These are tough times to be a Christian conservative. A few months ago, the good people of Kansas booted a couple of your kind out of the state school board (for the second time) after the board implemented anti-evolution measures (for the second time). This came on the heels of the election in Dover, Pa.--hardly a bed of secular humanists--where voters kicked out all nine of the school board members just days after a Reagan-appointed judge called them a bunch of mouth-breathing dingbats and said that "intelligent design" has no place in science classrooms.

In retrospect, however, those might seem like the salad days for the movement. As the mid-term elections creep closer, it seems that more and more "solid" Republican seats will go to Democrats. And an increasing majority of Republicans seem to be blaming the folks who call themselves "Christian conservatives."

An awful lot of Republicans have never liked the fact that a certain percentage of their base seemed to want religion placed front and center in the national political arena. Given the number of religions (and divisions within those religions) in this country, taking up the standard of one particular strain of belief is dreadfully risky. Eventually, all the other folks are going to wake up and say, "Hey, what about my God?"

Of course, almost everyone is talking about the same God--even atheists don't believe in the same God as Jews, Muslims and Christians. But almost everyone interprets the will of God differently. Take the Prez, who seems to believe that he is some sort of prophet or anointed king or something. Not many people, even Christian conservatives, buy that. Of course, if David Kuo (former chief of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives) is to be believed, the Prez and his pals never thought much of the Christian conservative movement and its leaders. They simply paid lip service to its ideals and raked in the money--and the votes.

Now, though, Republicans are in their season of discontent, and the long knives have been drawn against the Christian conservatives. Predictable, really, and someone more naive than me might actually wonder why it took so long.

Here's the thing: Religions that have a God tend to proclaim that God all-powerful and all-knowing. Makes sense to me. After all, if your God isn't all-powerful and all-knowing, what good is it, really? The problem Christian conservatives have is that they claim to have an exclusive pipeline to the will of God.

I should say that this is the problem now. Back in the late 70s and early 80s, when evangelicals of a certain stripe were getting cozy with the Republicans, this was a strength of the movement. People on fire for the Lord (and who know what fires them) tend to be highly energetic. They give money, they volunteer and they vote as many times as they can. What could be wrong with that?

Nothing, until different parts of the same movement claim that the Lord tells them to do different things. There are evangelical environmentalists pitted against evangelical businesspeople. There are evangelical charities pitted against evangelical flat taxers. And so on. The movement is now so large that the schisms within it are readily apparent to members of the general public--not to mention parishioners at evangelical churches.

And in any case, there's a problem with claiming to know what the Lord wants. The Bible is a fine guide, but so is the Qur'an and the Talmud and the Bhagavad Gita and...alright, alright, I suppose that too much ecumenicalism gets to be heretical. It's just that I'm a big fan of heresy. Maybe that's why I'm a born-again atheist.

Still, from a philosophical standpoint, claiming special knowledge of the will of God with the surety that many Christian conservatives do is simply untenable. If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, then God will do whatever it wants. If such a God wants the Democrats to take control of both houses of Congress in a couple weeks, then by God (ahem) God will make sure that happens. Using this dogma, humans are powerless in the face of the true will of God. Not only that, but no sane human could claim to have special knowledge of the will of God. An all-powerful God is, by definition, unknowable, much the way ants have no real knowledge of any given human. Except that the ant-human relationship is exponentially tighter than any prospective God-human relationship.

I know, I know. Jesus died for our sins and intercedes with the Father on our behalf. God granted us free will, which is why it's so important that we vote Republican. God chooses to reveal its will to certain people--you know, the whole prophet thing. And in any case, the Bible is the literal, inerrant revealed word of God, and anyone who says anything else should be stoned to death.

I know all that, and it's hokum. Free will is an interesting idea, one that leads naturally to Neitzsche and the death of God and then to Sarte and...well, the road jogs a bit here and there along the way, but it is there. I swear. The rest of it, especially that about the Bible--a human document, people!--being inerrant and literally true is simply absurd. There are lots of good reasons for subscribing to one religion or another, but one of them isn't so that you and your pals can rule the country as you see fit. There are too many people, and none of us agree on everything.

Which is, truthfully, the main philosophical problem facing the Republicans. Corruption and incompetence notwithstanding, there are too many elephants in the tent. And an awful lot of them want to stampede all over the piously evangelical in their midst. It's interesting to watch, but not particularly important. At some point, you've got to take your religion more seriously than your politics. If you don't, then politics becomes your religion. There is no more corrupt creed out there than political power, and when you've taken too big of a bite, it's time for you to fall.

Hey, I never said the Bible didn't have some great stories in it.

Jon Worley thinks religion is a terrific spectator sport.