By JIM FARBER

Madonna knows what people are thinking.
She’s well aware that plenty of eyes roll, or glaze over, every time she talks about politics or war or her parental duties or, most of all, her spiritual quest through the kabbala. But since she has insisted on addressing these subjects so often – both during interviews and in her music – the media have come to consider the grown-up Madonna to be as “preachy” as the younger one was thought to be “dangerous.”

“What do you call ‘preachy’?” Madonna asks. “Having an opinion?”

“Guilty as charged!” she then proudly announces.

As Madonna holds forth in her Manhattan hotel room, she’s obviously in no mind to go back to playing the party girl of old. She may be here to promote her new CD, “Confessions on a Dance Floor,” which returns her to the rousing beats and frothy exuberance of early hits like “Holiday.” But she says her motivation for recording such an album wasn’t simply to make fun music again, or even to shore up her wobbly recording career.

Instead, it seems, she wanted to, ahem, help mankind.

“It’s that old cliché,” Madonna explains, “when the world gets you down, you need to be lifted up. Look at the state of the world. People need to be inspired and happy.”

It’s not the only time in our interview when Madonna serves up a lofty sociopolitical theory for what many might consider a simple musical issue.

Asked why her last CD, “American Life,” became the first disappointing seller of her career (barely going gold), she doesn’t acknowledge any possible artistic deficit. Instead, she asserts that the cool reception was “because I was critiquing America. We had just gone to war in Iraq, and I was criticizing George Bush’s decision. People were saying, ‘You’re not supporting the troops. ‘You don’t care.’ “Which is bull-. I care a lot. That’s why I didn’t want it to happen. I said the wrong thing at the wrong time.”

Back then, the singer made a very un-Madonna-like move by withdrawing her controversial video for “American Life,” which equated Bush with Saddam Hussein. Now she asserts that the only reason she yanked the video was “because I was worried for my children. I saw what happened with the Dixie Chicks. I didn’t want people to throw rocks at [my kids] on the way to school.”

Not that Madonna’s retreat lasted very long. She addresses politics again in her new documentary, “I’m Going to Tell You a Secret,” which aired last week on MTV and VH1. Though the film covers some of the zippier moments from 2004’s terrific “Re-Invention” tour, it finds Madonna pontificating about the importance of “going against the establishment” and of taking “responsibility for the world around you.”

At one point, she even dresses down her makeup man for not being registered to vote.

STILL A REBEL

Originally, the “Secret” documentary was supposed to come out in movie theaters. Though Madonna did shop it at the Cannes Film Festival, she says she was turned off by the fact that, “unless you’re Steven Spielberg, distributors take all your DVD rights. When I sold ‘Truth or Dare’ [her 1991 documentary] to Miramax, I got very little out of it. Just to use a clip of it in my new movie, I had to pay them like $7,000.”

“It was thinking outside the box to have it shown on TV,” she insists.

The new documentary contrasts tellingly with the old one. In “Truth or Dare,” Madonna comes off as a flip and provocative fun-time gal. This time she says things like, “Sometimes fun is overrated.”

While “Truth” painted her as an outrageous Lady Madonna, “Secret” reveals her to be a cross between Joan Baez and a singing-dancing Mother Teresa in training.

The media have had a field day with the transformation. Long ago, it become a staple of gossip columns to giggle over the contrast between the sassy young Madonna and the prim children’s author.

Madonna, who’s now 47, sees no contradiction whatsoever.

“Obviously, my tastes and my priorities have changed,” she says. “But I am still asking the question ‘Why?’ Just because I’m a mother doesn’t mean I’m not still a rebel and that I don’t want to go in the face of convention and challenge the system. I never wanted to think in a robotic way, and I don’t want my children to think that way, either. I think parents should be constantly questioning society.”

Some critics, however, assert that Madonna is being reactionary, or even (gasp!) conservative, in her oft-stated refusal to let her kids (Lourdes, 9, and Rocco, 5) watch TV.

“It’s not conservative,” she says. “It’s actually very punk-rock to not watch TV.”

But let Madonna talk long enough about pop-culture excess, and she ends up sounding not wildly dissimilar to Pat Robertson. “It’s very surface-oriented and of the moment and disposable,” she says. “You have to constantly up the ante. [Celebrities] just have to keep getting more extreme to get attention. It’s crap. It’s scary. We are obviously creating our own demise.”

Eeyow! Are things that bad?

“Look at the world we live in,” says Madonna, yet again.

In reaction to this excess, the singer has spent more and more time exploring the inner life through her faith. The shift has inspired more hostility toward her than anything in years.

“It would be less controversial if I joined the Nazi Party,” Madonna says of the kabbala.

“‘What do you mean you study the Torah if you’re not Jewish?'” she asks rhetorically. “‘What do you mean you pray to God and wear sexy clothes? We don’t understand this.’ It frightens people. So they try to denigrate it or trivialize it so that it makes more sense.

“I find it very strange that it’s so disturbing to people,” she continues. “It’s not hurting anybody.”

On that level, she relates to Tom Cruise, who has taken endless flak for being a Scientologist. “If it makes Tom Cruise happy, I don’t care if he prays to turtles,” Madonna says. “And I don’t think anybody else should.”

The accusation that her participation in kabbala makes her part of a cult irks her even more. “We’re all in a cult,” Madonna says. “In this cult we’re not encouraged to ask questions. And if we do ask questions, we aren’t going to get a straight answer. The world’s in the cult of celebrity. That’s the irony of it.”

Certainly, Madonna should know a few things about that particular cult, having worked its tenets to a T. The difference, she says, is that “I hope to utilize [fame] to make things better, to help people come to their senses.”

Even if we, the benighted, fail to heed Madonna’s call, at least she can still get us to pay attention to her more routine controversies. Apparently, she has the ability to stir some up even when she’s not trying.

A song on the new album titled “Isaac,” which uses Jewish musical motifs, has outraged some kabbalist rabbis. They claim the song is about Isaac (or Yitzhak) Luria, a 16th-century Jewish mystic. “Jewish law forbids the use of the name of the holy rabbi for profit,” Rabbi Rafael Cohen, who heads a seminary named after Luria, said in a statement.

Madonna insists that her song is not about Luria at all but about Yitzhak Sinwani, who sings on the track. “They’re saying I’m committing a blasphemy, but that’s not what the song is about,” she says. “What are they doing commenting on pop songs? Don’t they have synagogues to pray in?”

The album may provoke some milder criticism for another song: “I Love New York,” in which Madonna lionizes this city while singing that “L.A. is for people who sleep/London and Paris, baby, you can keep.”

“It’s just that feeling of ‘God, I love [New York],” Madonna explains. “I’ll always have a special fondness for this place, because this is where I learned how to survive. This is where I went to the school of hard knocks, where I found myself. Believe me. I love London and I love Paris. But in that song I don’t.

“I’m allowed to be contradictory,” she giggles. “And I’m a paradox, you know?”

SNEERS AT FAME

Madonna emphasizes the point in the new song “Let It Will Be.” In one moment, she sings about having done whatever it took early in her career to become famous. In the next, she sneers at the culture of fame. “I’m posing the question to everybody: How far are you willing to go?” she says of our collective lust for recognition.

As far as acting goes, Madonna feels she has gone just about far enough. All those who’ve winced through films like “Body of Evidence” and “Swept Away” will be thrilled to know that Madonna says she’s not interested in acting in movies anymore.

“I want to direct,” she announces.

Which, of course, may bring on yet another round of shudders from Madonna’s many foes. The artist herself acknowledges all the “haters” by closing the album with the danceably dismissive “Like It or Not.”

Not least, the song captures Madonna’s trademark defiance and unrepentance. It’s those enduring attitudes that seem to override all the contradictions of her career. Though Madonna may offer a new song like “How High,” in which she wonders if she should go on with her work, in the end it’s clearly not a question she takes very seriously.

“I’m not thinking of quitting,” she says with a big laugh. “I ain’t going nowhere.”