DES MOINES - Many Democrats who had spent years lamenting that their candidates were uneasy around the faithful were pleased to find this year that their primary field was filled with people with at least enough church experience to work scriptural verse into a stump speech - and even more pleased to find, for the first time in years, that it was the Republican front-runners who appeared most conflicted about discussing religion.
The recent ascendance of Mike Huckabee - a former Arkansas governor and self-described "Christian leader" who credits his surge in the polls to divine intervention - has suddenly made religiosity a prized attribute in the Republican field. After polls showed Huckabee rising in Iowa, his closest rival, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, gave a high-profile speech that called for a greater role for faith in public life based on the notion that "freedom requires religion."
Yet Democrats have remained silent on this turn to a newly assertive religious politics. When asked this week if Hillary Clinton agreed with Romney's formulation about freedom and religion, her chief strategist, Mark Penn, referred the question to the campaign's "policy" department.
Even the Democratic National Committee, which has a large staff aggressively policing the Republican candidates' exchanges for even the most picayune missteps and excesses, was absolutely mum on Romney's assertions that religion should play a greater role in politics. Similar sentiments from Huckabee, including a 1998 speech in which he exhorted a crowd to "take this nation back for Christ," have been similarly ignored.
Democrats are now torn between appearing to reject the spirituality of opponents like Huckabee and Romney (and their supporters) and failing to assertively defend nonbelievers.
"They should stand up and say that secular humanists who have contributed to the common good are just as invested in the American experiment," said Tony Campolo, an evangelical pastor from Pennsylvania who advised Bill Clinton.
After Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts lost the 2004 election, many Democrats came to blame failure to court regular churchgoers. Kerry has conceded recently that he did little during the campaign to discuss his Catholic beliefs and their role in shaping his worldview. "I could have done a better job of that, and probably should have," he said in November.
Led by party chairman Howard Dean, who launched a "Faith in Action" initiative, Democrats embarked on a multiyear soul-searching effort to find their voice on religious issues. Party leaders have expressed satisfaction that the trio of leading 2008 candidates have shown the fruits of that new consensus on religious outreach.
Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards have addressed religious gatherings where they have discussed their formative spiritual experiences. They have tried to deemphasize the party's single-mindedness on cultural issues like abortion and gay rights while speaking in holy terms about left-leaning concerns like the environment, poverty, and global health.
"Democrats have been more comfortable in talking about faith in the public square and in their lives," said Mara Vanderslice, a Democratic consultant on religious issues who advised Kerry. "All the Democratic candidates have found a way to do this."
For much of the campaign, it was Republican candidates who seemed awkward around the subject. Romney has said he is "not a spokesman" for his Mormon church, Rudy Giuliani appears as interested in talking about his lapses from Catholicism as his adherence to it, and John McCain recently told New Hampshire voters that he thought "one's faith was largely a private matter between one and one's creator."
Yet the terms of the debate have been upended by the newfound success of Huckabee, a Baptist minister with an aw-shucks, fire-and-brimstone style who, when asked recently to describe how his campaign has taken off so quickly, summoned providence.
"There's only one explanation for it, and it's not a human one," he said at Liberty University. "It's the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of five thousand people."
Huckabee's popularity in Iowa comes in large part from the support of religious voters previously allied with Romney, although it is unclear whether the candidates' new emphasis on religious politics is as well-received in parts of the country where evangelicals hold less sway. In a poll of New Hampshire Republicans conducted by Suffolk University since Romney's speech, only 34 percent agreed that "freedom requires religion," while 55 percent disagreed. When asked whether they believe in a "complete separation of church and state," 53 percent said yes and 35 percent said no.
"There are risks and challenges for both parties in talking about religion and faith," said Gordon Fischer, a former chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party who is now supporting Barack Obama. "In the past, Democrats have gotten it wrong and now I think the Republicans may be getting it wrong."
Yet strategists for several Democratic candidates said this week that there was little incentive to get involved in a Republican primary dispute over the sacrosanct. "Religion will be in the general election without dispute," said Thomas Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "The question is whether Democrats are going to bring it into their primary."
But Democrats like Campolo - who declared "Giuliani is the most vulnerable to people of faith, because they find more spirituality in the three top Democratic candidates" - have had to adjust to a climate in which they would have to engage a nuanced set of questions about the bounds of faith.
"The Republican primary's recent focus on religion has in a sense upped the ante," said Russ Tisinger, a pollster with International Communication Research who has studied the evangelical vote. "On one hand, this presents Democrats an opportunity to attack Republicans for not respecting the wall between church and state. But the question is: How can candidates talk about that issue without alienating religious moderates?"
Democratic strategists say that they do not expect the change in Republican focus to alter their approach to religious outreach. "We're not going to adjust our strategy based on comments from any of the Republicans on the faith issue," said DNC spokeswoman Stacie Paxton.
Some observers of religion in politics say that a Republican nominee easily portrayed as fundamentalist could even be a gift to Democrats seeking a moderate comfort zone on religion.
"Huckabee would be a candidate vulnerable to the Democrats on these issues," said Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. "That kind of strongly identified Christian candidate would allow the Democrats to stand behind the idea of a 'civil religion' that is inclusive, tolerant and nonsectarian."
Such a contrast, according to Vanderslice, could aid a party that has struggled with reconciling its desire to project a spiritual side while embracing secular supporters. "It's part of the Democratic tradition that we realize religious liberty means the ability to practice your own faith or not to practice a faith," she said. "We have to be leaders of all people."
