The way the presidential candidates are touting their religiosity, you’d think it was part of the job description.

It’s not. Neither religious affiliation nor belief is a prerequisite for high public office, and those elected to office are constitutionally barred from making or executing laws that have the purpose or effect of advancing religion.

Candidates know this, of course, but they pander to the view that candidates who are at least moderately religious are preferable to those who are not. According to a Pew Research Center poll released last September, about 60 percent of those canvassed said they’d be less likely to support a candidate who did not believe in God.

These same people would probably be offended, and perhaps even inclined to sue, if a prospective employer asked them to state their religious affiliation or affirm their belief in God. Yet, they insist on considering the religious professions of candidates they’re “interviewing” for the presidency.

And candidates are only too happy to oblige.

The most unabashed 2008 pulpit pounder, former Arkansas governor and ordained Baptist minister Mike Huckabee, has described himself in Iowa campaign ads as a “Christian leader.”

Huckabee’s chief GOP rival for the hearts of Christian conservatives, Mitt Romney, has done a hire-wire balancing act, emphasizing the depth of his spirituality while trying to dispel doubts his Mormon faith – viewed by many, unfairly, as closer to cult than church – will affect his decisions as president.

In a Dec. 6 speech, Romney declared no authorities of his church, or any other, would ever “exert influence” on his presidential decisions, an echo of John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech about his Roman Catholicism.

In the next breath, however, Romney said the Founders “did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square” and “we should acknowledge the creator, as did the Founders – in ceremony and word.” So, if elected, Romney wouldn’t serve the interests of a particular church, but he would promote religion in general.

Even Democratic presidential hopefuls, a party which usually declines to play the religious card, are quick to flash their credentials. John Edwards describes his life as a “journey of faith,” while Hillary Clinton avows she takes her faith “very seriously and very personally.”

Presidential candidates are free as anyone to practice their faith. But campaign posturing disingenuously implies that religion makes them more qualified to be president, they can lawfully promote religious agendas as president, or the nation’s founders intended they should do so.

Some of our greatest presidents, notably Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, were deeply religious men. But so are President Bush and former president Jimmy Carter, who are less highly regarded. In the presidency, as in other walks of life, religiosity does not necessarily spell the difference between greatness and mediocrity.

Faith of our fathers

The Establishment Clause of the Constitution’s First Amendment states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” a phrase broadly interpreted to forbid government from using the powers of compulsion or the purse to favor one religion, to aid all religions in ways that may “excessively entangle” church and state, or to advance religious ideas without legitimate secular purpose.

Controversial court decisions have banned reading the Lord’s Prayer in public classrooms, offering prayers at graduation ceremonies, inserting “intelligent design” as a counterweight to evolutionary theory in school curricula, displaying of a crche bearing “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” in a county courthouse, and installation of a monument to the Ten Commandments in a state judicial building.

As for the Founders, a cursory reading of history shows they were out-of-synch with Romney’s portrayal. George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and others were steeped in the 18th-century European Enlightenment philosophy, which exalted reason over faith.

Although not necessarily opposed to religion, they tended to view much religious dogma as superstition, and church-state alliance as a perfidious practice which led to religious persecution and warfare in the Old World.

The Founders did value religion as a useful social tool for promoting high ethical standards among the citizenry. But their idea of God was less stern judge, personal savior or miracle worker, than clockmaker, who built nature’s complex machinery, wound it up, and let it run.

Washington, who often spoke of the importance of living an honorable life, rarely attended church or mentioned God in public utterances, even on his deathbed.

Jefferson, the most eloquent spokesman for a “wall of separation” between church and state, denounced the exclusion from public office of those who “profess or renounce this or that religious opinion” and rejected the right of any president “to direct the religious exercises of his constituents.”

Undeniably America has grappled with momentous political issues brought to the fore by religious movements – abolitionism and civil rights being prime examples. It’s also true that ethical monotheism, mainly Judeo-Christianity, has become embedded in our culture. As a consequence, candidates cannot be expected to expunge religion from their outlook or expression.

But a president’s primary duty is to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

That document never mentions religion, aside from the First Amendment. It gives neither Congress nor the president any religious authority, and, indeed, inveighs against the passage of laws which either “establish” religion or interfere with the right of free exercise. Even the oath of presidential office does not invoke God.

Therefore, a candidate’s only response to religious questions should be Jefferson’s, from more than 200 years ago: “I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.”

Elliott L. Epstein, a Lewiston attorney, is founder and board president of Museum L-A and an adjunct history instructor at Central Maine Community College. He can be reached at [email protected].