Even if the phrase “In God We Trust” were stripped from the dollar bill, religion could not be stripped from the current presidential race.

And I, for one, am glad.

Religion is the lens through which people view the world. It will influence every decision these candidates would make in office if elected.

Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif. who hosted senators Barack Obama and John McCain at a televised forum on religion this month, agrees that what they believe should matter to us.

“We believe in the separation of church and state, but we do not believe in the separation of faith and politics because faith is just a worldview, and everybody has some kind of worldview,” Warren said.

I was intrigued by what President Bush’s former speechwriter, Michael Gerson, had to say about the candidates at a conference I attended this summer.

After spending considerable time traveling with Obama, Gerson us he views Obama’s adult conversion to Christianity as one of earnestness and authenticity.

“I have no reason to doubt his faith,” Gerson said. “He is more comfortable speaking theology than any president since Jimmy Carter.”

McCain biographer, Paul Alexander, says McCain is more reserved about his faith because, at his core, he remains a military man, trained to keep it to himself.

As was stressed in the forum, both candidates can tell genuine stories of Christian faith impacting their personal lives.

Regardless of how convincingly these candidates can profess their religions in the public spotlight, we voters are left to discern what will most impact their decisions in office.

Though the candidates are banking that the evangelicals — an estimated 20 to 25 percent of the electorate — will vote like they usually do, there is no guarantee that a Christian president would vote like a Christian in office (not that there is any consensus on how a Christian should vote on issues).

As useful as it is to hear politicians talk about their faiths, they are still politicians. What matters is how they act on those words.

Both candidates have served as senators and logged pages of voting records.

Voting is what turns all this election talk into paper and pen, signature or no-signature decisions.

Our generation is swayed easily by the sincerity of a speaker and how we feel when we listen to him or her. I may be a practiced judge of character, but when it comes to politicians, I rarely trust my instincts.

I look at voting records, available at Web sites like votesmart.org,, to see how the candidates voted on issues that matter to me and how they voted on the issues they say matter to them.

For example, Obama says he is pro-choice, but he chose “Not Voting” three of the four times abortion issues were presented to the Senate, according to voting records. The issue will be divisive in the upcoming election, but so will almost every issue he would encounter as president.

Meanwhile, the pro-choice stance of his new Catholic running mate, Sen. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., elicited a scolding from Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver, who asked him to refrain from communion because of the gap between his beliefs and his politics.

While McCain remains more reserved about his personal faith, his value-oriented rhetoric is rooted in military honor. His decisions based on that foundation alone could align with the originally faith-based precepts on which our forefathers built this country — but it is still a stretch from what evangelical voters would like to see in a president.

President Bush’s openness about his Christian faith earned him more than 70 percent of evangelical votes.

At this point, McCain has about as much support from that group as Bush did prior to election, though it is less enthusiastic, according to a poll from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

But conversations about the religious worldviews of these candidates should matter to more than the evangelical voter who may share a pew with their beliefs.

It should matter to all voters because the decisions of our elected president will affect all of them.

Whitney Coleman is a journalism senior. Her column will appear every other Friday.