NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — When it comes to describing Harriet Miers’s qualifications for the US Supreme Court, the White House gets it exactly backwards. It withholds critical information while showering us with details that have no bearing on her worthiness.President George W. Bush has declared off-limits any documents that might say what Miers has been doing as a top White House aide for almost five years.

Wrong. It is precisely the Senate’s business to learn SOMETHING about a nominee’s legal work, a task made vastly more difficult by the fact that this nominee has been neither a judge nor a scholar.

In her case, senators also need to find out whether she advised Bush on presidential war powers, for example, on Oregon’s assisted-suicide law, on a long list of issues coming before the court.

Would she have to step aside from deciding lots of cases? That is for the president to know and for the senators not to find out, in the view of this White House.

On the other hand, Bush and his friends have made sure everyone knows which church Miers attends, her religion, even the depth of her faith.

To quell a revolt from the religious right, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove assured at least one religious leader “that Harriet Miers is an evangelical Christian, that she is from a very conservative church, which is almost universally pro-life,” James Dobson recounted on his radio show this week.

Why would her religion matter? It mattered a lot to Dobson. In a conference call with other Christian conservative leaders and hundreds of their flock last week, he recited Rove’s assurances as a key reason he backs Miers.

“I know the church she goes to, I know what her history is in terms of her own faith commitment,” he said. Still, many conservatives were angry that Bush hadn’t named someone with a clear record on the issues they cared about.

So White House surrogates and friends of Miers appeared in news stories to give first-hand accounts of her spiritual journey toward baptism as a born-again Christian.

How do Republicans reconcile this with their warnings during John Roberts’s confirmation that to even mention his religion was to violate the Constitution’s ban on a religious test for holding high public office?

Ah, but that was then, when liberals wondered whether Roberts’s personal views would override his legal judgment.

And this is now, when conservatives want to know that Miers will let her religious views guide her legal judgment.

We all want to know how a judge will rule ahead of time. And of course details about a judge’s private life, including religion, offer hints.

Good lawyers earn big fees by learning everything about judges, from personal leanings to previous rulings, so they can craft their arguments to fit the judge.

“There are lots of things you’d want to know about a judge that you’re not entitled to find out, unless you want to live in a world of complete transparency and no privacy,” says Steven Lubet, a Northwestern University law professor who has written on judicial ethics.

And, yes, people take comfort and pride when one of their own takes a seat on the highest court in the land. This is especially true for minorities who have felt ignored, ridiculed or attacked by the mainstream.

But that is only part of the story.

The rest is that some religious and conservative leaders out there, Dobson among them, have a clear, religious agenda that they want the Supreme Court to adopt — namely opposition to the big three: abortion, equal rights for gays and church-state separation.

To that crowd, a certain religious viewpoint isn’t just an interesting, comforting fact, something useful for a lawyer to know. It is a qualification for office.

That is because they aren’t content to let these issues battle it out on legal grounds alone, where the battle should be fought.

My complaint isn’t with Miers, who may be more capable than the White House has so far demonstrated.

My complaint is that the president of this pluralistic nation is pandering to those who want the Supreme Court to convert their personal religious views into law.

Call me old-fashioned, but I care more about whether Miers told the president that he could ignore anti-torture laws than I do about whether her baptism was full-immersion.