A quick glance at the American left reveals a movement in the midst of a nervous breakdown, displaying behavior that goes beyond inconsistency into the realm of bipolar moods and multiple personality disorders.

Nowhere do these violently conflicting impulses manifest themselves more clearly than in the contradictory attitude toward religion. On the one hand, leading commentators and activists maintain secularism's traditional hostility toward the very idea of applying religious values to public issues. On the other hand, the newly re-energized "religious left" openly invokes the name of Jesus Christ and the authority of the Bible in its desperate bid to advance a stalled agenda.

Consider a full-page ad in the New York Times that appeared in the first week of December, under the headline:

PRESIDENT BUSH: JESUS CHANGED YOUR HEART. NOW LET HIM CHANGE YOUR MIND.

The sponsoring organization identified itself as "Religious Leaders for Sensible Priorities" and bore the prominent signature of the Rev. Robert Edgar, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches. The text of the ad promised that "a strong faith-based revolt against war on Iraq is coming together in the first weeks of December." It also made a highly personalized plea to the commander in chief, baldly declaring that "Your war would violate the teachings of Jesus Christ."

Imagine the dismissive reaction if a conservative Christian organization had placed an ad suggesting that the foreign policy approach of President Clinton had "violated the teachings of Jesus Christ." Critics would rightly point out that the Jesus of the Gospels left few direct instructions about how to handle diplomacy or foreign affairs.

In fact, I had the opportunity to raise this point with Rev. Edgar (a former Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania) when he joined me as a guest on my radio show. I asked him to cite the specific "teachings of Jesus Christ" that war on Iraq would violate. After a painfully long pause, the best he could offer was a mumbled response about "blessed are the peacemakers."

I then asked if he would also interpret this verse as forbidding war against Serbia over the issue of Kosovo, or U.S. participation in the first Gulf War. Rev. Edgar hurriedly replied that neither of these conflicts would conflict with Christ's teachings. I naturally requested a biblical citation in which Jesus provided direct guidelines for drawing distinctions between appropriate and inappropriate wars. After another long pause, Pastor Edgar conceded that he couldn't identify any clear Gospel instructions on the matter.

In the same spirit, Rev. Mark Bigelow of the Congregational Church of Huntington in Centerport, N.Y., sent a letter to Bill O'Reilly of Fox News defending the offensive Planned Parenthood holiday card that proclaims "Choice on Earth." To Rev. Bigelow, this slogan made perfect sense because he felt certain that Jesus endorsed abortion.

"Even as a minister I am careful what I presume Jesus would do if he were alive today," he wrote, "but one thing I know from the Bible is that Jesus was not against women having a choice in continuing pregnancy. Jesus was for peace on earth, justice on earth, compassion on earth, mercy on earth, and choice on earth."

Since the good Dr. Bigelow insisted that he "knew from the Bible" that Jesus accepted abortion, it seemed reasonable to ask him to provide the specific citation that provided him with this unique knowledge. Of course, Rev. Bigelow refused all requests to back up his outrageous claims, or to pursue further discussion of the authentic biblical approach to what liberals so delicately call "terminating a pregnancy."

The most amazing aspect of these embarrassing leftwing attempts to mobilize scriptural authority isn't that they lack all scholarly basis (though they do), it's that they so obviously contradict liberal orthodoxy about the importance of keeping religion out of politics. When politically correct pundits attack religious conservatives for referring to the Bible on contemporary issues (abortion, the primacy of the family, homosexuality) they do so not because they disagree over substantive issues of scriptural interpretation, but because they oppose any effort to mix faith and politics.

Somehow, when it's the left that raises strident religious voices, this opposition to faith-based activism instantly disappears. While conservative clergymen regularly receive condemnation as "religious fanatics," left-wing Christian activists earn unequivocal endorsement as people of "deep, abiding faith" and bracing "voices of conscience." The admiring, even glowing obituaries for the late Phillip Berrigan, the militant ex-priest and genuine religious fanatic, prove the point. None of his eulogists questioned Berrigan's efforts to impose his radical brand of Catholic pacifism on society at large, though it's hard to imagine that they'd prove similarly tolerant when it comes to the religious activism of, say, Jerry Falwell.

When Pat Robertson ran for president in 1988, the mainstream media regularly questioned the very idea of a Christian minister making a bid for high office?even though another clergyman, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, ran for the White House the very same year without incurring similar challenges to his mixture of politics and religion.

In the same week that the "Jesus Changed Your Heart" ad appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post ran a column by the often thoughtful William Raspberry expressing his "growing fear of an imposed theocracy." In the course of that column he warns against "people for whom religion is the source of wisdom and truth, whose religious and civic lives are seamlessly connected. …" In this context, he specifically concentrates on that favorite liberal boogeyman, the horrifying John Ashcroft.

The fact that Mr. Raspberry feels no fear at all over the seamlessly connected "religious and civic lives" of the Rev. Robert Edgars, Rev. Mark Bigelows, not to mention the Rev. Jesse Jacksons and Rev. Al Sharptons of this world, indicates more than hypocrisy; it suggests that he, like other liberal leaders, may be undergoing a full-blown schizophrenic break.