Last week, like most other weeks, Tulsa blogger Michael Bates was writing about some local political intrigue. Without getting too bogged down in the provincial details, here’s the set-up:

There is a proposal to gerrymander Tulsa’s city council districts. This proposal is backed by Tulsa’s daily newspaper, and by a lot of money. It is opposed by four of Tulsa’s nine city councillors — and by Michael Bates.

What made last week so noteworthy was that in the course of praising the four stalwart anti-gerrymandering councillors, Bates thought it germane to mention that the four are “are all men of devout Christian faith.”

Since this particular Bates line was published not just on Bates Line, but also in Urban Tulsa Weekly, it touched off a chorus of tongue-clicking from local sensitivity vigilantes. The word “bigot” was aired, and so was “divisive,” and so was “perverted,” as in the slogan, “When religion is injected into politics or politics are injected into religion, both are irrecoverably perverted.” Tsk, tsk.

So this week, Bates felt the need to explain what he meant last week. “I’m amazed that the statement, intended as a compliment to the four councilors, would be read as an insult to adherents of any other faith,” he said.

He went on to describe character traits that devout Christians and Jews share — courage, fidelity, and perseverance, for instance — with concrete examples from Exodus, Psalms, Esther, and the Epistle to the Philippians.

He closed with: “If we want elected officials who are fearless to do what is right, we ought to look for men and women whose character has been shaped by confidence in a God who is bigger than any adversary they may face.”

All well and good. Faith in God makes them better elected officials… and better all-around human beings, for that matter.

But… better than who, exactly? That’s the question, isn’t it? When Bates praises the men on one side of a controversy by calling them devout Christians, isn’t the implication that the guys arrayed against them must not be devout Christians?

There’s a Tulsa councilman named Bill Martinson, who is not among the four devout Christians named by Bates. I think Martinson attends First Presbyterian Church, the very church also attended by Chris Medlock, who is one of Bates’s four devout Christians.

But Martinson is in favor of the gerrymandering! Does this mean that his Christianity is not devout? Bates doesn’t say so… because he doesn’t think so? Or is he too polite to make such an explicit accusation?

If so, his reticence is misapplied. If this redistricting scheme is so evil that a good Christian could not support it, then it must follow that any Christian supporting it is a bad one. This is a tautology, a statement that is necessarily true.

And if Martinson is a false Christian, why shrink from saying so? I would not shrink from calling, say, Ted Kennedy an apostate. Because if Martinson can take Communion from the same cup as Medlock, of what earthly use is the advice to favor those men who drink from the well of Christianity?

I’ll be following up on this post tomorrow, moving from the specific puzzles of Tulsa to the general implications of faith in the public square. Stay tuned.