Left clergy, right laity. (Scan).

The war in Iraq exposed many continuing fissures in U.S. society, but none more evident than the divide between clerics promoting a forgiving "God of Peace" and parishioners favoring a sterner "God of Justice."

Most mainline Christian faiths--the Roman Catholic Church, the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, the United Methodists, and the National Council of Churches--adamantly opposed the war against Iraq from the outset. Like the secular left, liberal religious leaders denounced the conflict as one of U.S. aggression, likely to evolve into a long, bloody conflict. In contrast, most people in the pews strongly backed President Bush's goal of ousting Saddam Hussein. According to a prewar poll conducted by the Pew Research Center and Forum on Religion and Public Life, greater than 60 percent of mainline Protestants and Catholics favored attacking Iraq, along with more than 75 percent of evangelical Protestants.

Significantly, this gap between the ecclesiastic establishment and the laity extends beyond issues of war and peace to a wide range of social and political topics. Professor of religion Wade Roof traces the divide to changes in seminary training that began in the 1960s, which brought an increasingly leftward tilt to young clergy on issues ranging from race relations and economics to homosexuality and women's rights. As a result, the "gap between mainline religious beliefs and what the American people actually think has grown worse," says Roof.

An intellectual takeover by progressives within mainline churches pushed clergy beliefs well to the left of church-goers, agrees Scott Appleby, a historian of the American Catholic Church and professor of history at Notre Dame. The sex-abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, Appleby says, have widened the gap between clergy and laity.

This may be one explanation for the inroads made by conservative evangelicals ...