Four years ago it was conservatives who were up in arms over the views of the clergyman who led the congregation where a rising senator named Barack Obama had worshipped for years. At the time, these columns declined to join the fray over the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. “The fact is,” we wrote, “that religion by its nature calls forth great passion. Religious institutions — churches, synagogues, mosques — are places where things are often said that strike the congregation in a way that they mightn’t strike the wider public.” That’s how we feel today as one of our greatest liberal institutions, the Atlantic magazine, launches, on its Web site, a sally against Congressman Michele Bachmann over the church to which she recently belonged.

The church turns out to be a Lutheran congregation whose doctrine opposes the Roman Catholic papacy. There has been some other coverage, but the Atlantic is the one that first caught our eye. Why a great liberal magazine wants to start beating this drum is beyond us. The Atlantic, after all, is famous for, among many other admirable things, issuing an article under the headline “Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?” It answered yes. Yet today we have a woman who not only has learned the alphabet but who has become a lawyer, a tax expert, and a congressman and is emerging at or near the head of the pack for the Republican nomination for president. Now, even though she declares that she loves Catholics, the Atlantic wants to test her over the religious views of a congregation to which she, until recently, belonged.

What strikes us about the Atlantic’s demarche is that, while we haven’t done a double-blind study, we have the impression that the magazine has lately been silent during other attacks on the Catholic church — over, say, its opposition to abortion or gay marriage. In recent months, the governor of New York and the mayor of New York City have each compared the Catholic church’s (and Judaism’s) views on same-gender marriage to bigotry. We can’t find coverage of it in the Atlantic. Yet it suddenly issued this long post in respect of Mrs. Bachmann’s former membership in a congregation that opposes the papacy on religious grounds.

Since we’re just at the start of a campaign in which this issue might come up again, let us just say that we’re with the Founding Fathers on this one. We’re against religious tests for public office in the United States. Your editor has been making this point for years, going back to, and even before, the criticism of the first Muslim to be elected to Congress. Forgive us if we make our oft-repeated point again. The most emphatic sentence in the entire Constitution is the one that says “[N]o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” It doesn’t matter if you’re Jewish, Muslim, an atheist, a Catholic, or if the synod to which your congregation belongs takes a doctrinal view that is hostile to the church of Rome. The Founders just couldn’t have been more emphatic: “no . . . ever . . . any.”