With a presidential election nearing, religion and politics are again hot topics.

But Corwin Smidt, director of the Paul B. Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics at Calvin College, says the heat may have already begun to be turned down this election cycle. And, he adds, it starts in America's pulpits.

"There has been a decline in the level of approval for almost all forms of clerical political activity among mainline Protestant clergy," he says. "Among evangelical Protestant clergy there are similar declines in expressed levels of approval for clergy political action, not as consistently nor by such wide margins, but declines nonetheless."

These declines in reported approval for clergy political activism, he says, have also been evident in reported levels of political participation, as both mainline and evangelical clergy exhibited lower levels of political activism in the 2000 presidential election than they did in the 1988 presidential election.

Smidt is editor of a new book due out in October from called "Pulpit and Politics: Clergy in American Politics at the Advent of the New Millennium."

The book looks at the theological beliefs, political attitudes and political behavior of American clergy in 20 religious denominations and springs from a survey of clergy the Henry Institute organized after the 2000 elections. Smidt says no study presently available has systematically examined such an extensive number of clergy, such a large number of denominations and such a range of religious families and faith traditions.

Included in the book are portraits of the social characteristics, the theological stands, the issue positions and the political behavior of clergy in the 2000 election.

Smidt says the social composition of clergy is changing.

"The relative numbers of women continue to expand within the ranks of Protestant clergy," he says. "Less dramatic, but also evident, is the growth of the proportion of ministers who are seminary graduates. Both changes can move clergy in a more liberal ideological and Democratic partisan direction."

However, says Smidt, there is an important counterbalance to that trend.

"Males entering the ministry still outnumber females entering the ministry," he says, "and white males entering the ministry today are more theologically conservative than those white males who have served in the ministry for some years. Those changes have moved clergy in a more conservative and Republican direction over the past 12 years."

Among the Protestant denominations examined in the book are American Baptist, Disciples of Christ, Evangelical Lutheran, Presbyterian Church USA, Reformed, United Methodist, Southern Baptist, Churches of Christ, Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, Presbyterian Church in America, Christian Reformed, Church of the Nazarene, Assemblies of God, Evangelical Free, and Mennonite.

The book also looks at denominations "beyond the two-party Protestant system" in chapters on American rabbis, the Roman Catholic church and the African American Episcopal church. And it includes a chapter on "post-modern" religious organizational forms as found at Willow Creek.