Easter Sunday and the Lord has risen. You don't even have to be a Christian to feel his presence. God is everywhere. He has inveigled his way into the British election campaign by way of the abortion debate. He is at the Vatican, where the Pope is dying, and at the Las Pinellas hospice, in Tampa, Florida, presiding over the last hours of Terri Schiavo's existence. By this Easter morning, she may already be dead. George W Bush and his brother, Jeb, could not, in the end, prevail on the US judicial system to order that her feeding tube be replaced. Unlike God, who spent fewer than three days entombed, Ms Schiavo has had a long wait in the anteroom between oblivion and deliverance.  'Terri died 15 years ago,' her husband Michael said. 'It's time for her to be with the Lord, like she wanted to be.' While all informed doctors confirmed she was irredeemably brain damaged, her campaign website, supported by her parents, was upbeat to the last. A question in a Q&amp;A panel asked: 'Is Terri in an unresponsive coma?' 'Absolutely not!' read the response. 'Terri is a purposefully interactive, alert, curious, lovely young woman who lives with a very serious disability.'  As most Americans agreed, this grim tussle over a ruined life should have been for her family and the law. Instead, the President and Congress muscled in, making Terri Schiavo a peepshow doomed to take her small step to death before an audience of millions. The Schiavo case, not simply a parable of prurience and opportunism, illustrates the rise of God the politician, just as God the theologian sees his influence wane.  The worldwide Anglican communion is in disarray, and only 16 per cent of Britons say that religion is very important to them. Yet God is suddenly the referee of choice for a secular nation. Leading churchmen want to take abortion to the ballot box and though the Prime Minister warns evangelical Christians that faith and politics don't mix, the religious right smells power.  So thank God for science. In what promised to be a counter-blow for rationalism, the science and technology select committee last week produced its report on reproductive technology. Parents, MPs decided, should be able to select their baby's sex. A ban on reproductive cloning cannot yet be justified. Research on animal and human hybrids should go ahead.  Even those who think God and politics a dubious mix might flinch from a cocktail of man and mouse. But the most glaring example of a procedure known as chimeric experimentation was the committee itself. The parliamentary equivalent of a breeding attempt between a yak and a wildebeest produced a split-down-the-middle hybrid with five of its 10 members in revolt. One, Geraldine Smith, later claimed the report could 'pave the way to the kind of eugenics with which Nazi Germany was once experimenting.'  That, frankly, is daft. Five blokes equal a quorum for an indoor football side, not the crucible of a master race. The fact that the brave new worlders could not even get their peers to endorse the finished product suggests that the public will take some convincing. Which is a pity because many of the ideas are bold and right.  The trouble is that the report, in avoiding any discussion or middle ground, plays to the same   rules as religious hardliners. In its post-ethical premise, the very lucrative fertility market should be let rip and clinics need not consider the welfare of any potential child. Despite the disparity of their creeds, extreme libertarianism and extreme repression appear to share the same icy soul.  Inevitably, the nuances of life and death cannot be settled by diktat or false equivalence. Is 'balancing' your family by choosing the sex of a baby more or less benign than allowing particular embryos to be chosen to provide a cure for an existing child? I am uneasy about social selection and children picked by gender as a substitute for a brother or sister who has died tragically.  'Saviour siblings', on the other hand, are born to help another child, not to replace it. Why would that not enhance both lives? It is iniquitous that couples like the Hashmis, now awaiting an imminent verdict from the House of Lords, have had to fight so hard to have a baby who can provide stem cells to cure their six-year-old son, Zain, of a serious blood disorder. The committee is right to argue that such cases are for parents and doctors, not for pro-lifers leeching their sanctity from other people's heartbreak.  With science moving so fast, and the Human Fertility and Embryology Act of 1990 up for replacement early in the next parliament, it is vital that moderate politicians start addressing such issues. Instead, God has all the best lines and raw science, unfiltered through any ethical prism, has given him more ammunition. Already, churchmen have denounced a 'Frankenstein' report.  It is easy to see why God should hold such sway. In an age of materialism, even unbelievers recoil from any suspicion that children are just another commodity, priced according to specification, and that the sick can be disposed of when their warranty runs out. Somehow, the myth has grown up that atheists threw out hope and charity with their unwanted faith.  But morality is patently not simply, or even principally, for the religious. It is the driving force of all individuals and the glue of politics. It is in the DNA of good democracies which forge the legislative framework in which it can thrive. Godliness, by contrast, is not ersatz ethics for the public realm. It is private and it should stay that way.  Obviously religion can be progressive, too. Priests in Africa save lives, no strings attached, faith-based groups do valuable work, and even US evangelists with modest cars and bumper stickers asking 'What Does Jesus Drive?' are doing their bit for God and Kyoto. But if the strident voices prevail, then a future Britain risks being sandwiched between faithful zealots and the Dr Strangelove tendency, with liberal people of all faiths and none marooned in the space between. In that vacuum, progress will be squandered, lives spoiled and cures denied.  It is time for politicians to debate the questions they do not dare address. Why, for example, is society more worried about the few babies aborted at 23 weeks than about those born at the same age and encouraged to live, no matter how grave their disability? Why can people not die at a time of their choosing?  These are not questions for some far-off tomorrow. A Lords committee will be reporting shortly on Lord Joffe's Assisted Dying Bill, and a judge will decide next month whether Charlotte Wyatt, the baby doctors deem too sick to resuscitate, should be artificially kept alive.  Britain needs an inquiry similar to the Warnock commission of 20 years ago. But first, our leaders need to fight any idea that public policy should be shaped by the personal credo of a minority. Forget dog-whistle politics. The siren call of the dogmatists is the sound that we should fear most.