What fascinates me are the kinds of claims that are made by religious people for political purposes. When I became distressed and upset with the language that President Bush is using to justify war in Iraq, I was saying, as many other liberal Americans were, "Doesn't he understand about separation of religion and politics? Separation of church and state? This is the American tradition."
Later I realized that that kind of liberal outrage doesn't go deep enough, because the interaction of religion and politics - and President Bush knows this very well, and Saddam Hussein knows this very well, and many other political leaders recognize it - are inextricably and very deeply interconnected, probably because they come from the same emotional source.
Interview with Edge, July 2003