If everything you knew came from cable TV news, you'd think the nation's predominant religion was a pagan cult of celebrity worship: a never-ending Dionysian spectacle of sexual transgression, violence and redemptive sentimentality.

We create celebrity-gods, it seems, largely to destroy them.

Shortly before the Schiavo carnival, I watched an hour-long MSNBC newscast devoted entirely to these five topics: actor Robert Blake found not guilty of murdering his wife; celebrity wife-killer Scott Peterson sentenced to death; a missing child and a pedophile on the lam in Florida; Ashley Smith, the heroic Atlanta waitress; and the Michael Jackson sexual molestation trial. Evidently, nothing of significance had happened anywhere in the world.

Then came the death of Pope John Paul II, and suddenly everybody turned Catholic. Except that, judging by TV coverage, you'd think that the late pontiff was the spiritual head of the Republican Party and that the "culture of life," as defined by GOP politicians, was the essence of the Catholic faith. Defined, that is, by "hot-button" issues of sexual morality: gay marriage, gay priests, abortion, contraception, etc.

For purposes of TV ratings, understand, it's not so important what you're saying about sex as long as you're talking about it.

Now there's no denying where John Paul II stood: firmly in the church's centuries-old tradition of sexual priggishness and medieval scholasticism. Nor that, for all his personal courage, greatness as a world leader, and historically reaching out to Jews, Muslims and Eastern Orthodox Christians, it's partly due to his reactionary views that American Catholicism seems to be in crisis, with church attendance steadily dropping, schools and parish churches closing, priests and nuns in short supply, and the laity expressing declining confidence in the church hierarchy.

Fully 78 percent of U.S. Catholics told a recent CNN/USA Today poll that the next pope should allow them to use birth control. Sixty-three percent are in favor of priests being allowed to marry. Fifty-nine percent think medical research on human stem cells should be permissible. Most agree with the views of former Republican Missouri Sen. John C. Danforth, himself an Episcopal priest, in a recent New York Times essay: "It is not evident to many of us that cells in a petri dish are equivalent to identifiable people suffering from terrible diseases."

Forbidding contraception in the face of a rampant AIDS epidemic and runaway overpopulation causing disease, starvation and war throughout the Third World strikes the majority as moral idiocy.

In his final book, "Memory and Identity," (Rizzoli, 2005) John Paul II suggested that advocates of gay marriage are "perhaps part of a new ideology of evil, perhaps more insidious and hidden, which attempts to pit human rights against the family and against man." Many wonder if "insidious" doesn't better describe American bishops and cardinals who transferred serial pedophile priests from parish to parish, endangering thousands of children entrusted to the church's care, in the futile hope of avoiding scandal. An amoral secular bureaucracy could hardly have done worse.

If the Catholic Church could find a way to accommodate divorce -- i.e., by dressing it up as "annulment" and generating healthy fees for canon lawyers -- it ought to be able to solve "gay marriage," too. Simply calling it something else might be a good start.

But there I go, falling into my own trap. And as I am no longer a communicant in the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, perhaps it would be more appropriate for me to list a few ways in which John Paul II was, indeed, a great spiritual leader and most emphatically not a conservative Republican.

Unlike President Bush, who cribbed the "culture of life" phrase from a papal encyclical, John Paul II unequivocally opposed the death penalty. Instances where society had no other means of protecting itself, he wrote, "are very rare, if not practically non-existent."

John Paul II also vigorously opposed Bush's war in Iraq, warning that armed conflict could only worsen the plight of "the people of Iraq, the land of the Prophets, a people already sorely tried by more than 12 years of embargo."

On his visits to Jerusalem, the pope made a point of stressing the sufferings of Palestinians as well as Israelis by visiting a refugee camp as well as the Wailing Wall. As he apologized to the Jews for the Vatican's moral blindness during the Holocaust, so he prayed in a Muslim mosque in Damascus, Syria.

Having worked in a Nazi labor camp and seen his native Poland fall under Stalinist tyranny, John Paul II also warned against purely materialist capitalist economics in which "(t)he worker is treated as a tool whereas the worker ought to be treated as the subject of work, as its maker and creator." He was pro-labor union and a passionate environmentalist.

In short, John Paul II was a religious leader, not an American politician.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a national magazine award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at genelyons2@cs.com.