Why do we so slavishly venerate religion? Is it always a force for good in the world? Doesn't religious dogma often conflict with reason and progress? Shouldn't we view it with the same questioning, sometimes skeptical, eye we fix on other wealthy, powerful institutions?

But we don't. In an age of cynicism and doubt -- about politics, media, values -- religion gets a free ride.

Think about it. God-talk permeates our culture and politics. Civic leaders consistently invoke God, hide behind Him, bend their knee. No acknowledged atheist would dream of running for national office, even in our supposedly secular country. Just a few decades ago, journalist H. L. Mencken enthusiastically lampooned the pomposity and hypocrisy of organized religion and the sometimes gullible piety of the faithful: Now, no newspaper columnist or TV news anchor would dare. Any teacher who challenged his or her students to think critically about religion would be looking for work the next day.

As essayist Wendy Kaminer pointed out in The New Republic a few years ago, even academics -- a traditional source of skepticism and challenge -- have largely run from the subject in recent years.

However continuously religious values are invoked in politics, they are rarely practiced. Politicians go to church faithfully and commit adultery chronically. The Commandments expressly forbid killing, yet states fall all over one another to enact capital-punishment laws.

Extremists slaughter innocents in the name of religion or wage brutal conflicts in Bosnia, Ireland, the Middle East, India, and Pakistan. Other faiths use dogma to suppress women, denounce homosexuality, and fend off advances in medicine and other technologies. Is there a serious student of religion who would challenge the notion that Jesus would run screaming in terror if he witnessed the horrors committed in His name?

Enlightenment philosophers warred ferociously with religious authorities, advancing ideas about science and rationalism, arguing that ancient stories and shibboleths impede learning and understanding. Enlightenment scholar Peter Gay recalls philosopher David Hume, for instance, whose work was both courageous and modern:

"[Hume] was willing to live with uncertainty, with no supernatural justifications, no complete explanations, no promise of permanent stability, with guides of merely probable validity; and what is more, he lived in his world without complaining, a cheerful stoic."

Hume's example makes plain, Gay writes, that "since God is silent, man is his own master; he must live in a disenchanted world, submit everything to criticism, and make his own way."

But Hume's attitude didn't find its way to our world today.

America permits very little public skepticism about religion. The New York Times reports that 93 percent of Americans have told Gallup pollsters they believe in God, and millions of their children are routinely introduced to religious education at the earliest possible ages, before they have the chance to make up their own minds.

America's founders went to extraordinary pains to separate religious and political life, understanding that theocracies impede both freedom and learning. Still, many religious organizations refuse to accept this profoundly important ethos. Not content simply to worship, they want to selectively force their notions on everyone else. They weigh in on sexual practices, language, abortion, foreign policy, assisted suicide, school policies, and, of course, the right of women to control their own fates.

The mixing of religion and politics brought us the amazing spectacle of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi and Representative Dick Armey of Texas in last week's scripturally inspired homophobic outbreak. First, Lott told a TV interviewer that homosexuality is a sin, treatable in the same way as alcoholism or sex addiction. Lott was supported by Armey, who told reporters "The Bible is very clear on this," citing I Corinthians 6:9, ll, 18, and 20. In the King James version of the Bible, I Corinthians 6:9 says that "neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind" shall inherit the kingdom of God. Why, nearly a half-century after the Scopes Monkey Trial, are we still having to argue that the Bible doesn't really work as literal law? And how amazing to have to make the argument to people who are supposed to be leading the nation.

He and Lott, Armey said, believe "very strongly" in the Bible.

The founders were wise to try and keep this kind of ignorance out of our national political life, but they didn't foresee how much dumber their successors would be, or how God-talkers would creep into the political mainstream.

The Lott-Armey outburst was preceded by a remarkable declaration last week in Salt Lake City, where the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant denomination and an increasingly powerful conservative force in American religious organizations, amended its statement of beliefs to include the declaration that a woman should "submit herself graciously" to her husband's leadership and that a husband should "provide for, protect, and lead his family."

The Southern Baptist group claims nearly 16 million members, including Bill Clinton (who dissented), Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, and Lott himself.

The Southern Baptist declaration was prominently -- if gingerly -- reported in the mainstream press, which was particularly "objective" in its coverage. A few feminists protested in a few sound bites, but there was relatively little journalistic hue and cry. In a day or two, the story had vanished completely from newspapers and TV newscasts.

Were any politician to announce at a press conference that a woman ought to "submit herself graciously," many of the forests in North America would be felled during the ensuing uproar; for weeks, air time would be crammed with denunciations, explanations, retractions. Other politicians would line up to separate themselves from so block-headed an idea; editorial writers would declare their outrage.

The idea that an ancient text justifies such a regressive and offensive impulse would be rightly seen as insane, even barbaric, in another context. American women's peaceful yet effective movement towards equality has changed the world. Yet the pundits who thunder about morality had nothing much to say about a religious institution that would once again subordinate millions of women.

The online world is already freer than the rest of the culture. We can more openly explore sexuality, talk about death, consider politics beyond liberalism and conservatism.

Now the Southern Baptists remind us that we online can reverse the modern tradition of our tepid and corporatized media and establish a new tradition: challenging and questioning those wealthy, powerful, and increasingly politicized organizations that presume to shape our lives in God's name.

The point isn't to attack religious institutions or dismiss people who cherish them, but to explore the roles of these sometimes frighteningly arrogant institutions.

The Southern Baptist declaration, for instance, is an outrage, a deep offense to the slow and painful evolution of American history toward its original ideals.

Nuts to them for trying to turn back the clock. So dumb a position can at least remind us that God, if he exists, does indeed work in mysterious ways, and that David Hume was right: Nobody has the right to speak for him.