Des Moines, USA - 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 favorites 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, 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."
Democrats have remained silent on this turn to a newly assertive religious politics.
When asked last week whether 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 Kerry of Massachusetts lost the 2004 election, many Democrats came to blame a 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 Howard Dean, the party chairman, 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 three 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 de-emphasize the party's single-mindedness on cultural issues like abortion and gay rights while speaking in holy terms about such left-leaning concerns as 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, Rudolph 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 5,000 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 supporting 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 last week that there was little incentive to get involved in a Republican primary dispute over the subject.
"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?"