Is the marriage between religion and the right finally dissolving? Washington Post writer and Brookings Institution fellow E.J. Dionne makes that case in his new book “Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right.” Speaking before an audience of Bay-area political reporters and students at UC Berkeley’s Journalism School Thursday, Dionne announced that “the era of the religious right is over.”

Dionne, a Catholic who covered the Vatican for the New York Times in the 1980s, said he has been frustrated for years about the way right-wing politics has co-opted and narrowed religious belief. He’s puzzled by the short list of issues tied to faith, namely abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research.

“I think it’s a great sell out of our traditions to say religion is only about this very small, pre-approved list of issues,” he told the audience at UC Berkeley.

He’s not the only one to observe a shift in the relationship between religion and politics. Polling evidence suggests the link between Evangelicals and a conservative political agenda may be weakening. Also, two other recently released books make similar arguments: Amy Sullivan’s “The Party Faithful” and Jim Wallace’s “Great Awakening: Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-religious Right America”.

Still, in response to a question from Peter Schrag, noted Californian historian, Dionne admitted conservative religious influence is not exactly dead. Asked if the upcoming California Supreme court decision on gay marriage could potentially hurt Clinton or Obama with Christian voters this fall, Dionne hedged.

“I think they’d both rather not deal with this issue, but I don’t think it has the power it did two years ago,” Dionne said.

“But it still has some legs left?”

“Yes, it still has legs.”

But Dionne sees an emerging trend to expand religion’s role in political discourse to include more progressive causes. He cites Rick Warren, an evangelical mega-church pastor and author of “The Purpose-Driven Life” who invited Barack Obama to an AIDS prevention event in 2006. Warren’s response to conservative complaints about the presence of the pro-abortion senator: “I’m not right wing or left wing, I’m for the whole bird.”

It’s still too early to tell how Dionne’s theory will shake out in upcoming elections, but his vision for religion’s role in public life offers more hope for a productive discourse than the example of the recent past. Dionne reaches back to the more distant past for inspiration, referring to Abe Lincoln’s religious humility, even during the Civil War.

“What we are looking for in terms of religion’s role in public life is not the certainty that religion encourages, but the humility it promotes,” Dionne said.

Not such a bad idea.