Peter Finley Dunne (1867-1936), a first-generation Irish immigrant to the United States, was the author of a popular, nationally syndicated column that satirized the rich and the powerful and denounced, among other things, racism, the Spanish American war, and the U.S. Supreme Court --- all through the lips of his fictional Mr. Dooley, who gave the column its name.

"Religion is a quare thing," Mr. Dooley once said. "Be itself it's all right. But sprinkle a little pollyticks into it an' dinnymite is bran flour compared with it. Alone it prepares a man f'r a better life. Combined with pollyticks it hurries him to it."

Peter Finley Dunne's sentiments, expressed through Mr. Dooley, are probably shared these days by millions of Americans, especially after the recent presidential campaign and election.

Millions of others --- evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics for starters --- would not share Mr. Dooley's point of view or his sense of humor, of which they seem to have precious little.

They insist that people of faith have as much right to participate in the political process as any other citizens. And if people of faith think that their moral values, even if based solely on their own understanding of God's will, ought to be embodied in law or public policy, they have every right to try to make that case.

Strictly speaking, of course, they are correct. But no more correct than a Catholic bishop who might decide, for example, to run for the U.S. Senate in Colorado or Missouri, or New Jersey. There would be no constitutional prohibition against such a candidacy. The question, however, is whether it would be prudent for a Catholic bishop to be a candidate for political office.

James Madison, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America and its fourth President, had famously warned against factionalism as the great enemy of the public peace. He defined a faction as "a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community" (Federalist Paper, No. 10).

Madison specifically included religious groups in his concern about factionalism. The antidote to religious factionalism, he believed, is the existence of a multiplicity of religious groups within a (lower-case) republican form of government.

Applying Madison's view to this year's election, the exercise of political muscle on the part of evangelical Protestants would most effectively be countered, not by an individual political party, but by other religious groups, particularly other Christian churches.

"Faith" is not the private preserve of Christians, nor is Christianity the private preserve of evangelical, fundamentalist and Pentecostal Protestants. They are as different from the mainstream Protestantism of Lutheranism, Methodism, Presbyterianism and New England Congregationalism as Mel Gibson's form of Catholicism is from the mainstream Catholicism of Vatican II.

Given Madison's analysis, religious groups can best support the republican form of government by distinguishing always between moral values whose validity is grounded in their own confessional understanding of revelation, as contained in the Bible and/or the teachings of the church, and moral values whose validity can be established by reasoning and arguments unrelated to sacred texts and doctrines.

In the public forum, the only arguments that should bear on the framing of laws and governmental policies are those which are intelligible and persuasive even to citizens who have no religious allegiances and for whom no religious texts and doctrines are sacred.

In a pluralistic society, laws and constitutional amendments that would regulate the conduct of minorities --- be they religious, racial, ethnic or sexual --- should only be approved if society at large judges them to be reasonable, that is, truly conducive to the common good.

God, however, should have nothing explicitly to do with the process. One Christian group's convictions about the divine will on this or that moral issue can be judged by another Christian group as a form of heresy or fanaticism.

For how many decades did some Christian churches in South Africa and in the American South insist that God willed the unequal separation of the races by means of apartheid or segregation?

Eventually other, more mainstream Christians, Protestant and Catholic alike, raised their voices in protest. Racial segregation and apartheid are not the will of God, they insisted, and it is a moral outrage to cloak them with divine approbation.

The same challenge confronts mainstream Christians --- Catholic, Protestant, Episcopal, and Orthodox alike --- in our own time and place.

In the end, who speaks for Christian values and for Christianity itself?

Father Richard P. McBrien is the Crowley-O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.