The influence of religious faith on the American political process cannot be underestimated. According to a Newsweek poll conducted in March, 73 per cent of Evangelical Protestants said that they believed that God created men and women in their present form within the past 10,000 years. In recent debates, four of the ten Republican candidates for President took the position that they do not subscribe to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, preferring the biblical creation narrative that, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”.

It is not surprising, therefore, to learn that many people are beginning to wonder whether America is on a downward slope towards its own form of Sharia, where secular matters are governed by religious law, especially when an increasing number of legal posts are being filled by students from one poorly regarded faith-based law school. Regent University School of Law in Virginia Beach, Virginia, has roughly 500 students and is ranked at the rock bottom as a “fourth tier” law school in an authoritative survey published by U.S. News & World Report.

One of its prominent graduates is Monica Goodling, a lawyer with scant prosecutorial experience, who resigned under fire last April after a five-year stint as a top aide to Alberto Gonzales, the US Attorney-General. She wrote her besieged boss a letter: “May God bless you richly,” she said, “as you continue your service to America.” Goodling received her legal and religious training at Regent, which was established by Pat Robertson, the televangelist, himself a Yale Law School graduate, in 1986 to provide “Christian leadership to change the world”.

Up until 2001, it was exceedingly rare for Regent graduates to take governmental positions; since it took office, the Bush Administration has hired 150 Regent graduates and with most of these lawyers are employed by the Department of Justice. In a recent Regent newsletter, a 2004 graduate provided a revealing snapshot of how the Church-State divide may have been crossed. Describing his interview for a position with the Civil Rights Division, the student was asked which Supreme Court decision of the past 20 years he found most objectionable. He cited Lawrence v Kansas, the gay civil rights case in which the Justices decided to invalidate the Kansas sodomy statute. The interviewer readily agreed, and said he found the decision “maddening”. Thereupon, the correct-thinking Regent alumnus received an appointment to the housing section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, the only job offer he received on graduation.

To the dismay of her alma mater, Goodling took the Fifth Amendment before the Senate Judiciary Committee investigating her role in firing eight federal prosecutors. One third-year student criticized the decision: “You should not be in a situation where you have to plead the Fifth,” as though there would be something immoral about invoking a constitutional right. Goodling, who was granted Congressional immunity, later testified that she may have gone “too far” in the course of her official duties and inadvertently “crossed the line” by asking “political” questions of applicants for non-political jobs in the Department of Justice. It was at Goodling’s insistence that one of the coveted “jobs” - United States Attorney for Arkansas - went to Timothy Griffin, a close political aide to Karl Rove in the White House. Griffin resigned the post after it appeared that he could not survive the scrutiny of Senate confirmation hearings.

The infiltration by mediocre graduates of a poorly rated faith-based law school into key positions in the Department of Justice is just plain scary. The New Republic website, referring to the Goodling affair, observed with uncharacteristic understatement: “That a recent graduate of one of the worst (and sketchiest) law schools with virtually no relevant experience could ascend to this position is a sure sign that there is something seriously wrong at the [Department of Justice].”

The collision course between fundamentalist religious values and the operation of the Justice Department was set in 2002 when the much-maligned John Ashcroft served as the Bush Administration’s first Attorney-General. Ashcroft was criticised for bridging the divide between Church and State by “inviting” his subordinates to attend daily morning prayer devotionals in his office. It was Ashcroft who had to backpedal from a statement he made in a press interview that: “Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for Him. Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you.” A clever turn of phrase, perhaps, but not when you are the Attorney-General of the United States. Small wonder that, after his resignation in February 2005, Ashcroft decided to teach a law school course on “Human Rights, Civil Liberties, and National Security” — at Regent Law School.

In 1952, the Supreme Court - in approving a New York “released time” school programme that permitted student absences from state-supported schools for off-premises religious observance and instruction - stated that Americans “are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being”, but that there “cannot be the slightest doubt that . . . Church and State should be separated”. Justice Black, dissenting from the result, emphasised the history of constitutional separation between Church and State: “It was precisely because 18th-century Americans were a religious people divided into many fighting sects that we were given the constitutional mandate to keep Church and State completely separate. Colonial history had already shown that, here as elsewhere, zealous sectarians entrusted with governmental power to further their causes would sometimes torture, maim and kill those they branded ‘heretics’, ‘atheists’ or ‘agnostics’.” In other words: meritocracy, yes; theocracy, no.

It is uncomfortable to see something so personal as religion worn on anyone’s sleeve. The issue is really whether faith is an unwelcome intruder in political discourse and governmental business or whether there must be some legitimate place for an intersection between the tenets of faith and the ethical ideals of justice and humanity that are instinct in the United States Constitution.

Let’s face it, America is a faith-based country. Although seldom sung, there endures the closing verse of the fourth stanza of the National Anthem:

Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,

And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”

And the Star-Spangled Banner in triumph shall wave

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

James D. Zirin is a trial lawyer in New York

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