Given the faith factor in U.S. politics, it was probably inevitable that someone would come up with a poll asking who is the most Christian among the presidential and vice presidential candidates. The Times in London has done it — and come up with some interesting results so far. After an initial lead by the candidate thought to appeal most to evangelical Christians, the candidate now way out in front is the one who rumours say isn’t a Christian at all.

The online poll is open until next Wednesday, so click to Ruth Gledhill’s blog Articles of Faith to vote. The poll is a bit confusing — the post starts out asking whether Sarah Palin is a good Christian and then presents a voting table asking you to choose the “better Christian” among the presidential and vice presidential candidates. The winner of a four-horse race should be termed the “best” in the group, but maybe that sounds too judgmental.

Anyway, after voting, let us know here if you think this poll is representative of American voters’ views or skewed by votes from outside the United States.

After the 2004 election, the buzz was that religion was a key factor in U.S. election campaigns. It’s come up this year with Barack Obama’s “pastor problem,” speculation about Sarah Palin’s Pentecostal church and several other points. So I thought it was worth getting up in the middle of the night (cable TV had it from 3 a.m. here in Paris) to see what if any role religion played in her debate with Joe Biden.

From that narrow point of view, I could have stayed in bed.

The only interesting point on any of the usually divisive “culture war” issues was the way Palin agreed with Biden that gay and lesbian couples should not be denied legal benefits granted to married heterosexual couples. “No one would ever propose, not in a McCain-Palin administration, to do anything to prohibit, say, visitations in a hospital or contracts being signed, negotiated between parties,” she said. Neither supported gay marriage, but that was their stated position already.

With the financial crisis dominating the news these days, there was little chance that these issues would take up much time in the debate. But the fact that Palin didn’t use the wedge issue when it arose was interesting. According to a new study by Beliefnet “moral issues are dramatically less important this year than in previous years – even among the most religiously observant voters.”

So has the faith factor fizzled out in this campaign? Can I get a full night’s sleep when Obama and McCain debate?

Catholic leaders in Colorado and elsewhere have been swift to react to comments by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that the Church itself had long debated when human life begins.

“… I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is, over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition … St. Augustine said at three months. We don’t know. The point is, is that it shouldn’t have an impact on the woman’s right to choose,” said Pelosi, seen at left kissing Pope Benedict’s ring during his visit to Washington in April.

In Denver, the venue for this week’s Democratic party national convention due to annoint Barack Obama as its presidential nominee on Thursday, Archbishop Charles Chaput and his Auxiliary Bishop James Conley said in a statement on Monday that Catholic teaching on the subject was unequivocal — abortion is gravely evil — and that “Catholics who make excuses for it … fool only themselves.” Similar comments came from Washington D.C. Archbishop Donald Wuerl.

In a statement late on Tuesday, Bishop Michael Sheridan of Colorado Springs said: “Those Catholics who take a public stance in opposition to the most fundamental moral teaching of the Church place themselves outside full communion with the Church, and they should not present themselves for the reception of Holy Communion.”

Pelosi’s spokesman Brendan Daly responded on Tuesday with a statement saying not all Catholics agreed with the Church’s position on when life began.

While not always mentioned by name, the clerical criticism can also apply to Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, picked as the vice presidential running mate for Obama. Biden is a practicing Catholic who also supports abortion rights and analysts have said he could help woo wavering Catholics into Obama’s fold. But a revival of the 2004 debate over whether such Catholic politicians should be refused communion at Mass could possibly hurt him.

John Kerry, a Catholic who was the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004 , provoked stormy debate in Catholic circles about whether or not a pro-abortion rights politician should be able to receive Holy Communion, a key sacrament of the faith. Several bishops said they would not give him communion and the media staked out churches where he attended Mass to see if he received. In June 2004, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — now Pope Benedict XVI – wrote to American bishops restating the Church position that a priest must refuse to distribute communion to a Catholic politician who supported abortion rights.

Abortion is one of the most divisive issues in U.S. politics and while polls show Americans in this election cycle much more concerned about the economy and Iraq it could prove important in Colorado, a closely-contested “swing state”.

When Colorado voters elect a new president on Nov. 4 they will also be asked to amend their state constitution to define legal “personhood” as starting from the moment of fertilization, a position that would not ban abortion but would create the legal foundation for a possible ban in the future.

This measure could energize the state’s conservative Catholics and large evangelical community — a key base for the Republican Party which its presidential candidate John McCain needs — to go to the polls.

Did Rick Warren’s Saddleback Civil Forum with John McCain and Barack Obama violate the separation of church and state? Was it right for a pastor to ask U.S. presidential candidates about their belief in Jesus Christ or their worst moral failures? Will the success of the Saddleback Civil Forum mean that major televised interviews or debates about faith will become a regular fixture in American political campaigns?

I didn’t think questions like this got enough of an airing in U.S. media before Saturday’s event. The fact that Warren made it such an interesting evening made me think the fundamental question — should there be a televised “faith quiz” at all? — would be crowded out of the public debate. The initial reactions angled on the winner/loser question or the “cone of silence” issue seemed to bear this out. But some commentators and blogs are now zeroing in on the deeper question.

In the New York Times, columnist Willian Kristol (Showdown at Saddleback) applauded the event and said: “Rick Warren should moderate one of the fall presidential debates.” That says a lot about the quality of the usual televised debates but little about the church-state question. Ruth Ann Dailey’s op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette put her answer about the church-state question right in the headline: At Saddleback, the wall stands firm.

On the other side, Kathleen Parker wrote in the Chicago Tribune that Candidates’ church chat erodes U.S. principles. DeWayne Wickham of USA Today wrote the Next president need not be the vicar of Saddleback.

Hat tip to the Washington Post On Faith blog for probably the most comprehensive selection of views for, against and in the middle. This is not a simple question and it was good to see so many thoughtful responses.

As religion editor, I naturally have a strong professional interest in seeing religion discussed in public. I also think a candidate’s religious views are relevant when they clearly shape his or her political stands. So I’m not against asking such questions in principle. But a session like the Saddleback Civil Forum raises some fundamental questions about the role of religion in politics and where lines between the two should be drawn. There is no hard and fast rule. Anyone who reads religion news from around the world regularly, though, has surely seen enough cases of politics interfering too much in religion or religion interfering too much in politics to take the issue of church-state relations lightly. Just saying “it can’t happen here” isn’t good enough.

Since television loves to repeat a successful formula, it’s a good bet we’ll see more of these sessions in campaigns to come. With that in mind, here are a few questions I hope to see debated before the next “God quiz” rolls around:

• Has this “soft” kind of interview created a “soft” religious litmus test? One that does not require a certain religious belief, but some religious belief, to pass?
• Is there a border line between appropriate and inappropriate questions? Are some questions too prying, something only for a private session with a spiritual advisor?
• If there is going to be one televised faith “showdown,” should it should be conducted by only one interviewer from a specific faith tradition? Does that skew the questions to the kinds of questions that faith tradition asks, and favour answers that faith tradition gives? Does it give the impression that questions that are high priority for that tradition — in this case, evangelical — are the only faith questions out there?
• What about Jews, Muslims and others, even other Christian denominations? Are they overlooked in this process? Would a mixed panel of interviewers be more inclusive?
• What about atheists and voters who believe such events violate the separation of church and state? Will they have a televised forum?

P.S. Since we take a world-wide view of religion news, I did a quick search for comments on the event in some non-U.S. media. It’s striking how many chose the term “confession” to describe the event.

U.S. religious forum would not have happened here - The separation of church and state is more notional than real in the U.S. (Montreal Gazette, Canada)

Obama&McCain:Confession in front of puritans (Journal du Dimanche, France)

McCain and Obama confess their sins (Elsevier, Netherlands)

Campaign launched for religious voters – Obama and McCain “confessed” to the pastor of the nation (DieStandard.at, Austria)

McCain trumps Obama at faith summit (Spiegel Online, Germany)

“Television Confessional” (Financial Times Deutschland, Germany)

Religion test for Obama and McCain - an unusual event in the U.S. campaign (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Switzerland)

Obama and McCain proceed to the media confessional (Libération, France)

Obama and McCain reveal their dark sides on stage (La Stampa, Italy)

Confession road to the White House (El Periódico de Catalunya, Spain)

Is the Democratic Party really “Godless” and are Republicans really righteous?

Far from it, though there are findings from the monumental U.S. Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life which could be used perhaps to make such arguments. You can see our main story on the survey here and the survey itself, which was released on Monday, here.

On partisan affiliation for example, the survey found that Mormons were the most staunchly Republican religious group in America with 65 percent of those polled indentifying with or leaning towards that party.

Members of historically black Protestant churches remain the most reliably Democratic at 77 percent while the Godless crowd was also firmly in that camp. It found that atheists and agnostics leaned heavily Democratic (65 percent and 62 percent respectively).

But among evangelical Protestants, a group normally associated with the Republican Party and social conservative causes, things are less clear cut. The survey found 50 percent of this group tilted Republican but 34 percent of such folk favoured the Democratic Party.

This raises interesting issues. Can presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama woo the faith vote without alienating the party’s “atheist base?” Can his Republican rival John McCain woo independent evangelicals?

The survey was taken in 2007, so it is not up-to-the-minute, and the first batch of its findings were released in February. But it involved polls of over 35,000 U.S. adults nationwide and so it is an excellent indicator of broad trends.

There’s been so much emphasis on Barack Obama’s “pastor problems” and his quitting his church that a key religion element in his campaign gets overshadowed. Obama isn’t just a polished speaker. He’s shown he’s fluent in the language of American civil religion, the non- denominational set of beliefs that has been a source of inspiration for great U.S. orators like Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy.

Andrea Useem has posted an interesting analysis of Obama’s oratory on her Religion Writer blog. Taking his speech in St. Paul at the end of the primaries as an example, she noted that he didn’t make any direct references to God. “But in speaking about hopes and aspirations as a defining political force, he somehow tapped that vein of civil religion, implying that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and that the greatest campaigns are those based on the inner human spirit.”

By contrast, Hillary Clinton’s “message of grit and sweat and labor obviously resonates with the ‘hard work’ ideal of America, but at the same time, that message may be too leaded, too rooted, to soar into the realm of inspiring political rhetoric.”

This raises an interesting question about American political culture. Do U.S. orators have to tap into this civil religion to be inspiring?