I know I’m not alone in noticing that every other day there is a new story on one of the three remaining presidential candidates and their faith. In the past few elections, this has been reserved more for the Republican candidates, but this year it’s completely taken over the Democratic candidates as well.

I say this not as an atheist, but as an American political observer: enough is enough. This is not a religious post you are running for. Your qualifications and resume is far more important than your religious beliefs, especially when you are being vocal about them for the first time in 20 years.

It’s one thing to not be afraid to speak of your faith. It’s another thing to force it on the voters. This campaign is featuring more of the latter than the former. I personally cannot recall another election that had a “Compassion Forum” to gauge the candidates religious beliefs.

When this election got into full gear, I went out of my way to document what all of the candidates had to say on matters of religion, and compile them in one place. Well, after six months, I can’t even keep up with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s religious quotes.

The funny thing about this development in this election, is that when I began to compile the candidate’s quotes on religion, there weren’t a whole lot of them out there. Aside from Mike Huckabee, none of the candidates in either party were particularly outspoken on matters of religion. Now, you can’t get these people to shut up about it.

It’s not all their fault either. The ridiculous numbers of questions that are asked about religion give the candidates the impression that their religious views are as important as their political ones. That has led to a pissing contest between all three candidates to show who can be the most religious, without regard for the actual content of their quotes.

As Michael Russnow of the Huffington Post said:

“I’m really tired about the fact that it’s become increasingly common for presidential candidates to insist how much religious belief plays such a prominent role in their lives no matter how progressive and forward thinking they purport to be.”

There are certainly some Americans who heavily weigh a candidate’s religious views before casting their vote. I don’t doubt that, and I understand that to an extent candidates will suck up to anyone with a vote. But the overwhelming amount of religious content in this campaign is bothersome to me.

A presidential candidate’s religion is important to some people, and I am one of those people. But it’s important to me in a “I want to make sure you don’t screw this up” kind of way than it is in a “I’m holier than you are” kind of way. That is why I immediately ruled out ever voting for Mike Huckabee. His religious views did not belong in the White House.

Obama, Clinton and McCain are all religious people. There’s is no arguing that, and I don’t think any of them are looking to theocratic on us. So what’s the point of this never-ending debate? We know how they feel on the subjects that religion affects.

We know that Obama is as liberal as a politician can be, despite having convinced moderate America that he’s one of them. We also know that he’s made some bad decisions regarding his religion, specifically where he chose to worship for 20 years and with whom. If his religion has been making his decisions for him for the last two decades, he has no business in public office.

We know that Clinton will believe in whatever the voters and/or polls say to believe in. There is no reason in the world to think that anything she says on this campaign trail is true. It says a lot to me that she is at Bible and prayer gatherings with other Congressional members regularly. But there is no reason to believe that her religious views will change the way she has acted for the past 30 years in public service.

We know that McCain is a regular church goer who was very quick to rip the mouthpieces of the religious right movement back when he was a real maverick. We also know that he picked a “spiritual advisor” that I wouldn’t allow in my house with the kind of hate he spews. The disturbing part of that fiasco is that it’s obvious that McCain only used him to win religious points with voters, not worrying about the points he would be losing with non-religious or less-religious voters.

In essence, we’ve learned that while they all constantly proclaim their religious superiority, they are all using religion to win religious votes, and for no other reason. If they all believed all of the things they’ve said in the last four months, there would have been plenty of quotes on record from them all about their apparently deep faith before this campaign started. There wasn’t. Not to the extent that they are talking about it now, at least.

Sadly, I don’t think this is the last time that I’ll have to write about this, as there is still an entire general election to go, but I needed to get this off my chest for now. But the bottom line is: enough is enough. We know how you feel — you love God more than the other two, you’ve always been religious, your faith is the most important thing to you, etc. We know you’re lying, or at the very least drastically exaggerating. Stop it. You’re running for president. Have some pride and a backbone. You’ve said what you’ve said, now move on. Let’s get back to politics.

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