Obama Loses the Saddleback Faith Debate...

But the often over-looked question that remains festering in my bones is whether there should ever have been a faith debate in the United States to begin with. I have not seen anyone asking this critical question, and I find this as troubling as the fact that the debate occured at all, let alone carried any credible political clout. One would think - wrongly, apparently - that the historic separation of church and state would have rendered this antiquated notion (by North American standards, at least) pathetically anachronistic.

Not so. Appearing at the Saddleback Church for the first, albeit informal and not face-to-face Presidential Debate, moderator and man-of-the-cloth Rick Warren, himself something of a celebrity as he attempts to fill the void as "America's Pastor" left by Billy Graham, presented a series of faith-based questions to each presumptive candidate individually. The crowd hung on every word as each candidate weighed in on issues that, unfathomably, refuse to die in this world, but especially in America at large: gay marriage, abortion, and what being a Christian in this hectic, modern world means to each man.

In brief, each man was able to lay bare his personal moral compass, leaving it for America - and, to a lesser extent, the world - to decide which direction on offer they prefer. While it is up to each camp to convince America why their man 'won' a debate that, by all accounts, should not even exist, here are two reasons why Obama lost.

Firstly, he affirmed in his academic-speak too cowardly to offend that not only is he against same-sex marriage (he prefers 'Civil Union' as a more appropriate term), but that, for him, life begins at inception. For the latter response, he was summarily boo'd by an overwhelmingly evangelical crowd not so right-wing and hateful of equality and human rights they find personally distasteful as I had initially thought. So good on them for booing Obama for his backward and cowardly abortion response. And secondly, Obama lost because he should be above peddling a late-in-life religious finding for political gain. It's sad, and it's low. And to use an already flawed forum to espouse his rather un-Democratic views is laregly just confusing for Democrats: though, I suppose, an appropriately Republican venue.

But my question remains unanswered: why did this event happen in the first place in a supposedly secular nation like the United States of America? And moreover, why was this religious "debate" given the credence that it was? Jesus will not decide the next American election: human beings with real existences facing real consequences to their very real actions on Election Day and beyond will decide who next leads the free world. Not Jesus Christ.

I remain unconvinced. Why do these religious stump speaches matter?