I heard a wonderfully eloquent argument against injecting religion into politics the other day.  I was listening to NPR and the speaker was a reverend whose name escapes me now.  I can't remember his exact words, but I remember the basic idea.  But first, a little background...

When I was a kid, the nuns in high school were fond of frightfully intoning: when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you.  The idea being that showing an interest in things occult, might cause something occult to show an interest in you--which, as they presented the quote, basically boils down to "knowledge is dangerous" so it has always left me singularly unimpressed.  Especially since the occult isn't real, but that's an argument for another day.

In actuality the quote comes from the philosopher Frederich Nietzsche, and here it is in its entirety: Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

I'm no philosopher, but it seems to me that Nietszche was speaking more broadly.  What I take from this epigram is that mixing with something you despise (even to fight it) makes you more like it.  Like pouring white paint into red paint.  You may see it as the white paint lightening the red paint, but it is also true that the red paint is reddening the white paint.

Which brings me back to the argument against mixing religion and politics.  If you are a religious person, and if you believe that politics is largely despicable, then it follows that you may believe that getting your religion into politics will improve the state of politics and make it less dirty.  But, like the mixing paints, doing so will also infuse the dirt of politics into your religion.  Priests will become politicians, and politicians will become priests, each less suited to their role than they were before.  Keeping your religion away from politics is the best way to keep politics away from your religion... if you don't eventually you'll find that the power-hungry have invaded your churches and turned them into something they were not intended to be.  Mixing the two leaves you with neither.

To be honest, the preservation of religion isn't particularly important to me except with respect to the anthropological value of religion, and the fact that I care about my religious friends' freedom to practice their faiths.  I am an atheist, but (as previously noted) not an evangelical atheist like Richard Dawkins.  (Which means I am despised both by intolerant theists and intolerant atheists.)  I believe in the basic mantra of live and let live (or to put it as I might actually put it, mind your own fucking business).  So I have my own reasons for not wanting religion in politics which have to do with my government representing ALL of its citizens, and not just those belonging to one particular sect, or theists in general.

So the argument presented above carries little weight with me.  Why should I care if someone doesn't realize he is turning his church into a "den of thieves"?  I'm worried about the freedom of all citizens.  But the mixing paint metaphor may carry weight with religious folks, which makes it a pretty good point to keep in mind, human nature being what it is.