Here are two chicken-or-egg questions for you: Which came first, an unfavorable view of President Obama or the sense that his religious beliefs are not like yours? If his faith resonates with yours, do you like his politics, too?

These are the unanswered, possibly unanswerable, questions in a new report released today based on surveys analyzing the mid-term elections by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Brookings Institution.

Religion was not a major factor in the economics-dominated vote but views on God, faith, politics, moral issues in the public square and on Islam still have significant impact. And for President Obama, the results track a potentially troubling faith-gap between him and most Americans, a "religion dilemma," the report says.

Most Americans (51%) say President Obama has religious beliefs somewhat or very different than their own while 40% say their views are somewhat or very similar, according to the American Values Survey of 1,494 Americans by the PRRI.

Obama, who grew up with a Christian mother but didn't attend church until he was an adult in Chicago, now, like most Christian Americans, scarcely attends church. He does, however, have a group of pastors he speaks and prays with regularly by phone. And he speaks very clearly about a life leaning on Jesus.

Yet all his statements of faith don't resonate with those who, as the report says, "are hostile to Obama on political grounds."

Among people who say Obama believes like they do, 94% view him favorably including 51% who see him very favorably. Opposite them, 80% who say Obama's religious beliefs are different than theirs see him unfavorably, including 51% with very unfavorable views.

Set aside the whole Obama-is-Muslim flap (mistakenly believed by 18% of Americans according to a poll earlier this year). His role is not to be believer-in-chief no matter what his faith and yet, as Brookings' E.J. Dionne and William Galston say in their analysis, an American president is ...

called upon to represent the nation's shared values and broad purposes. More than most Democratic politicians, Obama has defended a role for religion in public life and sought to broker a truce in the nation's religious conflicts...

In looking at Obama's religious dilemma, Galston and Dionne, speaking at the Faith Angle seminar Monday, said, it's dangerous to confuse cause and correlation between beliefs at odds and politics at odds. Says Galston, "It strikes us as very likely it goes both ways."

What about race? Galston said that, despite anecdotal evidence of racism, there's no way, from this survey to see if race is a principal driver of views or if the election really is a story of "the triumph of a new kind of meritocracy that upsets our historic populism."

Dionne observed that among hard core opposition to Obama,

... You could get that they'd disagree on ice cream. No question, there is some racism for some percentage of Americans. But you cannot explain all or most of the reaction to him by that.

Galston told Monday seminar, sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, that there's no evidence that the 2010 elections disrupted the established larger patterns of religious and political attitudes and preferences.

But, he said "a new politics of faith is taking shape," one overlaid on the old politics and shaped by...

President Obama's religion dilemma, attitudes toward Islam, and attitudes toward American exceptional ism (the idea that God has granted America a special role in human history.)

Galston, Dionne and Robert Jones of PRRI also found that concerns about Islam are affecting American voters which, the Brookings report says,

... places a heavy responsibility on political and religious leaders to battle religious prejudice against American Muslims. It also suggests that American Muslims are in a situation similar to that of Catholics who, in earlier periods of our history were seen by a significant share of America's population as representing principles at odds with equality and democracy.

Neither is race missing from the equation. The findings by Brookings and PRRI show 74% of African-Americans say their beliefs and Obama's are similar but only 35% of whites.

And they see in the Tea Party ("Teavangelicals" as David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network calls them) less a libertarian alternative to the Christian Right than ...

the embodiment of a more critical or even hostile attitude toward multi-culturalism, immigration and the idea of compassionate conservatism put forward by former president George W. Bush.

Does your view of Obama's faith affect your view of his politics or vice versa? Has your view changed during his presidency?