My skin is crawling because I just had a creepy epiphany about the power of religious story in politics.

I've been listening on CNN to Barack Obama preaching, I mean campaigning, in Selma, Alabama. Demagoguery is alive and well in southern churches; in the hands of a master, it does send shivers down your spine one way or another (either because you buy it utterly or conversely because it's frightening to see the congregation buy it so utterly.)

Looks like this will be an even more uneasy election cycle for me than the last two -- and this time not because of far-right Christian activists manipulating lesser-educated minds (always assumed to be headquartered in the South, sigh) with simplistic, storybook preaching to motivate and direct that base straight to the polls like lordly lemmings.

This time I may have to fight the so-called liberals too, those willing to dominate civic and global matters from the pulpit if need be, with an army of God behind their politics . . .

Obama kept evoking "Generation Joshua" this afternoon, to hallelujahs from the crowd (congregation?) If you're a secular homeschooler, that'll send shivers down your spine and if you're not, let me 'splain --

There's a well-financed, evangelical-dominated national organization of lawyers, lobbyists and speakers/advisors in the homeschool movement, known as the HomeSchool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA.) Its heft and heat tend to blot out the sun -- with the Son? -- in homeschool politics and the public mind. AS if that weren't plenty of power for me to fret over, in 2003 HSLDA leaders launched a kiddie "education" project aimed at getting conservative Christians to steer children into Republican politics and government at the highest levels.

What did they name it? Generation Joshua. (Shudder)

Skin pigmentation aside, I was actually raised in the civil rights era of the south, during the same years that a multicultural Barack Obama seven years my junior, was being raised in Hawaii and Indonesia. (Has he NEVER lived in the South then?)

Skin pigmentation aside, I grew up in the ample bosom of small-town southern churches, while young Barack Obama was learning overseas whatever he learned about the Bible and religious cultures, among the European and Middle Eastern sons of diplomats and princes. I take him at his word (see "Obama's Religion" at Real Clear Politics) about his own eventual conversion experience as an adult, but any fair comparison of his life experiences and mine would have to put mine much closer to what he's preaching about in Alabama today, than his have been (again, skin pigmentation --and charisma quotient-- aside):

Barack Obama says he's a Christian who came to develop a personal relationship with Jesus Christ in his mid-20's. But does he consider himself "evangelical?" That question was posed to him recently by Cathleen Falsani, the religion reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. Here is Obama's reponse:

"Gosh, I'm not sure if labels are helpful here because the definition of an evangelical is so loose and subject to so many different interpretations. I came to Christianity through the black church tradition where the line between evangelical and non-evangelical is completely blurred. Nobody knows exactly what it means.

. . ."My faith is complicated by the fact that I didn't grow up in a particular religious tradition. And so what that means is when you come at it as an adult, your brain mediates a lot, and you ask a lot of questions.

"There are aspects of Christian tradition that I'm comfortable with and aspects that I'm not. There are passages of the Bible that make perfect sense to me and others that I go, 'Ya know, I'm not sure about that,'" he said, shrugging and stammering slightly.

Obama's response doesn't bother me at all, and probably won't bother most people.

Heck, that doesn't bother me either! What bothers me is startling evidence to the contrary today, this fresh gust of charismatic (you know that's a Christian term. all about divinely inspired natural personal power, right?) political gospel being preached just across the Panhandle from me, sounding for all the world as if Jesse Jackson were running again, shivery oratory calling churchfolk to electoral action that's disturbing to me either way, whether it's authentic Obama or a well-rendered campaign tactic built upon The Greatest Story Ever Told.

His education and life experience are closer to mine than to those so far beyond the Bible Belt that they wear it on their heads, feet, sleeves and speed-dials, feed it to their kids and plot to carve it on the Constitution. Those who see church as the path to state power and the state as the path to eternal power, who feel divinely chosen and claim to serve both church and state with one all-purpose campaign stop and then don't ever stop campaigning.

So why can't he just SAY SO??
I wish that while he and other Dem candidates this cycle are cleverly recasting their own religious and cultural traditions to be more mainstream (??) that they saw more value in connecting with mine.

If you can't get elected in third-millennium America because we're still measuring time and talent and generations in Christian units and terminology, if smart, savvy Dem lawyers like Obama and Clinton are as willing as Republican lawyers like the HSLDA leadership, to exploit church in their personal fight for state, then maybe the most bizarre interpretations of Biblical prophecies are true and the end is near at that.

The preaching and practice of my childhood Christianity was politely circumscribed and well, almost downright cerebral -- certainly more Cartesian than Spinozan --and as Methodists, left largely to me to intellectualize as as I pleased without congregational dictates much less divine absolutes. I was also raised in the public schools of that era, eventually leaving both southern church and public school as an adult (for similar reasons) just as Obama seems to have "discovered" them.

Politics as gospel makes me no less uneasy than prayer in school. Is this really what we have to look "forward" to -- with all our supposed enlightenment and hard-fought economic and policy progress, is this going forward at all, spiritually, scientifically OR socially? It feels really backward to me . . .