Mitt Romney is now the Republican nominee. With Texas in his back pocket, “Richie Rich” Romney has theoretically accrued enough delegates to more or less call curtains on the primary season.
Now we can all recover from the last six months of bloody Republican fratricide just in time to settle in for the next six months of soul-grinding, mind-numbing, bare knuckle belief-dodging good ole’ American real politick.
I’ve got goose bumps.
If recent history has taught us anything, the tone of our national dialogue headed into the November general election will become increasingly and gloriously hideous.
That being said, religion, the whiffle ball bat of politics, has basically been taken out of the arsenal.
Romney is a Mormon (a faith most Americans associate with bicycle enthusiasm) and Obama is a closet Muslim (I met him at the Iowa caucus in ’08, he gave me the secret handshake – trust me.)
They’ve basically checked each other.
It’s hard to start a holy war when both candidates’ religions are equally misunderstood and despised.
Neither side can delve too deeply into the issue of religion this time around without risking the alienation of their respective political bases.
Romney can’t call Obama’s lefty Liberation-Christianity out because he himself is not a mainstream Christian, and Obama can’t call Romney out without looking like a hypocrite and sending Republican bloggers rampaging across the Internet with pictures of the president in a turban.
Religion’s exit from the political arena couldn’t have been timelier.
According to a new poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, Americans are getting fed up with hearing politicians call one another infidels.
Thirty-eight percent of people polled felt politicians displayed their faith too openly and involved too much religious rhetoric and prayer in their campaigns.
Fifty-one percent of respondents stated they felt religious organizations held too much sway in the Republican Party.
Not only are most Americans tired of politicians bickering over faith, they’re also sick of religious leaders bickering over politics.
Fifty-four percent of people polled said they didn’t want their religious leaders telling them how to vote, and America’s religious leaders seem to be responding.
The National Association of Evangelicals, which coordinates the activities of more than 45,000 churches in the U.S., has decided to tone down their election-year rhetoric.
Instead of sending out voter guides, they’ll be sending their congregations scriptural material instead.
This doesn’t mean the relationship between religion and politics is over in our country.
Instead, it has taken on a new form.
Civic-minded religious leaders have geared up on the grassroots front.
They’re taking a step back from the national debate and tackling issues in their own community.
A group of priests in Missouri are fighting the Pay-Day Loan industry for its predatory lending practices and ill treatment of the poor. A group of evangelicals in Minneapolis are opposing city ordinances which would make it harder for impoverished people to vote. The list goes on.
This sort of move away from national partisan politics can only work in religion’s favor. As our political system becomes more polarized, religion needs to bow out.
As faith becomes less of a weapon of politicians and pundits, we the faithful can expend our energy on what really matters – tending to the poor, lost and forgotten; and viciously arguing about differences of theology.
Nicholas Pierce is a 22-year-old history major from Baton Rouge, follow him on twitter @TDR_nabdulpierc.
 
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