ABSTRACT
The fact that the political applications of religious convictions may be misguided or wrong does not justify dismissing or condemning all such expressions. But it does underscore the importance of thinking carefully about what the relation between religious life and the political order ought to be in a democracy. That ambivalence about the political realm reappears in various forms throughout the Bible. Theologians have related the sacred and the secular, the religious and the political, in a variety of ways. A love ethic can never be perfectly embodied in politics, he taught, but it nonetheless compels its adherents to seek justice as a proximate public expression of love. It is important to distinguish the realistic view from the more simplistic antipower ideology that persistently rears its head in American politics. Government is hardly the only realm in which power exists or can be abused; political power can be used to counter or control economic or other kinds of power.
