ASHINGTON - ''Tikkun olam'' is a venerable Hebrew phrase that translates loosely as ''improve the world.'' A day after the Anti-Defamation League told Joseph I. Lieberman to stop talking about religion in the presidential campaign, his wife, Hadassah, asserted that the spiritual call was the mission of the Democratic ticket.
''The Gore-Lieberman team is committed to service and benevolence,'' Mrs. Lieberman, daughter of a rabbi, like his wife a Holocaust survivor, said in her first official campaign speech, delivered last week at the B'nai B'rith convention. ''Our ultimate purpose is `tikkun olam' - to repair the world.''
Sacred words, Biblical images, confessions of faith, policies presented as moral imperatives - the 2000 presidential campaign may be historic in relocating the intersection of religion and politics.
Even before the nomination of Lieberman, the first Orthodox Jew to be a vice presidential candidate, both Governor George W. Bush of Texas and Vice President Al Gore were fiercely competing to claim faith-based morality and a God-centered life.
Americans don't want to be told what religion to practice. But that doesn't make them deaf to God-and-values talk on the political stump, pollsters say. Moreover - and probably more important - behind the soaring campaign rhetoric, a consensus is quietly forming in Congress, in think tanks, and among sectarian groups about a need to expand the role of religious institutions in public life.
''People take great comfort in knowing their leaders act and have an agenda that is informed by a faith commitment,'' said Anna Greenberg, an assistant professor who studies public opinion at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. ''There is a yearning in this campaign for a discussion about values, not the `family values' of abortion and homosexuality, but of personal responsibility, discipline, and having society work more decently.''
Part of it, of course, stems from a national embarrassment over President Clinton's Oval Office adultery and a strong sentiment for electing a leader who is virtuous and respected. Beyond that, many Americans feel that culture, especially as it affects children, has coarsened and even spun out of control and that a dose of religion might not be the worst antidote.
Lieberman, a two-term US senator from Connecticut who is known to his colleagues as a man of deep faith and rectitude, tapped into those double anxieties before he joined the Democratic ticket. He is famous for his floor speech chastising Clinton for his affair with Monica S. Lewinsky, and he has threatened the entertainment industry with calls to regulate content if it doesn't curb sex and violence in movies, TV, and video games.
Lieberman also is a key player in a relatively new policy debate over returning religion to the public square. It isn't being driven by either the church-state separatists or conservative Christians, who have dominated the discussion for 30 years.
The new voices are centrist Democrats (such as Gore) and ''compassionate conservative'' Republicans (such as Bush) who argue that a shrinking government needs to form a partnership with grass-roots, faith-based institutions to address social problems, particularly those in urban America.
The pressure inside Congress is coming from groups such as the Empowerment Caucus, a bipartisan, ideologically mixed group of members who would like to see funds for federal initiatives, on housing, fatherhood, drug avoidance, literacy, and sexual abstinence channeled to religious bodies or charities that have reputations for getting results with their own programs. Lieberman is a Senate cochairman of the caucus.
Outside, groups such as the National Council of Churches, which representsmainline Protestant denominations, are becoming more politically active on issues of social justice. The council, which is now run by ministers who formerly had political careers - Mayor Andrew Young of Atlanta and US Representative Bob Edgar of Pennsylvania - led the effort in reuniting Cuban refugee Elian Gonzalez with his father.
In detailed policy addresses last year, both Gore and Bush used language about the transforming power of faith as they laid out similar visions for cracking the wall between church and state. They pledged to expand the concept of ''charitable choice,'' an obscure provision in the 1996 welfare overhaul law that requires state agencies to let religious groups compete for government contracts without demanding they give up their sectarian character, as long as they don't evangelize.
Bush said in a July 1999 address at a Methodist church in Indianapolis: ''In every instance when my administration sees a responsibility to help people, we will look first to faith-based institutions, to charities, and to community groups that have shown their ability to save and change lives.''
According to the Center for Public Justice, a Christian think tank in Annapolis, Md., Bush's commitment to charitable choice - the governor issued an executive order endorsing it after the welfare law passed - has made Texas one of the only states to steer public funds aggressively to religious groups.
Stephen Lazarus, a policy analyst at the center, said most states have either been unaware of the provision, or, like Massachusetts, made no new efforts to expand partnerships they already had with faith-based groups.
''We have a long history of contracting with faith-based organizations, so it really was a part of welfare reform that didn't have much of an impact on us,'' said Thomas Noonan, general counsel of the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance. Noonan said sectarian groups providing shelter for the homeless will receive $6.2 million, or about one-third of this year's shelter budget.
Gore, in a May 1999 speech to the Salvation Army in Atlanta, called for extending charitable choice beyond welfare to drug treatment, homelessness, and youth-violence prevention.
''I believe strongly in the separation of church and state, but freedom of religion need not mean freedom from religion,'' Gore said. ''There is a better way.''
Melissa Rogers, general counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee for Public Affairs, noted that Gore has not spoken out on the issue recently, perhaps because charitable choice is not garnering ''untempered enthusiasm'' from all faith groups on the left and the right.
''I feel distinctly uneasy when I hear policy makers talk about all the positive social results that religion produces, like churches are some cog in the bureaucratic wheel, or you can plug them in and use them,'' Rogers said. She added that religious institutions could lose their autonomy if they become too dependent on federal contracts.
But the idea is ''hot,'' Rogers said.
