Last night’s Republican presidential debate largely avoided questions that were explicitly religious. The only (explicitly) religious question was devoted to Rick Santorum, to which he replied (in what seemed designed to show us how much the country has changed) that he thought JFK erred too far on the side of separating his Catholicism from his politics.
Yes, there were “family values” discussions about young women being protected from HPV and, of course, the whole “Christian alternative science” thing was behind the global warming discussion. Herman Cain joked about the biblical tithe, while Rick Perry defended biblical law in the form of his state’s extraordinary use of the death penalty.
But really, for a presidential field so steeped in religion and so-called family values, discussion of these issues were conspicuously absent from the event.