If Al Franken decides to pursue a career in politics, he won't count on support from the religious right.

In fact, some conservative evangelical Christians might pray for his defeat.

Some might even pray for his mortal soul.

Mr. Franken, the smart aleck extraordinaire who first gained fame as a writer and cast member on Saturday Night Live, says he's eyeing a run for the U.S. Senate from his home state of Minnesota in 2006 or 2008.

He would be at least as provocative a candidate as Arnold Schwarzenegger, California's Republican governor. And he'd be at least as funny as Jesse Ventura, the wrestler who governed Minnesota from 1999 to 2003.

In any case, a Franken candidacy would surely attract national attention.

While he decides, the Harvard Lampoon alum is hard at work with The Al Franken Show, broadcast on the Air America radio network. In Dallas, it can be heard weekdays from noon to 3 p.m. on KXEB-AM (910). His latest book, The Truth (with jokes) (Dutton Adult, $25.95), hit the shelves Tuesday.

Part funnyman, part serious social observer, Mr. Franken has become a go-to voice for liberal America. He spoke by phone with Special Contributor Holly Lebowitz Rossi, touching on politics, his Jewish upbringing, and the scariest man on the religious right. Here are excerpts.

QUESTION: Is there such a thing as "the religious left"?

ANSWER: Yes, there obviously is, there has been forever.

QUESTION: I mean as an organized entity ...

ANSWER: Organized? (Laughs) No, not particularly. It doesn't seem as organized as the religious right. But there are mainstream religious organizations that do have certain kinds of values that I associate with liberals, like caring for the poor.

QUESTION: Should candidates on the left be talking more about religion, the way many Republicans do?

ANSWER: As far as Democrats talking about religion, I think it's fine. I also think it's legitimate for people not to talk about it.

But you're talking values and where they come from. For a lot of people, they come from their spiritual beliefs.

QUESTION: Where do your values come from?

ANSWER: We weren't terribly devout. I did go to temple, [but] I was confirmed, not bar mitzvahed.

I think that my values were very much formed from my parents' values. My mom wasn't comfortable talking about God, but my dad was. He liked the sermons, which were almost entirely about ethics: Like Hillel said, it's not enough to be just, but to do justice. My dad believed in God, but not in the sense of an old guy with a long, white beard sitting in heaven.

[My dad] was like our Founding Fathers – he was a deist, he believed there was God in nature. We'd talk about it if we were fishing or something, if we were sitting alone. Dad would say the world's too beautiful not to have something behind it.

QUESTION: You wound up going to the Blake School in Minneapolis, known as an elite Protestant high school.

ANSWER: The school started as a school for Protestant boys at the turn of the 20th century. They started letting in Jews in the 1950s to keep the SAT scores up.

I've said that before in public as a joke. And then in 2001, Blake had its centennial. They assigned the history teacher to do a history of the school. She calls me up and says, "You know that joke you do? It's truer than you can possibly imagine."

She had gotten notes from board meetings, and in the '50s, Ivy League schools were turning into meritocracies. Blake was discovering that it was getting harder to get its graduates into Ivy League schools because they were kind of dumb – they were just from these old families. They said, "In order to keep our reputation as one of the top country day schools, we've got to get kids who can get into these Ivy League schools. How are we going to do that?" And somebody went, "Jews!"

The valedictorian my year was Ron Friedman. The valedictorian the year before was Mark Kaplan. The valedictorian the year after was Rob Cohen.

QUESTION: So what are you getting at?

ANSWER: What I'm getting at is the strategy worked. (Laughs.) Nevertheless, we did have chapel where we sang Protestant hymns.

QUESTION: Do you think evangelical Christians are more comfortable with a religious, even non-Christian, Democrat like Joe Lieberman than with a secular Democrat?

ANSWER: I think Christian evangelicals probably liked Joe Lieberman more than they would like most Democrats because he did talk about his faith. He felt comfortable talking about it.

But what's a secular Democrat? In terms of the way the government works, we're all secular. We're a secular society, and I think Joe Lieberman would be the first to say so. Theocracy is when you look at Iran or someplace like that.

QUESTION: How do you square that with the influence of evangelicals in the 2004 election?

ANSWER: I examined this, and I don't think they had much of an influence, really. There was an increase in voter turnout everywhere. The day after Bush won, they [evangelicals] sort of claimed that they had done it.

QUESTION: Are you still considering a Senate campaign in Minnesota?

ANSWER: It's a possibility. We are moving to Minnesota [from New York City] in January. I'm an empty-nester now. I grew up in Minnesota, and always went back and forth because of my parents, so now I'll be back there.

QUESTION: Wouldn't you have to sacrifice your comic edge if you became a senator?

ANSWER: To some degree. There's a certain kind of language that I've used in my comedy that probably wouldn't be a good idea on the stump. It's just not appropriate.

But I don't think I have to change that much in terms of being frank and honest.

QUESTION:

What bothers you most about conservatives?

ANSWER: It just irks me to hear this crap from people like Rush Limbaugh and Bill Bennett and Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter about their values, these traditional values versus secular values. I've read a little of the New Testament. Jesus said enough about helping the poor, helping the least among us, that if you cut out every passage where he talked about that, you'd have a perfect box for smuggling Rush Limbaugh's drugs.

Having phone sex with an employee against her will [as Mr. O'Reilly was accused of doing in a 2004 harassment lawsuit], I don't know what kind of traditional value that is. I didn't know that the phone has even been around long enough for that to be a traditional value.

QUESTION: Who is the conservative that worries you the most?

ANSWER: Bush. He's most dangerous because he's at the top of the chain.

QUESTION: Do you think your show and Air America have done anything to change the media culture?

ANSWER: Since we started, we've at least doubled our audience. I have about 1.25 million listeners on an average week on radio, and then streaming [via the Internet], another 100,000 or so. I think that means something.

[The conservative talk show hosts] have a huge, 17- or 18-year jump on us. But Limbaugh, who's on at the same time as me, has gone down. And that's good.

QUESTION: What's the message of your new book?

ANSWER: It's sort of about how Bush won [in 2004] using fear, smear, and queers, and thought he had a mandate. It's about how he uses a mandate that didn't exist to show his hand about what he cared about. And that was Terri Schiavo – actually, Schiavo was more about trying to reward the Christian right. And then Social Security, which was about trying to unravel the most successful program in our nation's history. Then how he used being a war president – and in fact he is a terrible, terrible war president.

As far as the war is concerned, there is sort of this faith-based reality versus fact-based reality. They believe in some kind of faith-based reality.

They believe their own hype about weapons of mass destruction, about ties to al Qaeda, about how we were going to be welcomed with flowers and sweets.

Holly Lebowitz Rossi, a Boston-based freelance writer, can be contacted through her Web site, www.hollyrossi.com.