WASHINGTON -- Religious politics makes strange bedfellows. Praising the Almighty for striking down Israel's Ariel Sharon (or anyone else) expresses a particularly odious fanaticism. American evangelist Pat Robertson and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad both deserve condemnation for the warped sense of religion and the indecency each showed in attributing political motives to his own vengeful version of God.

Mr. Robertson is primarily a danger to himself, a clownish performer who is now self-destructing. Mr. Ahmadinejad on the other hand is rapidly becoming a clear danger to global stability -- intent on taking Jews and other infidels with him in a holy nuclear cloud on Judgment Day. This leader is nuts, by every observable rational measure.

The Iranians have now vindicated the Bush administration's adroit shift to nonconfrontational diplomacy by alienating Europe, Russia and the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency in a single stroke. The Iranians unilaterally ended international negotiations over the country's reprocessing capabilities by breaking the IAEA's seals at three Iranian nuclear facilities and resuming uranium enrichment. Western intelligence agencies believe that Iran is five to 10 years away from making a bomb, according to news reports.

That estimate may allow Washington space to follow a strategy of giving Mr. Ahmadinejad enough rope to hang himself: Denounce him and get the U.N. Security Council to hash over Iran's nuclear perfidies. But it must be coupled with an understanding that the forces that drive Iran's religious politics are much broader than Mr. Ahmadinejad and Iran's more conservative ayatollahs.

Religion has become a primary force of backlash against economic and political change in many parts of the world. The fact that Mr. Robertson, a leading figure in the American religious right, found himself cheek-by-rhetorical-jowl with the Iranian rabble-rouser suggests that the U.S. is not exempt from such backlash.

Religion, at times a source of social advancement, today rushes in to fill the vacuum left in societies when traditional political institutions and authorities cannot explain, moderate or contain the identity-smashing changes of the global communications and technology revolutions. In these cases, religion becomes politics. Reaction is what propels Mr. Robertson, the Shiite visionary Mr. Ahmadinejad, the Sunni Wahhabists of Saudi Arabia and countless other sects together in a broad historical sense.

They and their devout followers fight back in their own ways against the spreading vulgarization and secularization of societies that seem tempted to dispense with religion altogether. These are by and large counterrevolutionary movements, out of step with a secularizing march by history that many of them would destroy rather than accept.

That is why diplomacy's ability to contain the Iranian zealots and their nuclear ambitions is likely to be limited in reach and duration. Americans -- especially politicians, policymakers and journalists -- need to put aside their constitutionally endowed reluctance to recognize and discuss the role that religion plays in politics and civic life at large.

As a nation, America needs broad global strategies that explicitly take into account religion's changing role around the world, and the great potential for harm as well as for good that those changes offer.