Pope Francis is not a liberal or conservative. He transcends pedestrian labels that drive wedges in American society.
So perhaps it trivializes spirituality and religion to keep political score on the pope's visit. But it also might lend instruction and context to some of our raging debates.
So here's how I score it: In the current American political context, Pope Francis was mostly, but not exclusively, left-leaning in his address to Congress on Thursday.
The pope pleaded with Congress to accept immigrants, help the poor, attack income inequality, avoid the excesses of the global economy, reduce arms sales and attend to the environment.
While much of that conforms to simple teachings of Jesus as told in the New Testament, the pope's message tended to align with liberalism under the current American political paradigm.
That's because American conservatives emphasize matters differently, and, I must say, much more harshly than the pope.
They talk of personal responsibility, building walls on borders, the survival of the fittest in our freely competitive capitalist system, and an economy that can't perform well if we start trying to combat climate change, which these American conservatives insist may or may not be real or dire or a result of human activity.
When the pope pivoted to talk about protecting life at all stages of development, conservatives might have thought their moment had arrived--that Francis was warming up to assail abortion, which he and his church abhor.
But then he assailed the death penalty instead.
Perhaps the pope thought it his greater prophetic and pastoral duty to emphasize America's most neglected moral needs, meaning those requiring more attention than the protection of fetuses, for which there is an ample domestic constituency and clamor already.
About all he gave the right wing was a call for religious liberty. But it's not news that the pope advocates religious liberty. It would be news only if he would presume to recommend the appropriate balance between personal rights against discrimination and religious liberty. But he didn't.
His role is to espouse religious principle, not make political negotiation.
Naturally, you could hear and read complaints last week from some on the American right about supposed liberal hypocrisy. The charge was that the left insists on a secular government in which we strictly separate church and state except when a liberal pope wants to hold forth for our Congress.
The complaint reveals a basic misunderstanding of the great American experiment.
What is commanded by the genius of our Constitution is a separation of church and state, but not a separation of religion and government.
Our constitutional prohibition against the government establishing a religion means that no brand of religious thinking or practice--not the pope's, not Jason Rapert's, not yours, not mine--may be sanctioned by the government, or effectively become the government, and thereby demand obedience by citizens who, owing to a separate constitutional clause, must be guaranteed their own freedom of religion.
Pope Francis did not speak to Congress last week with any government authority. He was speaking only by government's permission and invitation.
And here's the relevant test: Stand back now and watch as Congress rejects most of the pope's pleading. That will demonstrate that Pope Francis was not combining church and state. It will demonstrate that he was free to speak even at the highest government level and that our nation was free to listen and agree, or not.
I'm reminded of what Jim Wallis, a liberal Christian preacher and activist and founder of the group called Sojourners, told me a few years ago after he lectured at Hendrix College in Conway.
He said the problem in America wasn't religion in politics, but bad religion in politics.
Wallis meant that our political dialogue needs much less religion-based rhetoric about imposing behavioral restrictions based on the narrow religious views of some. He meant we need much more of the kind of "prophetic preaching" by which, for example, Dr. Martin Luther King shamed our country's moral disgrace over race and stirred an uprising for justice.
Dr. King did not go around preaching to people about any imperative to join his church or agree with him theologically in a Baptist sense. He went around preaching not to his church or for it, but to his nation and for it.
Likewise, Pope Francis wasn't standing in Congress and trying to make us Roman Catholics. That would be mixing church and state, and bad.
He was standing in our Congress trying to make us better people. He was mixing religious principle and government. And that was good, indeed needed.