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It’s been an odd season for pastors and would-be presidents. The latter have been renouncing the former faster than you can say “damage control.” Barack Obama quit his membership at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago after Catholic priest Michael Pfleger delivered a sermon there in which he mocked Hillary Clinton for her alleged racism. Having already endured several rounds of controversy over Trinity’s retired pastor, Jeremiah Wright, Obama decided he was not interested in defending his congregation from any more complaints about extremist statements.

Mitt Romney and his Mormon faith. Mike Huckabee and his “Christian leader” ads. John McCain and John Hagee. Hillary Clinton and her “prayer warriors.” Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright. The 2008 election has featured an extraordinary emphasis on religion.

“There’s been more religious ferment in this election than any since 1960,” said Ralph Reed, the GOP strategist who helped build the Christian Coalition in the 1990s, “and I don’t expect that to come to an end.”

Presumed Republican presidential nominee John McCain has rejected the political endorsements of two megachurch pastors after learning more about their disparaging views of other faiths.

The Arizona senator rejected on May 22 the backing of Rod Parsley, pastor of World Harvest Church in Columbus, Ohio, for comments in which Parsley called Islam a violent religion bent on world domination.

In letters sent on successive days, the Internal Revenue Service said it concluded that neither the United Church of Christ, whose national convention heard Barack Obama speak, nor a Southern Baptist pastor, who publicly backed Mike Huckabee, violated tax-exemption provisions prohibiting political endorsements by churches.

Prophets do not always have a balanced view of reality. They are not people who have made a pragmatic adjustment to the status quo. Rather, prophets are people seized by a vision of God’s justice. They speak poetically and act dramatically, trying to move people to face truths that they’d rather not face. They make hyperbolic complaints, like Isaiah’s “No one brings suit justly, no one goes to law honestly.” They do outrageous things, like walk around barefoot as a sign of a coming catastrophe.

Using some of his strongest language yet about his former pastor, Senator Barack Obama said that Jeremiah Wright’s comments capping the clergyman’s provocative return to the public stage were “destructive” and contradict “everything that I’m about and who I am.”

Obama, who had already distanced himself from Wright in a Philadelphia speech on race early in April, said the minister’s remarks at Washington’s National Press Club on April 28 had taken the controversy to a new level.