Hartford, USA - For a country that prides itself on being a religious refuge, Americans like their public figures pious - but not overly so. And they like their religions straight, or at the very least, familiar.
So what to do with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a faith that, from all indications, is intensely personal and important to the Republican presidential candidate? Where do most Americans put Muslims, who in this country number roughly 6 million? And what to think about the Church of Scientology, which warehouses the spiritual well-being of so many entertainers?
If history is any indication, Americans are uncharacteristically slow to embrace the new, or unfamiliar, in theology. And we are uncomfortable with anyone we consider a religious extremist.
''For many, especially literal-minded Christians, there's a tradition that Christianity ends with the New Testament,'' says June-Ann Greeley, assistant professor of religious studies and director of the Center for Catholic Thought, Ethics and Culture at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn. ''The sense that there would be another revelation is very problematic.''
Theoretically, the attacks of Sept. 11 were supposed to usher in a new era of religious understanding. In an effort to study the perversion of Islam that moved terrorists to attack, non-Muslims would teach themselves about the religion. In a 2002 Washington speech at the Afghanistan Embassy, President Bush said, ''All Americans must recognize that the face of terror is not the true . . . face of Islam. Islam is a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. It's a faith that has made brothers and sisters of every race. It's a faith based upon love, not hate.''
But many people in the United States - which by many estimates is roughly 80 percent Christian - have not educated themselves about Islam, and the ignorance is telling.
Greeley, who teaches about the religion, says: ''We're about 45 minutes outside of New York City. Many of our students either knew someone personally, or knew someone who knew someone, who died in 9/11. They come to classes in Islam any time a class is offered,'' but not necessarily to learn.
''I don't know if it is to welcome a new understanding of religion, but to find certain ways in which it's really a wrong religion. That's not all students, but there will always be that other group who find it an evil religion and take a class to prove that it is.''
In such a class, she focuses on the Quran and waits for students to recognize the similarities between it and their own religious texts.
''What often will happen is students will say, 'Gee, this sounds like something I read in the Old Testament,' '' Greeley says. ''It's really not so different.''
Gabriel Greenberg, co-author with Peter Gottschalk of Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy, says neither Muslims nor Mormons have been considered mainstream in America, even though they are among the fastest-growing religions in the country.
''It almost takes an event that affects [their] lives'' before Americans seek to educate themselves about different faiths, says Greenberg. ''I don't think the average American was so aware of the Iran-Iraq War, though it was almost a decade long and claimed thousands of lives, because it didn't affect us so directly.''
His research for Islamophobia accelerated in 2005, when a Danish newspaper editor published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that some Muslims considered offensive, setting off riots worldwide.
''We viewed that with a kind of resigned nodding of our heads,'' says Greenberg. ''It was a classic theme played out again.''
For many, the Church of Scientology - with its teaching about other-worldliness and personal accountability - is too unusual to be embraced and doesn't jibe with already-accepted beliefs within, say, Christianity. And Scientologist and movie star Tom Cruise's odd attacks on psychiatry haven't helped, either.
''I think even among the more liberal-minded of us, there is a point where something is so strange and different we start assigning some untruth to it,'' says Greeley.
Nancy O'Meara, co-author of The Cult Around the Corner, has been a Scientologist for 35 years. She says distrust often comes with ignorance, when a person never talks to someone of a different faith and doesn't read any literature outside her own traditions.
''How many Christians have read anything of the Quran?'' she asks.
She suggests non-Scientologists do their own reading, not that of commentators who may have an agenda or an ax to grind.
But all religions have beliefs that to the outside eye seem odd, says Bruce Ledewitz, author of American Religious Democracy: Coming to Terms With the End of Secular Politics and a law professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.
For example, ''Christians were accused by pagans in Rome of eating flesh and drinking blood'' - a reference to what for many Christians is the largely symbolic ritual of the Eucharist, or Holy Communion, he says.
Mormons have suffered persecution since the religion's inception in the early 1800s. Founder Joseph Smith Jr. was killed in 1844 by a mob that stormed an Illinois jail in which he was held prisoner. That was the same year Smith announced his candidacy for president.
Questions arise anew with the Republican candidacy of Romney, whose faith has received particular attention from the press. By comparison, Democratic New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's Methodist background is familiar, as are Illinois Sen. Barack Obama's membership in the United Church of Christ and Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain's in the Episcopal Church. Time allows people to educate themselves, and religious practices that seem strange at first can begin to feel familiar, Greeley says.
''I think that in America, for all our secular, nonspiritual patina, so much is really bound up with faith,'' she says.
In such an environment, public figures - including politicians - dare not say they don't believe in God, says Ledewitz.
Witness former Democratic candidate Howard Dean, who said that he didn't attend church much. In practice, other candidates may hold religion at the same arm's length, but many don't admit it.
Imagine, by contrast, a campaign nearly 50 years ago. In September 1960, then-Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, speaking to the Greater Houston Ministerial Alliance, reiterated his support for keeping church and state separate.
Kennedy said, ''No Catholic prelate would tell the president how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.''
What Kennedy was saying was ''religion was not relevant,'' says Ledewitz. ''Now that we're out of that era, we're talking about religion in a very open way. No one can say it's completely irrelevant. No one can say religion is unimportant.''
In fact, the last two presidents - George W. Bush and Bill Clinton - spoke freely of their faith. And recent authors who question or deny the existence of God - Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens among them - heighten the discussion.
Romney's presence in the campaign ''really does ask us to grapple with those kinds of questions,'' Greeley says.
''Is it my country, or my God? Is there ever going to be a conflict? Do we ever need to ask someone that question? Being someone who teaches religion, I get nervous if we can't talk to each other.''