Privacy, it can hardly be disputed, is becoming as quaint in America as smoking in public or the pulse dial telephone. Some day, people will recall a time when they didn't know the details of their leaders' indecorous sexual proclivities. Still, it was startling to watch a television interview this week with two religious ministers, chosen by President Clinton to help keep him "accountable", chatting about their exchanges with the embattled president.

Surely these two men would not have gone on national television to discuss matters such as the healing of Mr Clinton's soul without the president's permission? But that approval and their chirpy demeanour lent an additional sense of politics-as-unusual to this peculiar time in American life. Few things would be considered more personal, sacred even, than the discussions between a clergyman and a sinner, but no longer - at least not in this atmosphere.

The Rev Tony Campolo, a balding clergyman from Eastern College, Pennsylvania, is described as a theological conservative with a liberal social bent. The Rev Gordon MacDonald, a preppy-looking evangelical minister from Grace Chapel in Lexington, Massachusetts, is a man known for his own sins. He admitted to his congregation 11 years ago that he once had an extramarital affair.

Perhaps this extraordinary exchange best speaks for itself. The ABC news anchorwoman, Diane Sawyer, opened the programme.

Sawyer: "And now, an exclusive interview with two people right at the centre of the news. You remember President Clinton announced that he had asked some members of the clergy to meet with him regularly at the White House for prayer and repentance? Well, we wondered what goes on in those intimate sessions.

"What do you tell a president in this kind of trouble? ABC News religion correspondent Peggy Wehmeyer talks with the president's pastors . . ."

Peggy informs viewers that Mr MacDonald spent hours at the White House counselling the president the night before . . . "Clinton confessed publicly for the first time that he had sinned."

The two men talk about sin and souls and repentance, how most people do not repent until they are caught. They say they are monitoring the president's spiritual progress. The reporter asks them if confrontation is a part of this process. They both agree that it is, and Mr Campolo declares: "We will, in fact, confront in the name of Jesus."

Reporter: "Have you confronted him?"

Mr MacDonald: "Oh, absolutely."

Reporter: "You're not just, you mean you're not just holding his hand and praying for him and helping him feel good?"

Mr MacDonald: "Oh, Peggy. We have gone to the bottom with this man. We have said things that are very confronting."

Mr Campolo: "We've seen him yell at us. I mean, we can, we can tell you about it."

Mr MacDonald. "I know."

Mr Campolo: "When we have come on so strong that he ended up yelling at us."

In case viewers were unclear about the important business of how the clergymen themselves were feeling about all this, and to affirm the spiritual value of yelling, Mr Campolo continued: "And that's not an easy thing. You know, to have the President of the United States yelling at you. That's when conversations become real, isn't it? That's when they become real."

Perhaps, but reporter Wehmeyer, like Congress, the American people, the nation states of the UN and tribes in New Guinea, was growing impatient with this page-turner. One got the sense the reporter was the kind of person who reads the last page of the book first.

Reporter: "And what if the two of you work with the president all these hours and discover that he's pulled the wool over your eyes, that he wasn't sincere? Then what?"

Mr MacDonald (solemnly): "I would have to say, if there came a moment where we concluded that that sincerity was not there, then we would have to change the relationship. And we would have to let people know that this was something other than repentance."

Reporter: "And you're willing to do that?"

Mr MacDonald: "You have to be. We've got to be straight with the president, who's asked us to engage with him in accountability. And we've got to be straight with other people who are trying to trust the president and trusting in, in one sense, our word."

A novel idea, really, this political strategy of staking a US presidency on the word of two evangelical clergymen. And a rather strange pact, too, where the ministers promise to make a public pronouncement if they find the sinner insincere. But perhaps Mr Clinton feels he needs at least a few preachers in his pocket.

The day after the broadcast, the chief executive of the 300,000-member Reformed Churches of America, the Rev Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, called on Mr Clinton to resign. In doing so, Mr Granberg joined a call that has thus far come from leaders from the Southern Baptist Conventions, Mr Clinton's own denomination, as well as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

One man of the cloth who has declined to speak about Mr Clinton is Cardinal O'Connor, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York. He told the congregation at St Patrick's Cathedral that his silence on Mr Clinton had caused "perplexity and has provoked others to question my courage". Nonetheless, Cardinal O'Connor said, he had no intention of commenting on Mr Clinton's sins.

As for God's position . . . so far, she's not talking.