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The Pew Research Center on Religion and Public Life has produced a study that either indicates a profound theological dissonance between the American people and the people whom they elect as their representatives in Congress, or it indicates that a great number of those representatives lie to people who take surveys.

The group that is most notably underrepresented is the religiously unaffiliated. This group – also known as religious "nones" – now accounts for 23% of the general public but just 0.2% of Congress. As noted above, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona is the only member who describes herself as religiously unaffiliated.

As we always should be aware, because the Constitution expressly forbids religious tests for any political office, the American people have decided to create them ad hoc based on their general impression of the various candidates under consideration. Someone who agrees with you on, say, tax cuts or the environment is presumed to agree with you on the Trinity or transubstantiation. Piety in our politicians is simply assumed even when it's as silent as the "W" in "wrong."

In addition, "Christian" has become such a baggy term in our politics that it's come to mean almost anything. In its most effective political form—and, therefore, in its most common citations—it means a certain splinter of American Protestant fundamentalism. It's a political signifier as much as it is a statement of belief. That may change because, as the Pew study shows, there are now more members of Congress from other faiths than there ever have been before. But, for the moment, I suspect "Christian" in politics will continue to be defined more in terms of the Billy Graham Crusade than anything else.

Meanwhile, the drift away from the various formal monotheisms in the general population, as is described in the Pew survey among others, has yet to develop a political salience of its own. It is very unlikely to do so any time soon, either. There is a deep suspicion, easily inflamed by ambitious mountebanks, of any politician who publicly claims to be unchurched. Why open that can of sanctified annalids when you don't have to, and when you can just genuflect in the general direction of a largely amorphous Savior? And, of course, an overwhelming majority of people who identify their politics with their fundamentalist Protestant religious principles just voted in a president who, by any reasonable definition, is as close to a heathen as anyone we've ever elected.

Congressional Quarterly Getty Images

Keeping religion in its proper place was a topic of heated debate at the time of the country's birth. At the Massachusetts convention called to consider ratification of the new Constitution, the Reverend Daniel Shute argued that the opposition to religious tests for office was universal and absolute.

Far from limiting my charity and confidence to men of my own denomination in religion, I suppose, and I believe, sir, that there are worthy characters among men of every other denomination – among the Quakers – the Baptists – the Church of England – the Papists – and even among those who have no other guide, in the way to virtue and heaven, than the dictates of natural religion. I must therefore think, Sir, that the proposed plan of government, in this particular, is wisely constructed: That as all have an equal claim to the blessings of the government under which they live, and which they support, so none should be excluded from them for being of any particular denomination of religion.

These were not fearful men, nor were they people unfamiliar with religious persecution. In Massachusetts, for example, the government was a little more than a century removed from a) hanging Mary Dyer for the crime of being a Quaker, and b) defining Catholicism as a crime worthy of the same punishment. We've come a long way from those days, though. Now we'd rather elect people who feign a faith in public from which we all are drifting in private. We argue about "faith-based" politics, because that's easier than grappling with the question of faith itself.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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