The Gospel According to Jim Wallis

The core divide, Land says, is "whether you believe there are transcendent moral values or whether you don't, and believe most things are relative and situational." It was Land who sat with George W. Bush in Texas on the day of the governor's second inauguration in 1999, along with several other confidants, and recalls Bush saying, "I believe that God wants me to be president." That moment was consistent with a president who speaks in morally unambiguous terms. Bush's use of words such as "evildoers," Land adds, epitomized a belief that there are moral absolutes.

By 2004, Republicans so dominated the religious Christian vote that Bush, a practicing Methodist, won more Catholics than Kerry, who if elected, would have been the second Catholic president.

"What I criticize in John Kerry is I think he felt quite ill at ease within a deeply religious congregation or environment, and there is very little doubt that Howard Dean did, also," Carter says. It was Dean who famously stated that Job was his favorite book in the New Testament; in fact, it's in the Old Testament. Kerry did speak about morality and faith during the 2004 campaign but rarely talked about his own faith in personal terms that allowed voters to get a sense of his moral core, in stark comparison with his opponent.

JOHN KERRY IS A MAN WHO STILL BELIEVES he is fundamentally misunderstood by America. He squints his eyes in agitation when recalling how he lost the religious Christian vote to Bush. "I reread the Catholic bishops' guide after the election," Kerry says, referring to the 2004 Catholic voters' guide, in his Washington Senate office, "and you know, I suspect I get about a 95 percent on it. George Bush gets about a 5 percent. Yes, pro-life issues are central, and I understand its centrality to faith, but a lot of other things are, too. Like just and unjust war and poverty and children and our responsibility to the Earth and to each other and to future generations, and I think it's important to put those on the table." But Kerry rarely did during the 2004 election. He'll say, "During the campaign, I spoke about these choices in moral terms." But soon after, he admits, "To the degree there is a gap, it is because we have not been overt and aggressive enough about making clear what real faith is about."

When I remind Kerry that, during the 2004 election, he told PBS News, "I don't wear my religion on my sleeve," he responds, "I think some people on the other side do. I'm not asserting who or what. But it became clear as the campaign went on from there that these issues required discussion." And, Kerry realizes, at that point it was too late.

For Democrats to continue bringing in more religious Christians, experts agree, a key component will be to find a way to "neutralize the abortion issue" by "advocating for the drastic reduction of abortion," as Wallis puts it. To lessen the weight of the abortion issue, one option currently discussed in Democratic circles is the "90-10" push to reduce the abortion rate 90 percent in 10 years. "We went too far on the abortion issue," Carter says of Democrats. "We became branded with abortion."

"It's more than just saying, 'Okay, we are going to reduce it,'" Kerry says. "I think some of our rhetoric -- I plead guilty for the Democratic Party -- I think some of our rhetoric -- mine included -- has been insensitive at times to that moral dilemma."

For Democrats to successfully close the religion gap, they will have to contend with opposition within their party, stresses John Green of the Pew Center. "The activist core of the Democratic Party is drawn increasingly from groups of people that are not religious," he says. Self-described secular Americans amount to about 15 percent of the electorate, and most are Democrats. "Some of them are hostile to religion, and some of them are indifferent to it. And that has made it very difficult for them to understand this very religious country in which they are trying to do politics."

Democrats have taken notice. Last year, then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi began a Democratic Faith Working Group to encourage Democrats to speak about issues in moral and religious terms.

"There are a lot of Democrats who are people of faith and haven't had permission to act like it, talk like it, behave like people of faith," Wallis says. "And when they start doing that, like Tim Kaine did in Virginia, my goodness, it works."

IN 2005, VIRGINIA'S TIM KAINE BECAME THE EXCEPTION that proved the rule. About half of all voters in Virginia are religious Christians. While Protestants make up seven in 10 voters in Virginia, Kaine, a devout Catholic, was able to rebuff attempts to paint him as too liberal by speaking about his stances in Catholic terms.

Since Kaine's election, Democrats have been looking to him for answers to cross over the religion gap. "They must talk as much or more about your motivations," Kaine suggests to Democrats. "If your motivation is a spiritual motivation, share that . . . Put that first, because that matters to people more than whether offshore drilling is a good idea or bad idea. . . . You don't share your faith to make somebody else feel like you; you share your faith to tell them who you are."

But Wallis insists that an openly religious Democratic candidate will win the presidency only when the party's liberal base becomes more centrist on issues such as abortion, more at ease with religion in the public sphere, and able to reconcile itself with the "failures of moral relativism."

"Can you win the majority of evangelicals to change sides? No, probably not," Wallis says. "But you know, the Republicans, they are not trying to win the black vote; they are trying to peel off a percentage of it in Ohio. So you try to peel off percentages of the evangelical vote." But to peel off percentages of the religious Christian vote, Wallis insists, "Democrats have got to run somebody who has a clue about religion, religious people, about poverty, about the environment, and will speak to those people in a moral language, able to talk sense about abortion. That candidate wins. That candidate wins tomorrow in America! Tomorrow!"

David Paul Kuhn is completing a book about presidential politics. He can be reached at 20071@washpost.com.