"Don’t ever believe anyone who tells you he knows what God is thinking."

No disrespect to rabbis, priests, ministers, imams or even the people who ring our doorbell and ask us if we truly know Jesus.

All right, maybe a little disrespect for the bell-ringers, but just about everybody else I respect enormously.

I’ve told my kids that when they see someone being true to the discipline of faith — whether it’s a priest wearing his collar, the Orthodox Jew putting on a prayer shawl, the Muslim on his knees praying toward Mecca — it’s tremendously admirable and heartening .

The great religions — given such energizing liberty in this country — have been likened to a mountain range with all the peaks pointing toward heaven. I think that’s a wonderful description.

I’ve had occasion to talk to many of our local religious leaders, and finer people you’ll never meet. So, when I warned my children about those who claim to speak for the deity, it wasn’t because I have anything against religion.

What I do have something against are people who try to use religion for their own often-nefarious purposes.

Springing easily to mind are the big-time televangelists who taught us more about greed and hypocrisy than they ever did about religion. Jim Bakker chiseled millions of dollars away from poor widows and others who scrimped and saved so they could send a few dollars each month to Bakker’s "ministry." In his spare time, the married minister slept with a church secretary.

Jimmy Swaggart got caught having sex with hookers, gave a memorable, blubbery confession on TV ... then got caught with another lady of the evening. Gullible folks still send him a lot of money because he tells them he knows what God is thinking.

I could go on and on about the televangelist crowd, but as miserable as those characters are, they don’t come near the influence of those who try to tell us that the way we vote is going to please or displease God.

The best thing John Kerry said in his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention wasn’t original. But if you’re going to borrow prose from somebody, Abraham Lincoln is as good an anyone.

"I don’t want to claim that God is on our side," Kerry said. "As Abraham Lincoln told us, I want to pray humbly that we are on God’s side."

Pretty good line.

Let’s hope he means it.

The United States is far and away the most religious of the world’s industrialized countries. So, it stands to reason that if someone wants to be president, he had better be prepared to tell people how much his faith means to him.

President Bush, of course, is a proud born-again Christian.

In "The Faith of George W. Bush," a book by Christian author Stephen Mansfield, Bush is quoted as saying to Texan evangelist James Robinson: "I feel like God wants me to run for president. I can’t explain it, but I sense my country is going to need me. Something is going to happen ... I know it won’t be easy on me or my family, but God wants me to do it."

Kerry, for his part, is less open about being part of God’s plan but no less certain about his faith.

"I was at war, lost some of my best friends, those I grew up with and those I fought with," Kerry said. "And I sort of questioned, why does this happen, why did this happen, what’s going on? We all question. And we learn that even though suffering, through loss, we get in touch with power, with the being, with the Almighty."

Bush spends a lot of his Sundays with evangelicals, and his campaign has even asked churches for their mailing lists because most of them are thought to be solid Republicans.

On Sundays during this campaign as often as not you can find Kerry, a Catholic, worshipping at largely black churches, which are thought of as being reliably Democrat-oriented.

Maybe it’s not said in so many words, but the black ministers tell their flocks to go out and vote for the Democrats, and the fundamentalist ministers tell their people to do the same for the Republicans. Whether black church or white, whether Democrat or Republican, obedient churchgoers are left with the definite impression that God wants them to vote a certain way.

Neither Bush nor Kerry is Satan. Neither is leading the forces of darkness against an otherwise holy world. Not only do I think Lincoln had it about right, but so did the framers of our Constitution when they wrote in the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ..."

Religion certainly has its rightful place in our lives and in our political process. But I hope my children learned their lesson well. If someone tells them God is a Democrat or a Republican, they should ask for an autographed picture.

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Sam Pollak is editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at spollak@thedailystar.com or at (607) 432-1000, ext. 208.