I wish politicians and other public figures would stop insisting God is mad at some of us. We’ve grown to expect, if not accept, that kind of thing from his high holiness Pat Robertson, who recently had the temerity to suggest God gave Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a stroke, and has used God’s name to justify assassinations and other unholy acts. You might even expect it from New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, given the hand nature dealt him and his city.

But that doesn’t make it right. Or even effective proselytizing.

Nagin has apologized for declaring that God is mad at America, and for some other remarks that, even for a man of color talking to other people of color, sounded racist. He said he was caught up in the moment. You would hope that. You would hope that damning entire populations because of some accident of geography would be a result of being caught up in the moment, and not the product of normal thought processes.

I’m no theologian and I can’t quote Scripture about floods and famines and fires and other great cleansings past and yet to come. But I don’t think God works that way. I trust that if God wants to strike me dead for some sin I’ve committed, he isn’t going to take my innocent, sinless neighbor along with me. He wants me to know I’m the intended target and why, not just that I happened to be standing near where lightning struck.

Robertson and maybe some of you, too, would argue that’s overly simplistic, and perhaps that is correct. But it’s not the point.

It’s also not the point that when everyone from a politician to a televangelist evokes the name of God in the public discourse, it begins to establish in the minds of the mass consumers of these sound bites that Christianity is the nation’s religion – though that is reason enough to object.

The point is that representations of knowing God’s mind debase the very thing people who (falsely) think there’s inherent permission in the Declaration of Independence for this to be a Christian nation are fighting with such zeal to make part of the national political dialogue. It is going to get to the point – and some would argue we’ve already passed that point – that politicians won’t be able to get elected without including an obligatory God bit in their stump speeches, making it more of a policy position, like whether to phase out Social Security or stay the course, than a statement of faith. When politicians and other public figures cloak themselves in Scripture, it allows them to represent themselves as people of faith without actually having to demonstrate their faith in their deeds. It’s cheap, tawdry and decidedly un-Christian.

When I heard Nagin’s “God is mad” spiel, the words to the Rolling Stones’ classic “Far Away Eyes” rolled around in my mind, sounding like a sacred hymn in comparison: “I was driving home early Sunday morning through Bakersfield /Listening to gospel music on the colored radio station /And the preacher said, ‘You know you always have the Lord by your side’/And I was so pleased to be informed of this that I ran/Twenty red lights in his honor/Thank you Jesus, thank you Lord.”

Sacrilege? Without a doubt. But mentioning the Rolling Stones in the same context as God is no more blasphemous than Robertson using God to justify sending an assassin after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez or blaming God for Sharon’s stroke, or Nagin’s casual use of God’s name to rally people of color to return to New Orleans.

This trivialization of him may be what God’s mad about. However, not being a mind reader, I can’t say for sure.

Beth Dalbey is editorial director at Business Publications Corp. E-mail her at bethdalbey@bpcdm.com