Whose cross to bear is bigger?
Whose cross to bear is bigger? (Here's where you can watch tonight's debates in person.) Official Congressional Portraits

Is there a more boring game than Who's the Most Christian Christian? There is not. But God, it's one of America's favorite political games! It's an especially disheartening game because the contestants will be playing to the most uneducated people in the room.

The Republican National Committee just released an attack ad against Tim Kaine thatā€”well, watch:

"Long before Tim Kaine was in office, he consistently protected the worst kinds of people," a man's voice intones.

One of the people Kaine defended when he was a brand-new lawyer (and religiously opposed to the death penalty) was Richard Lee Whitley. "The Northern Virginia handyman had confessed to murdering a neighbor and then sexually assaulting her with umbrellas," the Daily Beast reported in August.

At first, Kaine said no.

ā€œBut then it kind of worked on me that I had said no because my feeling is, well, I say Iā€™m against the death penalty,ā€ Kaine told the Virginian-Pilot for a 2005 profile. ā€œIf I say thatā€™s my belief but I say, ā€˜Nah, Iā€™m not going to do it,ā€™ then Iā€™m a hypocriteā€...

He couldnā€™t stop the execution. On the day of Whitley was scheduled to die, Kaine addressed news cameras while holding a Bible.

I guarantee Mike Pence will say "umbrellas" tonight, even though the ad doesn't mention umbrellas. I guarantee you Pence is sitting somewhere right now memorizing all the horrible implements used by the murderers Kaine defended.

The ad ends: "He has a passion for defending the wrong people."

Of course, Kaine will say that he is the bigger Christian hereā€”the Bible says "thou shalt not kill," and Kaine himself has said that he is opposed to the death penalty because of his work as a missionary. "I think itā€™s outrageous that there is the death penalty," he told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. "It's not the biggest outrage in the world, but it's one of a number of outrageous (things) where people don't appropriately value the sanctity of human life."

He told the same newspaper:

"I think it's a religious perspective. I spent a year in Central America working in a Jesuit mission and saw an awful lot of hunger and infant deaths caused by malnutrition. The essence of human life is probably suffering and pain. . . . The thing that redeems that is the presence of God in every person."

Kaine "presided over 11 executions as governor," in spite of his own moral convictions, because the death penalty is legal. That little piece of the puzzle is something Pence may feel he has to overwhelm with grisly details about people Kaine defended. That's why I predict he is going to be talking about umbrellas tonight.

As for Pence, his religious bona fides are that he is a Catholic and he's a born-again evangelical. That's the most have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too way to be a Christian in American political life.

"I made a commitment to Christ. Iā€™m a born-again, evangelical Catholic," Pence said in 1994.

According to a profile on the VP candidate: "Penceā€™s parents raised their children Catholic, and Pence served as an altar boy and went to a parochial school." But: "At some point in the mid ā€™90s, Pence and his young family switched to an evangelical mega church."

He just loves God, okay? He loves God in all the ways. He loves God a lot more than going to parties, that's for sure. He declines to go to parties where "thereā€™s alcohol being served and people are being loose," he reportedly said. Pence also apparently "frequently turns down invitations for drinks or dinner from male colleagues," because, as Pence put it: "Itā€™s about building a zone around your marriage."

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I'm sorry, I feel asleep there on my keyboard for a second, just like I might accidentally sleep through tonight's debate.

If you want to watch it online, CNN will have a livestream here and Fox News will have a livestream here and MSNBC will livestream it here. Pick your self-contained media silo and knock yourself out having all your own prejudices confirmed! U!S!A!

If you want to watch it in person in Seattle, here are places that are showing it.

If you want to build a zone of sanity around yourself and skip tonight's debate, I recommend reading this extraordinary essay in The Nation.