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The controversy over mixing religion and politics has not kept religion apart from government. Religious groups participate in a wide variety of political activities. But religious groups in the United States are not organized as political parties or political machines. There is a relation between religious affiliation and party affiliation. The correlation, however, does not usually indicate a "religious" vote. In part, the relation reflects socio-economic status. For Catholics and Jews it is very much a result of awareness of minority status. As minority awareness declines, trends in voting change. There is no pattern of voting for or against candidates because of their religion. The importance of religion in a presidential election cannot be assessed on the basis of other elections. The election of a Catholic president would not change the nature of our government, but it would have an effect on American politics.

The encounter between the human mind and the outside world is the essence of speculation. The dramatic element in the encounter has been provided by man's assertion that mind is capable of comprehending and ordering the world about him. This same "epistemological presumptuousness," which we associate instinctively with the spectacular successes of the natural sciences, has also been implicit in the enterprise of political theory. Here, too, the claim is that the human intellect can understand all of the complex interrelationships of a political order. In some ways this claim is even more assertive than that of the natural scientist. The theorist seeks not only to analyze and explain certain phenomena, but to prescribe more satisfactory patterns.Given the complexity of the subject matter of politics and the finite character of the human mind, it is not surprising that the ideas of political theorists lend themselves to diverse interpretations at the hands of later commentators. Disagreement in interpretation, however, can take one of two forms: it may turn on a question concerning a particular idea, meaning, or emphasis; or it may find the interpreters taking diametrically opposed positions concerning the basic tendency of a given set of political ideas.