The news report itself offered a flashback into an earlier age, back to the days before Vatican II or even to the tumultuous times of Martin Luther. On one level, this was simply a trend story about the Vatican trying to revive some old traditions. However, there were complicated details behind the blunt headline.

“In recent months,” the Times reported, “dioceses around the world have been offering Catholics a spiritual benefit that fell out of favor decades ago — the indulgence, a sort of amnesty from punishment in the afterlife — and reminding them of the church’s clout in mitigating the wages of sin.”

For most Times readers, this was an isolated, mysterious story. But in cyberspace, this one report inspired waves of debate. Among the big questions: How could this door have been reopened, when it had never been closed? Were enough conservative Catholics quoted? Why didn’t the Times cover a bigger story, the collapse in confession statistics?

Researchers later discovered that plenary indulgences remained a red-hot news topic for many days — online.

“Religion is one of those topics that has a unique ability to gather in one place large groups of people who care passionately about it. That’s the kind of thing that happens quite naturally online,” said Jesse Holcomb, a research analyst with the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. “The irony is that these online debates almost always start with a story from a big, traditional news source. Someone has to report the news before the bloggers can take over.”

This is precisely the kind of issue that causes sweaty palms for folks — like me — who care about religion news. I’ve been reporting and doing research in this field for 30-plus years and, 22 years ago this week, I began writing this column for Scripps Howard. I also run a website called GetReligion.org, which is six years old.

At the moment, the state of religion coverage is somewhere between “evolving” and “on life support.” Cutbacks in top 40 newsrooms — organizations that once had the resources to support a variety of specialty reporters — have sent many veteran scribes into early retirement. More than a dozen print newsrooms have reduced or eliminated their religion-news jobs in the past three years.

However, the amount of religion news remained surprisingly steady in 2009, at 0.8 percent, compared with 1.0 percent in 2008, according to a study by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

As always, it was a good year to read about papal tours, especially when they cause controversy, and stories about religion and politics, especially about the beliefs, rhetoric and policies of President Barack Obama. As always, it was not a good year to read about how religious beliefs helped shape events in some of the world’s most tense and bloody settings, such as Iraq and Iran. Holcomb noted that journalists even failed to probe the intense religious language and imagery in Obama’s historic speech at Cairo University, which focused on improving relations with the Islamic world.

Meanwhile, additional Pew research into news and trends online found that 41 percent of Americans believe the news media should devote more attention to “religion and spirituality.” Only news about science — with a 44 percent score — drew a higher response.

Who claims to want more “spiritual” news coverage? Women (44 percent) are more likely to say so than men (37 percent), which is significant since editors are worried about the rapidly declining number of female readers. Young adults, ages 18-29, are more interested in religion than readers over 50 — 49 percent to 35 percent. African-Americans (57 percent) and Hispanics (43 percent) are more interested in religion coverage than whites (38 percent).

If readers want to find detailed coverage of religion issues, they are now more likely to find it online, said Holcomb.

“When it comes to breaking down the differences between various types of beliefs and rituals and practices and then trying to show how these things end up affecting people’s daily lives, mainstream journalists are rarely able to get into all of that,” he said. “But that is precisely the kind of thing that more people are writing about on websites and on blogs.”

NEXT WEEK: The online buffet of religion news and opinion.

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According to a top strategist in the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain, Sarah Palin believed that the decision to pick her as the Arizona Republican’s running mate was actually made by Almighty God.

Translated into the logic of an Associated Press report, this political theology sounded like this.

“In an interview with the CBS news magazine ‘60 Minutes,’ Steve Schmidt described Palin as ‘very calm — nonplussed’ after McCain met with her at his Arizona ranch just before putting her on the Republican ticket. … Schmidt said he asked Palin about her serenity in the face of becoming ‘one of the most famous people in the world.’ He quoted her as saying, ‘It’s God’s plan.’ “

The Washington Post headline proclaimed, “McCain aide: Palin believed candidacy ‘God’s plan.’ “

After this latest Palin firestorm it’s time to ask: “Why can’t journalists learn to understand how ordinary evangelicals talk?”

To make matters worse, readers have no chance to understand this private, second-hand quotation because it has been stripped of all context. There is no way to know if this snippet is the entire Palin quote or merely what Schmidt has chosen to share as part of the ongoing fighting between factions inside McCain’s failed campaign.

The big question: Did Palin say her nomination was part of “God’s plan for her life” or did she, as implied, dare to claim that it was part of “God’s plan for America”? Most press reports have implied the latter, linking her faith-based confidence with speculation that she will run for president.

This has made her an easy target for her critics — again.

“Palin isn’t a minister or priest. She isn’t a bishop. She is a celebrity,” noted Andrew Sullivan, on his Atlantic Monthly website. “When she says ‘it’s God’s will,’ she is saying, it seems to me, either that her destiny is foretold as a modern day Esther … or that it doesn’t matter what decisions she makes in office because God is in charge. So she is either filled with delusions of grandeur and prone to say things that believing Christians keep private out of humility; or she thinks she’s some kind of Messiah figure.”

However, anyone with a working knowledge of evangelical lingo will understand that what Palin probably said was that this stunning door onto the national stage was, win or lose, part of “God’s plan” for her life.

This is the approach that she consistently uses in her memoir, “Going Rogue,” when discussing the twists and turns in her life — from an unexpected chance to climb the political ladder in Alaska to the challenge of an unexpected pregnancy, leading to the birth of a child with special needs.

In other words, Palin believes in a God who is mysteriously working through the choices and events — painful and joyful — that have shaped her life. This is a perfectly ordinary belief among millions of evangelical Protestants and, truth be told, many other believers as well.

It may help to recall that, during the 2008 campaign, Charlie Gibson of ABC News struggled to understand another piece of evangelical-speak drawn from Palin remarks about the Iraq War.

The governor told a church audience: “Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending (soldiers) out on a task that is from God. That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.”

However, in his interview with Palin, Gibson said: “You said recently, in your old church, ‘Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.’ Are we fighting a holy war?”

Palin responded: “You know, I don’t know if that was my exact quote.”

Gibson fired back: “Exact words.”

Not exactly. Palin was reminding the worshipers to pray that God had a plan in Iraq and that decisions made by America’s leaders would be consistent with that plan. She was not, as Gibson said, claiming that this was a certainty.

The bottom line: It may be time to circulate a basic “How Evangelicals Talk” phrase book that can be used in elite newsrooms, much like the one that journalists needed when Gov. Jimmy “born again” Carter first emerged on the national scene.

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As Aretha Franklin finished singing “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” the queen of soul did what she has done for decades — she improvised.

The result was a soaring bridge between the inauguration of President Barack Obama and a sermon 45 years ago at the Lincoln Memorial.

“Our fathers’ God, to thee, author of liberty, to thee we sing. Long may our land be bright, with freedom’s holy light, protect us by thy might,” sang Franklin, before adding words that echoed some of the final cadences the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., added to his “I Have A Dream” address.

“Let freedom ring … From the red clay of Georgia, all the way to the Allegheny Mountains. … Let freedom ring.”

If anyone ever doubted that themes from the Civil Rights Movement have been blended into America’s “civil religion,” it’s time for those doubts to fade.

Presidential inaugurations are the “high feast days” of the vague, but powerful, faith that binds together a nation of many races and creeds. To no one’s surprise, religion played a major role in the rites for Obama, said Darrin M. Hanson, a political scientist at Xavier University of Louisiana.

“Obama has a preacher’s emotional style of speaking and he uses that to bring people together. It’s a skill he will need in the days ahead,” said Hanson, who will be analyzing the 2009 address as part of his research into the role that presidents play in America’s civil religion.

In this speech, Hanson said, Obama wanted to deliver a few sobering, “prophetic” messages as well as offer “priestly” words to encourage the million-plus people on the National Mall and the millions more watching from coast to coast and worldwide.

Thus, the new president told his listeners: “Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.”

Obama then used religious images — aimed at left and right — to describe bitter divisions in the body politic.

“On this day,” he said, “we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics. We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”

When scholars describe “civil religion,” they discuss words and rituals that try to accomplish four major goals, argued Hanson, in an essay entitled “The High Priest of American Civil Religion: Continuity and Change.”

First, American “civil religion” attempts to promote unity while accepting religious pluralism. Second, this faith must remain separate from both the state and any specific religion, he said. However, if it ever favors a particular creed, it does so in defense of fundamental human rights. Finally, this “civil religion” provides unity by appealing to shared values and beliefs, acted out in common rites that are acceptable to most believers.

In one passage, the new president managed to combine a number of “civil religion” themes, while also evoking deep emotions at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement and his own personal pilgrimage.

“This is the source of our confidence — the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny,” said Obama. “This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed, why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall. And why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.”

The key, said Hanson, is that Obama managed to hit a few hard topics — from global terror to an economic recession — while emphasizing words of hope.

“If you are trying to bring people together, you can’t be too specific when you talk about the things that drive people apart,” he said. “Inaugural addresses, and I’ve read them all, are supposed to be vague — but inspiring. …

“In the end, it’s easier to be a priestly and successful president than it is to be a prophetic and successful president. It’s hard to tell people, ‘We have really messed up and all of us are going to have to change.’ “

NEXT: The politics of prayer, in two dramatic acts.

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The odds were also good that the Religion Newswriters Association would pick the White House race as its top news story. But there was a problem. There were so many faith-based issues in play during this election year that America’s religion-beat specialists had trouble deciding which of these hot stories was No. 1.

In the end, this was the winning item: “Controversial sermons delivered in recent years by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright surface, resulting in pressure on Barack Obama, who eventually withdraws his membership in his church, Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago. Meanwhile, John McCain rejects the endorsements of evangelists John Hagee, a critic of Catholicism, and Rod Parsley.”

However, it’s important to note that this RNA poll was held before two other stories broke, each demonstrating why it will be hard for the Obama administration to find middle ground in America’s wars over religion and public life.

The first was the resignation of the National Association of Evangelicals official Richard Cizik, who drew fire when he endorsed civil unions for gays and lesbians and hinted that he was willing to compromise on gay marriage, as well. In an interview with National Public Radio, the veteran lobbyist said: “I’m shifting, I have to admit. I would willingly say I believe in civil unions. I don’t officially support redefining traditional marriage, I don’t think.”

In the end, it was impossible for the association’s leaders to ignore those crucial words, “I don’t think.”

Then, soon after that controversy, Obama was criticized by leaders on the secular and religious left for selecting another high-profile evangelical to give the invocation at his inauguration.

The Rev. Rick Warren of Saddleback Community Church had also made cautious statements suggesting a willingness to compromise on civil unions. However, Warren drew fierce attacks from gay-rights supporters due to his strong support for California’s Proposition 8 ballot initiative, which defined marriage as the union of husband and wife.

The rest of the RNA top 10 looked like this:

(2) Led by Obama’s example, Democrats reach out to religious voters. At a crucial stage of the campaign, Obama participates in a debate with John McCain moderated by Warren and held in his megachurch sanctuary. Conservative Christians are given a few moments in the Democratic National Convention spotlight.

(3) The selection of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as the GOP vice presidential nominee energizes evangelical activists, who are excited by her defense of unborn children — both in her personal life and in public policies. Many religious conservatives reluctantly back McCain.

(4) The California Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage, but voters in November — including a large majority of African-Americans — approve a constitutional amendment enforcing a traditional definition of marriage. Gay marriage also fails at the polls in Arizona and Florida.

(5) Pope Benedict XVI makes his first U.S. visit, drawing massive crowds in Washington and New York. The pope also meets with a few Catholics who had been sexually abused by clergy and openly addresses their concerns from the pulpit.

(6) Backed by Anglican traditionalists in Africa, Asia and Latin America, conservatives alienated from the U.S. Episcopal Church appeal to the Anglican Communion to create a parallel jurisdiction — the Anglican Church in North America. This open split follows decades of doctrinal fighting in the Episcopal Church, including the consecration of a noncelibate gay priest as a bishop five years ago.

(7) India is rocked by terrorist attacks, including a three-day siege in Mumbai that results in the deaths of almost 200, including an American rabbi and his wife at an Orthodox Jewish center. Authorities pursue links to radical Islamists in Pakistan. Meanwhile, fatal attacks on Christians in the eastern state of Orissa continue during 2008.

(8) The Chinese government makes strategic moves to suppress Buddhists seeking Tibetan independence in an attempt to stage peaceful Olympics games. Still, some demonstrations mar rites to pass the Olympic torch.

(9) Religious groups are hit by effects of a struggling economy and begin to face declines in offerings, forcing many to cut staff and expenses while the need for social services increases nationwide.

(10) Chaledean Archbishop Paulos Rahho is kidnapped and murdered in Mosul, Iraq. Meanwhile, Sunni and Shiite Muslim groups continue to trade attacks. Reports of stability increase toward the end the year, including the return of some persecuted Christians to their homes.

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Then there was the landmark Nevada trip to interview Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his wife Landra at their home. Landing a face-to-face interview with Sen. Hillary Clinton for “The 700 Club”? Say no more.

Finally, after a year of negotiations, Sen. Barack Obama’s staff took a leap of faith and scheduled an interview with the news team at the Rev. Pat Robertson’s flagship network. Then Obama came back for another interview, then another and another.

Before that fourth interview, Brody expected to shake hands once again. But Obama caught him off guard by moving in for one of those “Hey, how are you doing?” shoulder-to-shoulder bumps that colleagues use when greeting one another.

“It was strange,” said Brody, speaking at the annual Baptist Press Collegiate Journalism Conference. “You really don’t want to be chest-bumping White House candidates. It just doesn’t look right.”

Indeed, these are strange times. In the past year, Democrats have been talking more about their faith than the Republicans — part of a strategic attempt to capture a slice of a voting bloc that was so crucial in the 2004 elections. But in the age of talk radio, 24-hour cable TV coverage, weblogs and other forms of niche news, politicos are learning that they need to talk to a wider array of journalists to reach these values voters.

All kinds of doors are opening and “you have to be ready for your close-up,” Brody told an audience of student journalists in Nashville, mostly from Christian campuses across the Bible Belt.

“Go after it hard. Be very, very aggressive. I can’t tell you this enough,” he said. “You need to make multiple phone calls a day to get your source to talk. You need to make sure that you are constantly really going after the story. Don’t ever let up. …

“Make sure you really find your niche, and make sure you know what you are passionate about.”

After two decades in broadcasting — mostly in mainstream newsrooms — Brody has become a go-to commentator inside the Beltway, primarily by gaining a reputation as a fair-minded, even sympathetic sounding board for politicians on both sides of the aisle. Thus, Brody has even started turning up on MSNBC, CNN and NBC’s “Meet The Press.”

Democrats turn to his occasionally goofy weblog, “The Brody File,” for insights into the views of conservative, centrist and progressive evangelicals. Republicans do the same thing, often to see how Democrats answer his frequent questions about hot-button social questions.

Brody stressed that he isn’t interested in asking “gotcha questions” about faith in an attempt to trip them up. The journalist has heard his own share of loaded questions during his lifetime, since he was raised as a Jew in New York City before converting to Christianity while in college. Brody isn’t fond of labels.

“I don’t have an agenda, but I am going to ask questions about faith” during CBN news broadcasts, he said. “I am going to ask personal questions about how the candidates go about making their decisions. Still, I know that there are shades of gray when people start talking about faith. … So much of our politics in the age of talk radio is totally back and white, but we really do try to avoid polarizing language.”

Take the Obama interviews, for example. It’s one thing, said Brody, to ask Obama specific questions about his liberal approach to Christianity, his support for abortion rights and commitment to expanding civil rights of gays and lesbians. It’s something else to “play judge and jury” and try to challenge the reality of Obama’s faith.

“There is no question that his sincerity shines through when he’s talking to you about his Christian beliefs and the role that his faith plays in his life,” said Brody. “This man says what he believes and he believes what he says. Obama has said over and over that he has given his life to Jesus Christ and I think people need to take his word on that. …

“The question is whether this kind of dialogue with Obama will continue. Are we going to be able to keep talking, without trying to demonize each other? That’s the big question.”

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The Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners saw a campaign button based on this one liner and, on the “Interfaith Voices” public radio show, said it was a fine response to Gov. Sarah Palin’s jab at the work of “community organizers.”

Donna Brazile — who ran Al Gore’s 2000 White House campaign — saw the same gag and, on CNN, quickly linked it to the Bible’s message that “to whom much is given, much is required.”

But this cyberspace quip finally made the crucial jump to YouTube when U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen took to the House floor to remind conservatives “Barack Obama was a community organizer like Jesus. … Pontius Pilate was a governor.”

Cohen later emphasized that, “I didn?t and I wouldn’t compare anyone to Jesus. … What I pointed out was that Jesus was a force of change.” But the apology came too late to douse the fiery rhetoric raging on talk radio and weblogs.

In particular, the soundbite used by Cohen and others captured the rising tide of religious tensions in this White House race. This conflict has been heightened by the powerful role played by religious liberals in Obama’s groundbreaking outreach efforts in a wide variety of sanctuaries.

Obama is, after all, an articulate, proud member of the denomination — the United Church of Christ — that has in recent decades boldly pushed mainline Protestant to the doctrinal left on issues such as gay rights, abortion and the tolerance of other world religions. His running mate, Sen. Joe Biden, is an outspoken American Catholic whose progressive views have often placed him in dangerous territory between his political party and the Vatican.

Sen. John McCain, meanwhile, used to be an Episcopalian married to a beer-empire heiress, the very model of a mainline Protestant gentleman from the 1950s. Then he started visiting Southern Baptist pews while mending fences on the religious right. Finally, McCain shuffled the 2008 deck by naming Palin — an enthusiastic evangelical mother of five children — as his running mate.

This move rocked the pews on both sides of the sanctuary aisle, but Palin’s ascension has caused an unusual degree of shock, anger, dismay and distain on the secular and religious left.

The political weblog Instapundit summed up the mood on the cultural left with this headline: “She’s the freakin’ Antichrist, I tell you!”

For author Deepak Chopra, a superstar in the spirituality marketplace, Palin is, quite literally, the anti-Obama. She is a living symbol of all that is wrong with small-town, parochial, ignorant, reactionary Middle America, especially with her “family values” code language that opposes expanding doctrines of civil rights.

“She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses,” he argued, at The Huffington Post. “In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of ‘the other.’ ”

Obama, however, is “calling for us to reach for our higher selves,” said Chopra.

The ultimate irony is the GOP’s assumption that Palin will appeal to women just because “she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies,” argued religious historian Wendy Doniger of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School.

“Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman,” she wrote, in an “On Faith” essay for the Washington Post. “She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women.”

But can anyone, in the current political atmosphere, top the Palin as Pontius Pilate smack down? University of Michigan historian Juan Cole, a specialist in Middle Eastern and South Asian affairs, offered Salon.com his best shot.

When it comes to faith and politics, he said, the values of McCain’s “handpicked running mate, Sarah Palin, more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers. On censorship, the teaching of creationism in schools, reproductive rights, attributing government policy to God’s will and climate change, Palin agrees with Hamas and Saudi Arabia rather than supporting tolerance and democratic precepts.

“What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick.”

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Gov. Mike Huckabee thought about that after Hurricane Katrina. The ordained Southern Baptist minister also knew that the summer camping season was over and that thousands of people fleeing New Orleans had to go somewhere.

“I saw on TV people on the bridges of Interstate 10 stranded for days without water, and I thought, this isn’t Rwanda. This isn’t Indonesia. … This was the United States of America,” said the former governor, who is now part of the throng of Republican presidential candidates. “These were the neighbors just to the south of us in Louisiana. It was beyond my comprehension that we could get TV cameras to those people but we couldn’t get a boat or a bottle of water to them.”

Thus, he asked religious leaders to open camps all over Arkansas to the evacuees, while urging the public to rally around this blunt public policy: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

This was one case in which critics didn’t challenge his link between private faith and public action, said Huckabee, meeting with journalists at a recent talkback session at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. This didn’t turn into another nasty clash between God and the government because the need was great and this faith-based effort united citizens instead of dividing them.

Activists on the right will have to do more of that. Of course, Huckabee told the journalists that he has no intention of surrendering on moral issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. Nevertheless, religious conservatives need to be less confrontational when it comes to convincing skeptical Americans that faith can be a positive force in the public square.

After all, he said, it’s hard to believe that anyone actually thinks that political leaders are supposed to separate their personal beliefs from their public convictions.

“I sometimes marvel when people running for office are asked about faith and their answer is, ‘Oh, I don’t get into that. I keep that completely separate. My faith is completely immaterial to how I think and how I govern,’ ” he said. “To me, that is really tantamount to saying that one’s faith is so marginal, so insignificant and so inconsequential that it really doesn’t impact the way one lives. I would consider it an extraordinarily shallow faith that does not really impact the way we think about other human beings and the way we respond to them.”

No one debated that concept after Katrina. Thus, Huckabee listed several other unifying moral issues that he thinks deserve attention on the political right.

While Americans disagree on what to do about health-care reform, the nation could rally around efforts to provide health care for children, he said. Liberals and conservatives also could focus on funding health-care programs that fight the big three activities — smoking, overeating and “under-exercising” — that fuel soaring medical costs.

While Huckabee acknowledged that environmental issues cause heated debates, he believes that it’s time for conservatives to become more involved in efforts to promote the “better stewardship of the environment and in development of an energy source that is not foreign based but domestically produced.”

And then there is the issue of corporate corruption, with business leaders drawing giant bonuses while wrecking their companies. Surely, conservatives can agree that this is immoral, said Huckabee.

“I don’t see how we can call it anything other than a moral issue,” he said. “That’s not free enterprise. That’s theft.”

The point is that religious conservatives are will have to broaden their agendas and be willing to work on new issues, said Huckabee. They can do this without compromising on the essentials.

“I really do think that if Christian conservatives, who have … held the Republican Party’s feet to the fire on issues as they relate to traditional conservative social areas, no longer play that role, it not only is going to be the end of relevancy for them, but I also think that it means that the Republican Party will lose a lot of people. They will say, ‘Well, you know what, if they’re not going to be the party that really cares about these issues, I’ll go home to the Democratic Party.’ A lot of those folks came from the Democratic Party to begin with.”

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We’re not talking about Mitt Romney’s recent trip to Virginia Beach to deliver the commencement address at Regent University. For political insiders, the only controversy in that speech was when he said, “I want to offer my sincere thanks to Dr. Pat Robertson for extending me the honor of addressing you today.”

No, the daring campaign address that politicos are still discussing was the one John F. Kennedy delivered in 1960 to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, the speech in which he erected a high wall of separation between his public political life and his private Catholic faith.

“I believe in an America,” said Kennedy, “that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish — where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source — where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials — and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

“For, while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew — or a Quaker — or a Unitarian — or a Baptist.”

Or a Mormon? That’s the question facing legions of evangelicals as they gird their loins for battle in the Bible Belt political primaries. They are waiting to see if Romney will publicly address their concerns about his deep Mormon faith.

That didn’t happen at Regent, where the candidate stuck to marriage, parenting, public service and positive thinking. There was one clear religious reference, when he referred to the April 16 shootings at Virginia Tech.

“We’re shocked by the evil of the Virginia Tech shooting,” said Romney. “I opened my Bible shortly after I heard of the tragedy. Only a few verses, it seems, after the Fall, we read that Adam and Eve’s oldest son killed his younger brother. From the beginning, there has been evil in the world.”

Regent was a signpost in Romney’s quest to calm evangelical fears, in part because the campus contains the headquarters of Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network — which addresses Mormonism in its “How Do I Recognize a Cult?” website page. It states, for example, that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a “prosperous, growing organization that has produced many people of exemplary character. But when it comes to spiritual matters, the Mormons are far from the truth.”

That passage is mild compared to the incendiary language common among many Christian conservatives. Bill Keller of LivePrayer.com, for example, bluntly states that the teachings of the “Mormon cult are doctrinally and theologically in complete opposition to the Absolute Truth of God’s Word. There is no common ground. If Mormonism is true, then the Christian faith is a complete lie.”

Mormons do believe that the Old and New Testaments — as read by traditional Christians — are packed with errors and that Mormonism is the one true faith. Mormons believe that their president is a living prophet and that faithful mortals, in the next life, can achieve godhood. Thus, Mormons reject or redefine the Trinity, teaching that this world’s Father God has both a literal body and a literal wife.

These are not the issues that obsess typical voters, but they are important to many Christian leaders who wield great influence in the public square. The Vatican, for example, refuses to recognize the validity of Mormon baptisms.

“There are valid questions that Romney will have to answer,” said veteran religion writer Richard Ostling, co-author of “Mormon America: The Power and the Promise.”

“People need to know, ‘Is this man going to take orders from Salt Lake City? Are there elements of Mormon theology that will affect public policy?’ … But before he gets to those questions, Romney may have to say, ‘We have different doctrines. We have different scriptures. … We even have different concepts of God.’ He has to know that he can’t just say, ‘We all have the same faith.’ That is not going to work.”

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In the age of Google, it was easy to connect this with the gospel hymn “Power in the Blood,” which says there is “power, wonder-working power, in the precious blood of the Lamb.” Soon, journalists were calling Gerson’s West Wing office asking him to underline all the evangelical “code words” hidden in major speeches.

“They’re not code words. They’re our culture. … They are literary allusions understood by millions of Americans,” Gerson told 24 journalists at a recent Ethics and Public Policy Center seminar in Key West, Fla. “It’s not a strategy. It’s just the way that I write and the president likes it.”

George W. Bush is not speaking in an unknown tongue.

Anyone who studies what presidents — from George Washington to Bill Clinton — have said in times of triumph and tragedy knows that faith language is normal. If anything, said Gerson, today’s imagery has become more nuanced. It’s hard to imagine Bush delivering anything resembling Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1942 address warning that the Nazis yearned to spread their “pagan religion” worldwide, replacing the “Holy Bible and the Cross of Mercy” with the “swastika and the naked sword.”

The historical patterns are easy to find. In addition to literary allusions, said Gerson, presidents have consistently used religious language when:

* Offering words of comfort. Presidents cannot face the nation after shocking tragedies and say that “death is the end, life is meaningless and the universe is a vast, empty, echoing void,” said Gerson. Instead, they use words similar to Bush’s remarks after the space shuttle disaster: “The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth; yet we can pray that all are safely home.”

* Praising the influence of faith on efforts to promote justice. Thus, in a 2003 speech on Goree Island, Senegal, Bush bluntly described America’s sinful history of slavery. But he added: “In America, enslaved Africans learned the story of the exodus from Egypt and set their own hearts on a promised land of freedom. Enslaved Africans discovered a suffering Savior and found he was more like themselves than their masters.”

* Asking citizens to help their neighbors. For Bush, this “faith-based rhetoric” has been closely connected with “compassionate conservatism” and his efforts to allow religious groups to find niches within wider government programs to help the needy.

* Alluding to divine providence in national life. Here, the rhetorical bar has been set especially high by Abraham Lincoln, who insisted that Americans can hope to be on God’s side, but cannot claim that God is fighting on their side.

Presidents use religious language in wartime, said Gerson. Nevertheless, critics of the war in Iraq have attacked Bush’s consistent use of these words: “Freedom is not America’s gift to the world. It is almighty God’s gift to all humanity.”

The president wrote those words, noted Gerson. Working together, they have tried to emphasize that Bush rejects what scholars call “American exceptionalism” — the belief that America is uniquely God’s instrument in history. The president’s stance is best expressed in the 2003 State of the Union address, said Gerson.

“We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone,” said Bush. “We do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history.”

Those anxious to criticize how the Bush White House has used religious language should dig into the speeches of Woodrow Wilson, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and many other American leaders, said Gerson. Would critics prefer Republicans to limit themselves to the libertarian logic of big business?

“As a writer, I think this attitude would flatten political rhetoric and make it less moving and interesting,” he said. “But even more, I think the reality here is that scrubbing public discourse of religious ideas would remove one of the main sources of social justice in our history.”

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But this does not mean that he backed President Bush.

The University of Notre Dame scholar is concerned about health care and fair wages. But this doesn’t mean that he marched into a voting booth and picked Sen. John Kerry. During a year in which religion and politics constantly made headlines, MacIntyre published an essay that frayed nerves on the religious left and right.

“When offered a choice between two politically intolerable alternatives, it is important to choose neither,” he said, writing for the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. “When that choice is presented in rival arguments and debates that exclude from public consideration any other set of possibilities, it becomes a duty to withdraw … so as to resist the imposition of this false choice by those who have arrogated to themselves the power of framing the alternatives.”

While some argue that good citizens must vote, MacIntyre said that the only vote worth casting in 2004 was “a vote that no one will be able to cast, a vote against a system that presents one with a choice between Bush’s conservatism and Kerry’s liberalism, those two partners in ideological debate, both of whom need the other as a target.”

These are fighting words for many politicos.

Late in the 2004 race, some religious activists spoke out against “single-issue voting,” a phrase often used to condemn those who cast votes based on a politician’s stance on abortion. Other activists said MacIntyre and other writers who advocated political abstinence were naive and irresponsible for focusing on so many issues.

In one of his “BreakPoint” radio commentaries, evangelical apologist Charles Colson said Christians must vote in order to take part in God’s work in this culture. In this case, Colson was specifically rejecting the views of historian Mark Noll of Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill.

Colson said that some Christians seem to yearn for a return to the past, when fundamentalists retreated from politics rather than face the temptation to sin through compromise. Is this retreat what Noll and others seek?

“That position is dead wrong and damaging to democracy,” said Colson. “It’s the utopian notion which assumes divine perfection in fallen humans. His assumption that we can support only candidates who have perfect scores according to our reading of the Bible makes me wonder how he votes at all. And if that9s the standard, all of us should stop voting.”

Obviously, Noll disagrees, arguing that it is not wrong to seek consistency on faith-based issues. Here is his short list — race, taxes, trade, health care, religious freedom, the international rule of law and “life issues,” such as defense of the unborn.

“Each of these issues has a strong moral dimension. My position on each is related to how I understand the traditional Christian faith that grounds my existence,” writes Noll, author of “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.” Yet neither the Democrats nor the Republics have made “a serious effort to consider this particular combination of concerns or even anything remotely resembling it.”

MacIntyre agrees and cannot imagine embracing either major party, right now.

“Try to promote the pro-life case … within the Democratic Party and you will at best go unheard and at worst be shouted down,” he said. “Try to advance the case for economic justice … within the Republican Party and you will be laughed out of court.”

The philosopher has, in recent weeks, declined to defend his essay or to state how a Bush win or a Kerry win might affect his political views.

One thing is certain: religious believers will face similar choices again, or worse. It’s hard to imagine how the religious left can compromise on abortion or same-sex unions. It’s hard to imagine how the religious right will cope with the rise of cultural progressives such as Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“I don’t feel that I need to elaborate on what I have written at this time,” said MacIntyre. “Besides, I plan to write about this subject again at greater length. These issues are not going away because I do not believe that major parties have the right answers. I also don’t believe they are asking the right questions.”

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