People on the Secular Left, particularly those who believe (wrongly in my view) that the First Amendment's establishment clause somehow mandates a politics empty of religious reasons, may lament the fact that presidents need to be people of faith. But a fact this is, and at least in my lifetime it isn't going to be wished away.

Presidents have expressed their piety publicly ever since George Washington put his hand on a Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. But those expressions were largely formulaic and considerably muted until the 1970s, when New England reticence about speaking out on religion gave way inside the White House to the new Southern style.

The villain here (or the hero, depending on your perspective) was not the Republican Ronald Reagan but the Democrat Jimmy Carter, who famously confessed in "Playboy" to lusting in his heart, and in the process legitimized the use of religious rhetoric in American politics.

John Kerry lost to George Bush in 2004 in part because he wasn't able to speak convincingly about his faith. Anyone who puts his time as an altar boy front and center in his religious autobiography is going to raise some eyebrows among true believers. But the real problem with Kerry was that, as a buttoned-up native of starchy New England (where committing religion in public is considered bad taste) he couldn't talk about God with anything approaching fluency. Though he quoted from the Epistle of James ("Faith without works is dead") and invoked one of the Ten Commandments ("Honor thy father and mother") in the context of the debate over Social Security, he was never quite able to bring his own Catholicism alive.

In 2008 both parties will need to put forward candidates who can pass the faith test. Governor Mitt Romney will need to answer questions about his Mormonism--not least whether Mormons are Christians--far more forthrightly than he has done so far. And Hillary Clinton will need to convince Democrats not only that she has a better approach to health care and the war in Iraq than Barack Obama but also that she can talk about God too.

At least at the presidential level, elections are about hopes and dreams--what the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich called "ultimate concerns." And the containers of these hopes and dreams are people rather than policies. To put it another way, presidential elections are (at least since the Nixon/Kennedy debate) more about personalities than about issues. And, like it or not, faith is to the majority of American voters a crucial feature of a candidate's personality.