Great Scott, it's about faith

Another hiatus in the candidate visit business, but unsurprising following the debate.
Hillary is the first to be making a return trip to New Hampshire - heading up north to Hanover to "host a conversation about expanding stem cell research and moving our nation forward on important scientific research and medical issues".
I am invited to attend, but I simply can't get up there, as much as I would enjoy this issue and crowd. Hanover is the town where Dartmouth College is located. It is also the town in which satirical travel writer Bill Bryson chose to settle following his Lost Continent travels seeking the perfect American town. It is a very pretty college town.
However, I won't be there on Friday.

Hillary is clearly a force for medical progress and the advancement of science - unlike the Republicans with their rash of creationists and pro-lifers.
But even she has been dragged into the faith game which has become an unhealthy aspect of this presidential race. It seems that placating the Bible-thumpers is de rigeur. This is a scarily religious country.

I can understand why Hillary chose to join the very religious Barack Obama, who belongs to a rather powerful black church, in doing the old religious tell-all on television recently. I didn't watch. Couldn't bear to. I just understood that, with the obsessive Christianity of contemporary America, Hillary had to show her religious side. She has always been something of a church-goer. Nonetheless, it saddened me that waving the faith flag is necessary at all.

I was grateful to Boston Globe columnist, Scott Lehigh, who summed it up thus in Piety on Parade, a magnificent opinion piece which really merits reading in full:

I'd prefer a candidate inclined to keep quiet about his faith, rather than wear it on his sleeve. Or even one who held with the philosopher Herbert Spencer: Whether God exists is intellectually unknowable.

I'd rather hear about a hopeful's earthly justifications for his policy positions, about the real world values that guide her. When a candidate says, "My religion teaches me . . . " what he or she is really saying is: I'm about to base my answer in a realm that helps me barricade it against rational argument.

Do we really want a president who relies on faith more than facts in making his decisions? Or who thinks he has the imprimatur of God as he moves forward?