To be sure, America is a more "religious" country than Germany. In the U.S., nearly 40 percent of all church members attend divine service every Sunday; in Germany, only about nine percent do so, and among Protestants the figure is even more lamentable - four percent.

But is this the only valid yardstick? As one who has spent on and off more than four decades in America, I wonder about the worth of religious rhetoric if the abortion rate in "Christian" America is almost three times as high as in "post-Christian" Germany?

I was thunderstruck when I read in the pre-election "Faith and Life" poll that even among white evangelicals abortion ranks only seventh among issues they considered "very important" in this year's poll, well behind the price of gasoline. And as for African-Americans, thought to be the most faithful believers in the nation, they terminate pregnancies at almost three times the rate of their white compatriots. They abort with such a vengeance that demographers predict that by the year 2038 the black vote will no longer be of any relevance because much of the black electorate will have their opportunity to live denied as we speak.

Abortion is no hot-button issue among German voters either, to the sorrow of many traditional Christians. But it is hard to conceive of German doctors resembling remotely Dr. George Tiller who boasts on his own website with having performed 60,000 mainly partial-birth abortions in his own clinic in Wichita, Kansas; he says he is conducting an average 100 more every week.

If these figures are staggering so are the trimmings. In Dr. Tiller's clinic mothers have themselves photographed, with their heads next to their dead offspring. Fathers bring aborted fetuses gifts, such as teddy bears. Clearly, Dr. Tiller does not consider these fetuses useless clusters of flesh. He baptizes some before incinerating them in his own crematorium, and as a Lutheran he knows that one can only baptize humans, not lumps of cells.

Tiller evidently sees no contradiction between his handiwork and his faith. Excommunicated by one Lutheran congregation as an "unrepentant sinner," he now receives communion in another Lutheran church.

As they say in New York, go figure...

There is a marked difference between the Lutheran and the prevailing Protestant-utopian views in America concerning the interface between faith and politics. The latter, be they liberal or conservative, often teach that the Gospel can somehow fix this broken world; hence the religious battle of words in political campaigns where they have no place.

The Lutheran position, which is currently receiving a new hearing in churchly circles, is more down-to-earth: It takes practical reason to run this broken world. The Gospel - the good news of the repentant sinner's salvation by grace through faith in Christ's work on the cross - can "illume" reason, as Luther said, but it has nothing to say about how to fix a sick economy, or to extricate yourself from a war. To figure out problems like these, requires brains.

Of course there are theological concerns about which the Church must speak up, and Dr. Tiller's activities surely come under this rubric. It is hard to imagine him following a divine "calling," which is what defines man's vocations in the secular realm - vocations such as that of plumbers, parents, professors, students, and, yes, politicians and voters as well.

If the Christian performs those divine assignments in the world out of love for his neighbor, he renders the highest possible service to God, says Luther. This makes him a member of the universal priesthood of all believers. In other words, the altruistic man and woman in the voting booth are in reality priests exercising their ministry not at the altar but out here in our rough daily world.

For a long time, this hands-on doctrine governing the Christian's daily life has been smothered by the weight of kitschy gobbledygook that has given American religion a bad name. Now, with the "Luther Decade" underway, meaning the 10-year countdown to the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017, Luther's outburst against "false clerics and schismatic spirits" trying to tell secular rulers how to run their business, seem strangely topical.

At Concordia Seminary St. Louis, the largest Lutheran divinity school in the U.S., scholars and statesmen from Europe and North America have been comparing notes on precisely these issues last month at a conference titled, "Faith and Politics in Luther's Land - and Here."

The overarching questions discussed were these: Is Germany already a post-Christian society? Are there still glimmers of hope for faith in Germany's politics, considering that its Basic Law mentions the name of God in the very first sentence of its preamble, while there is no reference to God in the U.S. Constitution?

Finally: Is America, where at many secular universities hostility to Christianity is more prevalent than in Germany, about to follow the Old World's anti-religious footsteps?

Former German defense minister Hans Apel, a Social Democrat, described the glass as "half empty," as far as the interface between faith and politics in Germany are concerned. Christian Meissner, national secretary of the Protestant cause of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, said it was "half full." Taking a pessimistic view of faith among young Christians in Germany, historian Mark Ruff of St. Louis University, described them as "fading embers."

But in all papers given at this conference, dire warnings were sounded against a "post-Christian void." Irving Hexham, a religious studies professor of Calgary University in Canada, established the direct lineage of the neo-pagan substitute for Christianity from the rabidly anti-Christian philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72) to the Nazi Party's chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, who was hanged as a war criminal in Nuremberg in 1946.

And Rev. Larry Nichols, one of America's leading experts on cults, compared this phenomenon with the growing impact of neo-pagan cults, including Satanism, on segments of American society.

While all agreed that the "two kingdoms" - the secular and the spiritual - must never be "cooked and brewed together," it was hard to argue with Hans Apel's warning that churches giving up their fundamental theological positions in order to "please their memberships... lose their right to exist."

"Who else could provide values?" Apel wondered aloud. "A democratic society cannot force its fundamental values by law. If it cannot be based on common fundamental values, our democratic society is in great danger, as demagogues get their chance to overwhelm and change it."

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