I've tried saying something like this in a dozen different ways. But I think that Peggy Noonan hits the nail on the head with this comment about the religious beliefs of this year's crop of presidential candidates.

There are some people who believe faith doesn't belong in politics. But it does, and it is there inextricably. The antislavery movement, the temperance movement, the civil rights movement, the antiabortion movement, all were political movements animated in large part by religious feeling. It's not that it doesn't matter. You bring your whole self into the polling booth, including your faith and your sense of right and wrong, good and bad, just as presidents bring their whole selves into the Oval Office. I can't imagine how a president could do his job without faith.

But faith is also personal. You can be touched by a candidate's faith, or interested in his apparent lack of it. It's never wholly unimportant, but you should never see a politician as a leader of faith, and we should not ask a man whose made his rise in the grubby world of politics to act as if he is an exemplar of his faith, or an explainer or defender of it

For better of for worse, the moral beliefs of Americans have (and, I believe, always will) animate the political direction of this nation. And for the overwhelming majority of Americans, that moral sense is drawn from religion. That includes our political leader.

When we vote, I believe that most Americans want to elect someone who they believe has such a moral center, and a firm anchor upon which their morality is based. To the degree to which that means we want our candidates to be, at some level, "religious", I don't think it is inappropriate to inquire into whether or not that moral center exists.

But at the same time, presidential elections (and other elections, for that matter), are not and should not be referenda upon the religious faith of candidates. Does Joe Lieberman's Judaism make him more or less fit for office than Romney's Mormonism? The question is absurd -- all we need to know (as demonstrated by their lives and policies) is that each of these men hold fast to some sense of right and wrong that is in vague congruence with ours. Indeed, the notion that I would vote for Hillary Clinton over Mitt Romney because I find the teachings of the Methodist Church more authentically within the realm of Christian orthodoxy than those of the LDS Church strikes me as bizarre.

In 2008, America will elect a President, not a Pope, Patriarch, or Primate. We will elect someone to be commander-in-chief, not theologian-in-chief or pastor-in-chief. And while we will certainly expect an element of moral leadership from that individual, we cannot and should not expect moral perfection. of men and women who are candidates for the presidency rather than candidates for sainthood. What we must do is choose the individual we believe who will be best guided by their religious and moral beliefs (whatever they may be) to act in a manner that our religious and moral beliefs (whatever they may be) tell us is right for the country.

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