in some unknown place and back to us in the kitchen. I remember also that it felt oddly aberrant. Secular influences were so anathema to our insular world that the presence of the radio on the kitchen table, right next to the silver Sabbath candlesticks my mother had just cleared off the dining room table, was jarring.

During my teenage years and early 20s, until well after I was married, I spent my days at all-male yeshivas, schools for full-time Talmud study, where there were no radios to be found anywhere near the premises. News of Boris Yeltsin’s failed coup in Moscow and Saddam Hussein’s recalcitrance over Kuwait were passed along with plates of farfel and slippery noodle kugel. When Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin shook the hand of Yasser Arafat on Bill Clinton’s White House lawn, we looked up briefly from our Talmuds to listen to the student who brought the news, who claimed he had it on good authority — probably from the school’s non-Jewish janitor — and promptly returned to our studies. Later we repeated the news to our wives at home who carried it further to their mothers, sisters and neighbors.

Over time, however, I came to look up to the radio on top of our refrigerator with longing. I had, by that time, come to learn two rules of radio. The FM dial, I knew, carried music — secular, vulgar, abhorrent. The sin of listening to secular music, especially female voices, was so great that I couldn’t even be tempted. It was the AM dial, however, that intrigued me. I learned that it carried news and opinion, and as I matured into my mid-20s, I grew curious about the world, and, on occasion, wondered about the things available to me with only the flick of a switch. The more I thought about it, the more the temptation grew. It wouldn’t violate Jewish law, it would violate the restrictions of our fervently devout community, and I wondered if that wasn’t a violation I could live with. Many evenings, after a full day of Talmud study, I would sit at our kitchen table eating the dinner Gitty had prepared and my eyes would wander to the radio on the fridge. The dial seemed to hiss and beckon in a seductive whisper. I’ve got news for you. But I worried about Gitty. If she caught me, she would scold and sulk at the impurities I was allowing into my heart, and, by extension, into hers and those of our children. I was ashamed of my urges, like an alcoholic who keeps hidden a stash of booze.

Until one evening, arriving home to find Gitty and the children sound asleep, I sat in the stillness of our two-bedroom apartment — and I found I could no longer resist.

I found an old pair of earphones in one of our kitchen drawers, alongside utility bills and an assortment of multicolored rubber bands. Careful not to make a sound, I moved one of the chairs near the refrigerator, stepped onto it with a mixture of anxiety and excitement, and plugged the earphones into the tiny jack. I leaned my elbows on the dust-covered surface above the fridge and began twisting the dial slowly, listening with one ear to the cackle of static as the white indicator floated across the red band, while keeping my other ear tuned in for noises from the bedrooms down the hallway.

The dial switched from one station to another, commercials for medical malpractice attorneys, car dealerships and department store blowout sales filling me with forbidden pleasure. The strange jingles, the smooth transitions from traffic to news to commercials, captivated me; the fact that the sale ended in one week only, or that I was not currently on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, which, I was now being told, was backed up to the Brooklyn Bridge due to an accident in the right lane, mattered little. I was like a visitor from a different era encountering our modern one, captivated by its very mundaneness.

Eventually I came upon a talk show program. The host was angry, particularly miffed about the antics of someone he called “Alan Dirty-shirts.” After a few minutes of listening, I gathered that “Alan Dirty-shirts” was a liberal, and liberals were bad. They were in favor of sinful things, like abortions, and wacky ones, like homosexuals getting married. I listened as caller after caller berated “Alan Dirty-Shirts” for intending to uproot conservative values from the American heartland. The American heartland, whatever and wherever that was, had my sympathy. “Alan Dirty-Shirts” was against people of faith, who, I was happy to learn, existed even outside of my own Hasidic world. This radio thing suddenly didn’t feel all that wrong.

“Were you listening to the radio last night?” Gitty asked the next morning while flipping over a slice of French toast in the frying pan. I stood there, dumbfounded at her intuition and resentful of her demand for accountability. I tried to deny it, but she wasn’t fooled. “You promised years ago you’d disable it,” she said with chilly nonchalance. Then she added, “It starts with radio, and the next thing you know, you’re eating pig and driving on the Sabbath.” I thought she was being dramatic, but still, I gave her my halfhearted assurance that now, finally, I would disable it.

But I had no intention of doing so. It was no longer a mere temptation. An irrepressible desire had now taken hold, a yearning for exposure to ideas and views that I’d never heard before, ideas both strange and captivating. Several nights later, lowering the volume to near mute so that no sound escaped from the earphones, I spent another hour standing on the chair near the fridge, listening again to various programs along the AM dial. Once again, Gitty confronted me the next morning. She wouldn’t tell me how she knew, but it would do me no good to deny it. Gitty looked at me like she was deciding between pleading for piety and throwing the device off our second-story balcony. But I would not cave. I would be a dutiful Hasid in all respects except this one, and Gitty, realizing eventually that it was no use arguing, reluctantly let the issue rest.

I found it difficult to be a dutiful Hasid, and over the years there would be more flare-ups of conflict, battles over the many restrictions and boundaries imposed by our cloistered world. When I began to bring home library books on biblical archaeology or comparative religion, or I would absentmindedly leave a copy of the New York Times where the children might encounter it, Gitty would again confront me over my slippery descent toward the decadence of the modern world and the poisonous influences I was allowing into our home.

Four years after my foray into listening to the radio, a brand-new laptop computer arrived at our home, which I’d ordered from a mail order catalog. The unopened box lay on the kitchen table, and Gitty, ever so observant, pointed her index finger to the listed features.

“DVD drive?” she said. “Isn’t that for movies?”

I thought about lying to her, but I was no longer willing to suppress urges for which I no longer felt ashamed, no longer willing to abide restrictions that I now found meaningless. My silence confirmed her suspicion, and I could almost see the frenzy of thoughts churning in her mind.

“Maybe — it can be disabled?” she said.

My heart ached at the sincerity in her voice, for her pain at having to give up on the purity she sought for our home, for being forced to deal with a recalcitrant husband who had come to disdain the strictures by which we were supposed to live. I remembered the conversation about the radio, and how pleased she’d been with me when I agreed to her plan. But I knew that I couldn’t help her this time, and she saw it in my eyes. I wouldn’t promise to do something I wouldn’t do. And she knew, without me having to say it, that I would not put Krazy Glue to the DVD drive.

Years later, I would come to find other aspects of our lifestyle stifling, my curiosity about the world too powerful to repress. Our dogmas and worldviews, I would eventually find, were inconsistent with my developing views about the world. Soon after purchasing my first computer, I would sign up for a subscription to America Online, and, with a world of information at my fingertips, my faith would be further eroded until, after many years, I would lose it entirely.

Toward the very end of our marriage, after nearly 15 years together, Gitty and I sat in my small study in our converted garage, and looked back on the previous years. We were no longer arguing. Our views on religion were clearly unbridgeable, and we were resigned to our separation. I would be moving out within days.

“You know,” Gitty said, gesturing toward the desktop computer, the TV in the corner, the sagging shelves of the bookcase by the far wall, “without the Internet, the DVDs, your newspapers and your library books, none of this would’ve happened.”

She had forgotten — it all started with the radio. Gitty knew it all along. It’s what I’d heard from my rabbis and teachers all my life. Small violations led to bigger ones, until all would be lost. And I guess, in a way, they were right.

Sound familiar?

God had called Samuel to essentially Occupy Zarahemla, to stand up and speak out against corporate greed and wealth accumulation. For his trouble, he was promptly thrown out the front gates. Undeterred, he bravely scaled the city’s exterior wall, evading a barrage of arrows and stones to stand defiant. He offered Zarahemla a choice: repent or be destroyed by God. Like any of us who have ever witnessed the ranting of a doomsday prophet, the Nephites couldn’t be bothered. Four hundred years later, Samuel’s prophecy would sorely come to pass. After decades of perpetual wars and extreme environmental upheavals, the inhabitants of Zarahemla were wiped completely off the continent and out of history.

They had been warned.

The rise and fall of the Nephite nation is a cautionary tale included in the Book of Mormon. The book purports to be the history of ancient American people, written by prophets who foresaw the present day and knew that calamity was coming. Joseph Smith reportedly translated the record by “the gift and power of God.” The prophetic message of the scripture is sharp; if Americans are obedient to God, we will be blessed with riches. If Americans set our hearts on riches and ignore the poor, we will be destroyed.

It’s an ontological dilemma facing every millionaire Mormon.

One hundred and eighty-two years after its founding, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is certainly prospering. The Church has diversified into commercial enterprises, owning television and radio stations, universities, farms, banks and, most recently, retail. Last month, the Church opened City Creek Mall, a stunning billion-dollar downtown renovation in Salt Lake City featuring the Utah debut of Tiffany Jewelry, Michael Kors and Porches Design. This ambitious temple of high-end commerce sits adjacent to the iconic LDS Temple where sacred rituals are performed daily by the Mormon faithful.

Mitt Romney and City Creek represent the culmination of a great transformation within Mormonism. As an outcast faith, early Mormons experimented with communal living and alternative marriages. This original brand of Mormonism was typified by their rugged frontier prophet and polygamist outsider Brigham Young. In 1848, Young famously declared, “There shall be no private ownership of the streams that come out of the canyons, nor the timber that grows on the hills. These belong to the people: all the people.”

Young’s egalitarian separatism has long been superseded. The living embodiment of the 21st century saint is now the slick, painfully monogamous, politically malleable super-capitalist Romney who shares “humorous” tales of layoffs and factory closures.

Romney perfected the art of “creative destruction” through leveraged buyouts and junk bond financing that enriched his investors at Bain Capital while at times devastating common workers. His critics from the 99 percent, he argues, are driven by envy.

Ironically, while Romney would prefer to discuss wealth inequality in “quiet rooms,” the topic consumed both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young’s sermons and writings. For a short time in the Book of Mormon, the Nephites abandoned their love of riches and established “Zion” — a classless utopia that “had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor, but they were all made free.”

The Nephite story provided the template for Smith and Young’s social experiments with communalism. They would both try repeatedly to replicate the mythic Zion. Smith repeatedly told his followers, “if you are not equal in earthly things you cannot be equal in obtaining heavenly things.” Young also championed wealth redistribution, “We have plenty here. No person is going to starve, or suffer, if there is an equal distribution of the necessaries of life.”

But like all utopias, the dream is easier than reality.

Facing the existential threat of federal disincorporation, the LDS Church responded by seeking assimilation at any cost. They began to privatize their cooperative business ventures throughout the 1880s and publicly abandoned polygamy in 1890. The course was set. To survive in America, Mormons would transform themselves into patriotic citizens. The quest for Zion would be replaced by the American dream. The rhetoric of communalism exchanged with a reverence for the free market. Romney’s ascendance to the nation’s highest office will affirm to Mormons that their faith is finally authentic – that they are the indisputable Horatio Alger of American religions.

But how would the poor fare under the first Mormon president? By all accounts, not well.  Romney has eagerly endorsed Paul Ryan’s budget plan to slash $3.3 trillion from programs that benefit low-income Americans. Furthermore, Romney refuses to consider increased taxes on millionaires or a modest increase on the taxable rates of capital gains. He encourages the wealthy to hoard their riches while the poor continue to struggle. It’s a familiar story he should know. Samuel the Lamanite continues to cry out to Romney in sacred protest, “The day shall come when they shall hide up their treasures, because they have set their hearts upon riches; cursed be they and also their treasures.”

He has been warned.

Lizzie has been trying on bits and pieces of religions for years now, discarding each after a little wear. A few years ago, as we read the decidedly secular Nancy Drew together one night, she asked out of the blue if I believed in God. As she snuggled into the crook of my arm, chewing on a strand of dark blond hair, she waited for an answer.

“Well, some people believe in God,” I answered, carefully putting on the same serious but accessible voice I’d used to answer previous uncomfortable questions about where babies come from and why there are Republicans.

“Do you believe?” Lizzie said, stressing the you so I could almost see the italics flying out of her mouth. There was no getting around it. I had to answer.

“No, I don’t,” I said as concern creased her face.

Should I have lied and just said I believed? After all, God seems to lurk in almost every nook and cranny of this country. Way back, in kindergarten, the Pledge of Allegiance told her she’s part of one nation under God. Lizzie sees friends and family go to church or temple each week and smiles at the store clerk who tells her to “have a blessed day.” Giant decorated trees and huge menorahs are everywhere she looks each December (rather, menorahs used to be everywhere — then we moved to Portland). Every time I dig through my wallet to find bills to buy a gallon of milk — or anything at all — I see His name. In God some may trust, but not all of us.

There are chunks of society saying if you don’t believe in God you’re a bad person. Will Lizzie intuit that she’s bad if she doesn’t believe — or that her mother is? Or is it OK to tell her what I believe: It’s a superstition that many people believe but I don’t, and that, to me, it seems like mystical make-believe. Maybe I should take what I like about religion — the moral and ethical bits — and drop the rest, my own personal ecumenical smorgasbord. I’ll take One Golden Rule and seven of the Ten Commandments, please, and hold the mortal sin and transubstantiation.

My disenchantment with religion started long ago, when I went to Mass each Sunday. I wore frilly dresses that my mother had carefully laid out the night before and the white acrylic tights that itched my legs and sagged uncomfortably as I sat, week after week, on the polished dark wood pew, standing and sitting on command, but not really listening to the priest. I chanted when everyone else did — my religion, with its comfort of ritual and repetition, seemed made for obsessive compulsives. But instead of mediating on God’s glory, I’d flip though the hymnal and wiggle on the hard wooden seat. After my First Communion, I’d go each week and eat Jesus, in Catholicism’s ritualistic cannibalism. As the wafer dissolved slowly on my tongue, I realized that to me it was just a wafer. The church didn’t fill me with the Holy Ghost, just the feeling it was a scam. There wasn’t one single event that made me feel this way — just a series of Sundays and something deep in me. I was a closeted agnostic at 6. But I kept going. When I was a teenager, I’d sullenly attend each Sunday morning, studying the other teenagers, potheads and cheerleaders. A cheerleader who, at school, strutted past with a flip of her feathered hair as if I didn’t exist, smirked a fake lip-glossed smile at me and shook hands when the priest told us to offer each other a sign of peace. As soon as Mass was over, the detente ended and everyone went back to their roles, the weekly pretend play over. I smoked dope with the potheads, and cheerleaders ignored lesser girls.

High school also taught me how malleable faith could be — religious beliefs seemed as steadfast and unbendable as tin foil. After losing my religion as a teen, I lost my virginity and got pregnant. My parents, avowed Catholics, took me to the clinic for an abortion without a second thought. We didn’t even consider any other alternative for more than 20 seconds — and thanks be to my parents for that. But it crystallized the feeling that religion was full of hypocrisies — and you could twist it and turn it to fit your needs. I still went to church, though, with my parents weekly. I didn’t ask them not to go and they didn’t tell me to go; it was expected that I go, so I did. And as soon as I left home, I left my religion without a second glance. During my 20s and 30s, I gave as much thought to religion as I did to my 401K — pretty much nothing. But in my mid-40s, I found myself back in church for the first time in decades.

My 40-year-old cousin and her two young children had been killed. There aren’t words to explain the awfulness of what happened, but here are a few to describe it: It was late. It was dark. My cousin was driving with her two kids tucked safely into their car seats. Something happened and the car hit a tree. It burst into flames. Everyone died.

Red electric candles flickered in the corners and incense burned my nose and eyes. Flowers and tiny white coffins were wheeled into the church and placed next to the larger coffin — children snuggled next to their mother in death, as in life. All around, mourners sobbed. My cousin’s husband was lost to his grief, his entire family gone in less time than it takes to say three Hail Marys. What can you say to someone drowning in misery, how can anything you say possibly make it better? You can’t.

The priest’s words, meant as comfort to the family, fell flat to me. Everything seemed like a false comfort offered for such bottomless loss. Part of me wants to be able to tell Lizzie her second cousins are in a better place, to buffer her from the sadness of children dying. But it feels like a lie. So what do I say when other people tell her they’re in heaven? Do I stare straight ahead when she looks quizzically at me? What’s wrong with a white lie to help ease grief? I fight the urge to answer like a therapist. (“Are my second cousins in heaven?” “What do you think?”)

I feel comfortable with what I believe about not believing, but I still find it hard to talk to Lizzie about it. I want to give her the wisdom I have but also the room to decide for herself and not have her beliefs trailer-hitched to mine. So we read my old children’s Bible, Greek myths and Native American creation stories. Her dad tells her the story about the Maccabees and the oil when we eat latkes at Hanukkah and about Moses at Passover. I tell her about Jesus during Christmas and Easter. But I feel compelled to stress to her that these are myths that some people believe. And is it hypocritical on my part to even talk about Moses and Jesus? To have a tree? To search for eggs? To eat latkes?

Lizzie is sifting and sorting and exploring theology in her own way. She and her dad started their own religion, Dalala, after her fish Sparkly died. It involves lighting a candle for all the people or animals who’ve died in the past year — so they can come back as babies. And it involves eating pancakes. We’ve observed it annually, every March 26, for seven years now. It sounds as plausible as anything I grew up with.

So Lizzie has the room to believe what she wants. I taught her to brush her teeth, to look both ways before crossing the street and to think about religion from a historical standpoint. She’s a kind and thoughtful child, a living Golden Rule. And if she one day decides to get religion, I’ll love her and forgive her.

Subsidiarity, Ryan contends, is nothing more than the theological justification for shrinking the federal government down to a size that will fit in Grover Norquist’s bathtub. If I were a cartoonist, I’d draw Ryan dreamily doodling Jesus’ name on the Federalist Society masthead.

For many Catholic scholars and theologians, though, Ryan’s views are both laughably and dangerously wrong. As Daniel Maguire, a Catholic ethicist, wrote even before Ryan’s interview with Brody, subsidiarity “means that nothing should be done by a higher authority that can be done by active participation at lower levels. Right-wingers like Paul Ryan grab that one word, ‘subsidiarity,’ and claim it supports their maniacal hatred of government. It doesn’t.”

Joseph Palacios, Adjunct Professor of Latin American Studies at Georgetown University, told me, “Historically, Christian Democratic parties in Europe and Latin America have used subsidiarity to highlight the need for a social safety net to guarantee the common good that gets organized and guaranteed through state functions such as healthcare, education, economic development, housing, transportation.” Here in the U.S., though, Palacios says, “a lot of progressive
Catholics are unfamiliar with this principle and have allowed it to be usurped by conservatives and libertarians in the Church,” who attempt to lend religious justification for the position of Catholic Republicans like Ryan.

These disputes — particularly for a religion reporter like me — are the stuff of fascinating and illuminating stories on religious history, theology and political gamesmanship. In a pluralistic democracy, though, they have no place in determining the federal budget.

No one’s religious view is entitled to preference when Congress is crafting the federal budget. To be sure, given the attention paid to the plight of the poor by the most prevalent religions in the United States, there are many politicians, and many citizens, whose faith would inform how they evaluate the priorities — or lack thereof — in the Ryan budget. At the same time, secular humanists, atheists, and other varieties of the non-religious also have a set of values on income and wealth inequality.

Progressives and conservatives should duke it out — but without invoking religion. The budget should be based on shared concepts of fairness and justice, not whether Jesus or God or Allah (oh, never mind, the Republicans would never go for that!) approves.

But Ryan, who did not invoke his faith when first offering his budget proposal, is now scrambling to devise a post-hoc theological justification for it. This week’s revelations to Brody were hardly his first salvo. Last spring, he and his fellow Catholic, Speaker John Boehner, sought approval from clerical authorities.

Boehner, for his part, already had come under fire from Catholic academics for his deviation from church teachings. In a May 2011 letter reacting to his upcoming commencement address at Catholic University, the academics told Boehner, “[f]rom the apostles to the present, the magisterium of the church has insisted that those in power are morally obliged to preference the needs of the poor” (a principle Ryan claims his budget upholds). Boehner’s record on addressing “the desperate needs of the poor,” the academics charged, “is among the worst in Congress.”

Ryan and Boehner dashed off a letter of their own, to then-Archbishop (now Cardinal) Timothy Dolan, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Dolan, of course, does not mince words when reacting to perceived transgressions by elected officials. In January, he pronounced the Department of Health and Human Services requirement for insurance coverage for contraception “literally unconscionable” and on Easter Sunday described it as a “dramatic, radical intrusion of a government bureaucracy into the internal life of the Church.”

Such bombast was notably missing from his letter responding to Ryan and Boehner. It’s true that Dolan’s letter didn’t directly say Ryan’s budget was in line with Catholic teaching, only that Dolan appreciated Ryan’s effort to claim (however disingenuously) that it was. But given that Obama made significant efforts to yield to religious objections to the contraception rule and has been treated only to vitriol from the bishops and their Republican allies, it was significant that Dolan was far more gentle with Ryan: “Care must be taken that those currently in need not be left to suffer. I appreciate your assurance that your budget would be attentive to such considerations and would protect those at risk in the processes and programs of such a transition.” Not, take note, “literally unconscionable.” Even though it is.

Liberals, for their part, have sought to counter Ryan with more religion. Last year, in a stunt staged at Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition conference, fellow Catholics confronted Ryan and tried to give him a Bible with passages on the poor highlighted. An anti-Ryan advertisement was critical of his admiration for Tea Party heroine Ayn Rand — not because of her cruelly libertarian views on economics, but because she was an atheist.

More recently, a coalition of Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders known as the Faithful Budget Campaign have pushed back against Ryan with their own Faithful Budget. The coalition says its “faithful” budget “protects the common good, values every individual and lifts the burden on the poor.” These are worthy goals, but shouldn’t be elevated merely because they have a religious imprimatur.

Surely it’s understandable that liberal Catholics are angry that Ryan is misrepresenting their faith to justify his punishing and heartless assault on his fellow Americans. They should — and they will — persist in protest, in discussion and in argument. But just as Ryan shouldn’t run to Cardinal Dolan for approval, or at least acquiescence, nor should liberals seek religious cover for their counter-proposals. Religious leaders and voters are free to have their say, but when it comes down to the rationale for defeating Ryan’s budget, it should be based on the economic realities of the people whose lives would be destroyed by it, coupled with a cogent case for the role of government, and not on theology.