As in much of what we’ve heard from Bush over the past few weeks, there was a whiff of the surreal. He bemoaned the “arbitrary harm” caused by the hurricane, the unanswerable question of why God allows bad things to happen, and noted that “the greatest hardship fell upon citizens already facing lives of struggle” — as if that were merely a coincidence. The service was filled with references to the fury of natural disaster and the shock of unexpected devastation.

But Americans weren’t shocked by the death and despair caused by Hurricane Katrina — we’ve seen enough scenes of winds whipping tattered coastlines to know what can result, and we’ve even witnessed massive flooding, although never concentrated in one major city like this. What did shock Americans was the death and despair caused by human inaction. When T.D. Jakes, Bush’s handpicked preacher for the event, reflected on the story of the Good Samaritan, the story could have been illustrated in many minds with images of New Orleans residents left to suffer by the side of the road as rescue passed them by.

We can ask why God allows disasters like hurricanes to happen (although God might fairly answer in return: “It says very clearly in the Bible that you should ‘build your house upon a rock, not upon the sand’”). It is, after all, one of the oldest theological questions, one that has tested faith and tormented believers for centuries. The more pertinent question in this case, however, is not why God allowed bad things to happen but why the government did.

The chance to avoid, for a few hours, such inquiries may have been the real purpose of the prayer service. It’s not the first time a president has called the country together for religious purposes. The Washington National Cathedral — which was established by a charter of Congress in 1893, although it receives no public money — is officially the nation’s church and serves as host for these events. In 1981, a service of celebration was held when American hostages returned from Iran; after the space shuttle Columbia exploded in 2003, a national memorial took place there; and most recently, the state funeral of Ronald Reagan was held at the cathedral. (Woodrow Wilson is actually buried in a crypt within the building.)

The service that we should compare with this one, however, is the National Day of Prayer that was held on Sept. 14, 2001, just three days after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. At the time, we were a country in shock, unified in grief and anger. Something terrible had happened, and while rescue efforts were taking place on the ground, what the rest of us needed most was comfort. The sight of the entire government, Republican and Democrat, gathered under one roof in solidarity provided simple reassurance. We prayed for strength and for healing. And for the many Americans who rely on religious faith, the president’s eloquent words brought some measure of peace: “As we have been assured, neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, can separate us from God’s love. May he bless the souls of the departed. May he comfort our own.”

This time, however, it’s far from clear what the purpose of the service was. The hurricane is now nearly three weeks past. The country is not united in grief so much as in frustration at the failure of the government’s response. Even those involved with the religious side of planning the service were unsure about its mission. “The idea that it’s somehow a balm on the nerves of a shattered nation is not the case,” one such official told me.

This isn’t to say that Americans aren’t struggling to comes to terms with the loss of life and livelihood, but they don’t necessarily need a preacher in chief to help them cope. Some of the most moving images the weekend after the hurricane struck came from services held in the ruins of former church buildings, and from a Mass held on the beach amid debris. Residents of the Gulf Coast are taking care of their faith; what they could use from the administration is not another hymn but single-minded attention to repair and recovery efforts.

Instead what they — and we — got was a suggestion that perhaps faith-based organizations are best suited to deal with evacuee needs (the Samaritan, Jakes said, was helped by “resources, not by revenue”); we heard praise from Bush of rescuers that sounded less like an acknowledgment of their heroism than a hope it would rub off. And we were reminded that at the root of all the suffering is a divine “mystery” that we may never grasp.

Sneaked into the service, though, was one rebuke to the president, delivered by Bishop John Chane of Washington’s Episcopal Diocese, the official host of the event and a man who has not hesitated to criticize Bush in the past. Before he led the opening prayer, Chane reminded the audience, “Our Lord Jesus reminds us that faith without works is nothing.”

For millions of Catholics, John Paul II is simply the only pope they have ever known; his unusually long rule is the fourth-longest tenure among 265 popes over nearly 2,000 years. Throughout his 26 years as head of the Roman Catholic Church, John Paul II traveled to more countries than all previous popes combined. “He has changed the style of being pope,” Father Thomas Reese, the editor of America magazine, told CNN. “It used to be that the pope stayed home in Europe.”

In our contemporary celebrity-obsessed media culture, the pope was a ready-made star. The 1981 attempt on his life took place at the advent of cable news and was almost too good to be true for the nascent industry which, by the end of its saturation coverage, had turned the pope into an international star/almost martyr/hero. Even at the end of his life, the pope did not fade away quietly, hiding his decline behind curtains, but instead insisted on appearing to the public in his wheelchair, with breathing tube in place, as a symbol of suffering and in solidarity with the sick and frail around the world.

In practical terms, John Paul II has left a powerful mark on the Roman Catholic Church worldwide and the American church in particular, primarily through his teachings — embodied most visibly in 14 encyclicals — and appointments of Catholic leaders. During his papacy, he appointed the majority of bishops and cardinals currently serving in the United States. Long after his death, John Paul II’s ideological positions and teachings will live on through the men he handpicked to lead the church.

Although American Catholics have constituted a significant portion of the population starting with immigration in the 19th century, it wasn’t until the second part of the 20th century that the church really came into its own. The reforms of the Second Vatican Council — primarily the work of Pope John XXIII — played a large role in developing the modern American Catholic Church. But it was the leadership of John Paul II that shaped the Church post-Vatican II, setting the tone for Catholic engagement with the American public square and political life.

Many American Catholics believed — and hoped — that Vatican II would bring their church in closer alignment with modernity, perhaps even allowing more flexibility for the church to adapt to changing times. And it’s possible that if another man had been elected to Peter’s throne after the death of Pope John Paul I, the momentum of Vatican II might have swept more reforms through the Church.

John Paul II, however, while in some ways an unconventional selection — the first non-Italian in more than 400 years, he spent part of his youth writing plays and had connections to the Polish Solidarity movement — was theologically quite conservative. Under his stewardship, the church wavered little, even in the midst of turbulence. The Cold War came and went, sex scandals arose in the American church, and technological advances posed challenges to church doctrine. Through it all, John Paul II steered his church with an orthodox hand.

The pope’s conservatism on issues of gender, reproduction and sexual orientation — he staunchly opposed the ordination of women and took a hard line on homosexuality, abortion and birth control — divided American Catholics. Yet the pope was not uniformly conservative in his thinking. Although the right wing embraced him, they were only able to do so by ignoring major aspects of his teachings. John Paul II’s death, coming on the heels of Terri Schiavo’s, is already prompting calls to honor his memory by embracing a “culture of life.” But while the pope first introduced that phrase to our cultural lexicon, what he meant by it and what is meant by those who would claim his mantle are worlds apart.

You could be forgiven for thinking that “culture of life” was a concept created not by John Paul II but by George W. Bush. Few people have done have more to popularize the phrase — if not its correct spirit — than our current president, who used it even before his first presidential campaign in 2000. While the use of “culture of life” was almost always intended to communicate Bush’s position on abortion, it was actually part of a larger strategy to reach out to Catholic voters.

The phrase was a central part of what is arguably John Paul II’s best-known encyclical, Evangelium Vitae (“The Gospel of Life”), which he released in 1995. Bush’s savvy Catholic advisors — including conservatives Deal Hudson and Tim Goeglein — knew that the phrase would immediately resonate with Catholic voters while indicating nothing more than vague pro-life sentiments to non-Catholics. Bush’s communications staff did the same thing with Protestant hymns and phrases, using code words that went over the heads of those who didn’t recognize them while resonating deeply with those who did.

During Bush’s tenure, the phrase has been employed in the service of opposing abortion, stem-cell research, cloning and — most recently and publicly — the removal of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube. When, in the third presidential debate, Bob Schieffer asked the candidates a question about abortion, the first words out of Bush’s mouth were: “I think it’s important to promote a culture of life.” A quick Internet search for the words “John Kerry and culture of life” and then “Tom DeLay and culture of life” revealed that the phrase is most often used by conservatives to attack Democrats who “flout the culture of life” and by liberals to sneer at Republicans and their “culture-of-life cronies.” The culture of life has become cemented in American conventional wisdom as equaling conservative social issues.

But a fair look at John Paul II’s use of the phrase and his political priorities must conclude that although he was undoubtedly concerned about abortion and stem-cell research and euthanasia, that list is far from complete. The pontiff also wrote about “the dignity and rights of those who work,” and he spoke out against the widening gap between the world’s rich and poor. He opposed both Gulf Wars in no uncertain terms and strongly communicated his outrage when the abuse at Abu Ghraib was revealed. During a 1999 visit to the United States, John Paul II spoke out against the death penalty, calling the punishment “cruel and unnecessary” and successfully petitioning for the commutation of a death sentence for a Missouri prisoner when he spoke in St. Louis.

Anti-death penalty, antiabortion, antiwar, anti-stem-cell, pro-worker, pro-poor, pro-sick. It’s hard to think of any American politician whose positions reflect the entirety of John Paul II’s “life” concerns. Even the American Catholic Church doesn’t always reflect the pope’s priorities. While John Paul II applied a fairly consistent ethic of life — what the late Cardinal Joseph Bernadin called the “seamless garment of life” — the National Conference of Catholic Bishops has taken a different stance. In 1998, the conference issued a letter called “Living the Gospel of Life: A Challenge to American Catholics” in which the bishops asserted that failure to following church teaching on abortion was more serious than any other issue, implying that a Catholic politician could neglect all other “life” issues and still be considered a good Catholic as long as he opposed abortion; at the same time, no amount of work for the poor or imprisoned or sick could save a pro-choice Catholic.

History will likely judge John Paul II as the pope of many firsts. He was the first pope to set foot in the nation of Israel, the first to enter a mosque and to visit a synagogue, the first to go to Greece since the Eastern Orthodox and Roman churches split over a thousand years ago. And he was the first to draw together centuries of Catholic teaching and vigorously promote them through the lens of “a culture of life.”

His legacy, however, may be limited by an age-old reality: the tendency of political leaders and the faithful to hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest. “The culture of life” is not simply shorthand for abortion and gay marriage and Terri Schiavo. But those are the definitions that are well on their way to becoming the established understanding of the phrase. That would be an unfortunate, but not surprising, result of John Paul II’s rule.

What’s that, you say? The religious what?

Everyone knows about the religious right, a movement of conservative, mostly Christian, religious communities that has become increasingly involved in American politics over the last three decades. The idea that there could be a countervailing religious force, whether defined as religious progressives or simply everyone not part of the religious right, has long since been dismissed from public consciousness. Indeed, the religious left had almost forgotten about itself — the community hadn’t come together to protest a federal budget, one of the religious leaders told me, “since the early Reagan years.”

And yet there was a time — not so very long ago — when the religious left was a powerful institution in American society and politics, when the term “religious” was not immediately assumed to connote “conservative.” Moral giants with names like Reinhold Niebuhr and Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King Jr. led intellectual and social justice movements. It’s nearly impossible to page through American history without coming across political causes that were driven either partly or entirely by progressive people of faith — abolition, women’s suffrage, labor reforms of the progressive era, civil rights, and any number of antiwar movements. Just a few decades ago, venerable organizations like the National Council of Churches (NCC) made pronouncements that carried not only moral weight but political influence as well. In short, the likes of Pat Robertson, James Dobson and Ralph Reed have not always dominated American politics; indeed, in the span of American history, the last three decades are an anomaly.

Today, the religious right and the Republican Party are clasped in a mutually beneficial relationship while the religious left and the Democratic Party are barely on speaking terms. Last year was the best in recent memory for cooperation between the two camps, and yet there is no question that relations are still dangerously strained. While the Kerry campaign hired several individuals to coordinate religious outreach — the first time a Democratic presidential campaign has branched beyond outreach to black churches — they were not held in high regard; the campaign’s director of community outreach often mockingly referred to her religious colleagues as “the Romper Room,” and the communications team simply refused to return press calls on religious issues.

For its part, although the religious left engaged in voter registration and education efforts, held bus tours, and ran newspaper ads, parts of the community remain stubbornly irrelevant. On Nov. 1, the day before the presidential election, the NCC sent out a press release on a matter of great importance to the organization: the treatment of Chinese Uighur Muslim prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. The release — at a time when conservative evangelicals were mobilizing to increase their voting numbers by 4 million over 2000 and deliver the election to George W. Bush — simply underscored how far the religious left has fallen from its days of national prominence.

The decline and fall of the religious left has been so complete that news organizations regularly conflate terms like “religious voters” and “moral values” with “right-wing,” without a second thought. When Time magazine recently ran an article about Democratic religious outreach efforts, the piece concluded with the thought, “Religious voters might like the music, but they’re unlikely to be seduced by it as long as Democrats stick to their core positions,” as if religious Americans could only support the Democratic Party by putting their faith aside, not because of their faith. The easiest way to change this perception is for the religious left to aggressively and vocally reenter political life. But it’s a long climb back to relevance.

The religious left is responsible, in part, for the religious right’s swift rise to power during the 1970s and ’80s. For most of American history, conservative Christians had focused primarily on the effort to save souls, making a principled decision to stay out of the realm of politics. “Preachers are not called upon to be politicians,” the Rev. Jerry Falwell explained in 1965, “but soul winners. Nowhere are we commissioned to reform externals.” At a crucial point in American history, however, a perfect storm developed that changed the political landscape forever, catapulting religious conservatives into political activism.

A series of Supreme Court decisions taking prayer and Bible reading out of schools, and culminating with Roe vs. Wade — as well as, it must be noted, some civil rights victories in the South — angered conservative evangelicals, and convinced them that government would not remain neutral, allowing them to simply live as they wished. Similarly, many Catholics — who had largely stayed away from politics while assimilating amid anti-Catholicism — were outraged by the Roe decision, and they developed into a politically active force, forming pro-life groups organized not by diocese but by congressional district. Both of these groups were embraced by Republican strategists desperate to form a political majority, who recognized that they could find common ground in the belief that government should stay out of their lives. It was a match made in heaven.

At the very same time, instead of sticking around to act as a check on this budding conservative movement, the religious left effectively disappeared, allowing the rise of the religious right to take place unabated. When they looked around them, the folks on the left considered their work done. The civil rights movement had been their crowning achievement, establishing once and for all the power of moral arguments to bring about political and social change, and the same Supreme Court decisions that had outraged conservatives convinced many religious liberals that they had won the debate: Religion and politics were both best served when religious leaders and communities were independent, when the state did not appear to be sponsoring and controlling religion. Confident that the judicial system was on its side and would maintain this status quo, the religious left took a much-planned and oft-postponed vacation.

The debate, however, was not over; it was simply shifting to a different arena, out of the court of law and into the court of public opinion.

“If there is such a thing as the liberal church anymore,” says the Rt. Rev. John Chane, Bishop of the Diocese of Washington, “it has become complacent. Complacency was always its biggest tragedy.” While their conservative counterparts were setting aside differences to focus on a single mission, members of the religious left — no longer following the guiding cause of civil rights — lost their way, dispersing their attention over what seemed like 87 different policy issues and busying themselves with internal denominational battles over female ordination and other debates. Many well-intentioned members of the religious left, not wanting to be associated with the nascent Christian right, filtered religion out of their rhetoric and secularized some of their appeals. The more vocal groups like the Christian Coalition and Moral Majority became, the more religious liberals withdrew from public view.

The parting gift the religious left gave Christian conservatives was an uncontested public square. Years before the religious right had the membership numbers to match its boasts of political influence, it was winning debates simply by controlling the agenda and cornering the market on religious authority. Richard Parker, who teaches religion and politics at the Kennedy School of Government, believes that the religious left simply forgot about a crucial part of its mission. “The Catholic Church believed it needed to learn how to articulate for its members faith-based reasons for action, and to frame arguments for the public square in ways that did not directly derive from church teaching,” he says. “Mainline Protestants [who form the bulk of the religious left] lost the first habit, and only carried out the second.” Those members of the religious left that did remain politically active often seemed like caricatures of left-wing activists, agitating to save baby seals, Arctic wildlife, third-world orphans with only the faintest of biblical appeals marshaled on their behalf. While religious groups were some of the most vocal opponents of the recent war in Iraq, their unique voices got lost within a sea of peace slogans. More damningly, to the extent that the religious left continued to exist, it became tied in the public’s mind with secularists. “The positions of the religious left and secularists on crucial questions seem indistinguishable,” says Joseph Loconte of the Heritage Foundation. “And that hurts them politically.”

Religious conservatives spent the 1980s and ’90s building national organizations, establishing political action committees, training grass-roots activists, electing school board members in local campaigns, educating young conservatives at seminaries and elite universities, lobbying for judicial appointments, and developing media savvy. To see the fruits of their labor, you only have to look around the nation’s capital today. The Department of Justice is staffed by lawyers whose legal credentials are impeccable but whose religious backgrounds would have led them down very different career paths just a few decades ago. The White House boasts a stable of speechwriters with the ability to weave religious language into presidential addresses. And when you tune in to a political talk show, you’re likely to find a leader of the religious right adhering to talking points about the ways in which religious Americans have been discriminated against in recent years.

The religious left, on the other hand, hasn’t seen any need to build separate institutions because its members already have outlets for political involvement. The average religious liberal doesn’t need to go to church to get involved with political issues; she goes down the street to her local ACLU’s meeting or to a MeetUp or joins a letter-writing campaign through her teacher’s union. Her commitment to politics may be driven by her religious beliefs, but the connection is never made explicit. A religious conservative, on the other hand, spends more of his time at his local church and is more naturally drawn to activism through that community of congregants.

But the religious left hasn’t just failed to keep up with conservative institution-building efforts. Financial and other scandals have weakened some existing religious left organizations — such as the once-powerful National Council of Churches — which are now so hamstrung that they lack the ability to offer much guidance to religious progressives in the pews. A few ego-driven leaders, concerned that someone else might become the movement’s visible spokesperson, have insisted on coalition efforts and joint statements that, while demonstrating the breadth of support, make decision-making virtually impossible and ensure that no one emerges as a spokesperson. In a media world defined by partisans of the religious right, liberal religious spokesmen are loath to “spin” their beliefs and positions, taking principled stands that nonetheless leave television producers underwhelmed and frustrated.

The Democratic Party hasn’t helped matters. For years, the party has ghettoized religion — flooding into black churches on the Sundays before elections, but treating religion as simply a quaint ethnic characteristic — and the last election was no exception. The Kerry campaign ran just one television ad that mentioned its candidate’s background as an altar boy: It was in Spanish, appearing only on a Spanish-language network. And when the candidate spoke about faith (which he often did, charging that Bush was a “man [who] claims to have faith, but has no deeds”), it was almost always in front of an African-American audience, fueling charges that Kerry’s faith was insincere and brought out only for political purposes. No one has argued that Democratic politicians should suffuse their rhetoric with hymn lyrics and claim God’s endorsement. But by backing away from each other like opposing magnets, the religious left and the Democratic Party have ceded the language of faith and values and morality to conservatives.

There are signs of hope. After the election, the religious left commissioned and received a report that brutally, but accurately, assessed the movement’s weaknesses and past mistakes. Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners magazine and the progressive Call to Renewal organization, has a new book on the New York Times bestseller list and has been blanketing airwaves on a national book tour, chatting up Jon Stewart, Charlie Rose and Terry Gross. And millions of Americans, outraged by post-election assumptions that “moral issues” are defined exclusively as conservative concerns, are hungry for a way to mobilize their religious progressive numbers. They may have to go hungry a while longer. When I asked the assembled leaders how they planned to mobilize their congregants to oppose the Bush budget, the response was meek: “We have some listservs … we’re asking people to contact their representatives.” After an election season in which the Christian Coalition distributed 70 million voter guides, the religious left will need to do more to make itself heard.