A few weeks ago, John McCain met with the Rev. Billy Graham in what was widely seen as an effort to step up his outreach to religious people. And little wonder: The conventional wisdom has decreed that the senator, who is generally reticent about his own faith, needs to do something drastic to shore up his appeal among religious voters. But it is not only Republicans who feel the need to court the "value voter" bloc. Ever since John Kerry's loss in 2004, the Democratic Party has been trying to "broaden the agenda" of religious folks, pushing global warming, Iraq withdrawal and income inequality as issues of "faith." To push such matters, Howard Dean, the man who left his own church over a bike path, started the Faith in Action initiative at the Democratic National Committee.

Has it worked? Are religious voters feeling the stirrings of a new, leftward-leaning faith agenda? Not really, according to a recent study out from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. "The connection between religious intensity and political attitudes appears to be especially strong when it comes to issues such as abortion and homosexuality," the researchers report. Almost three-quarters of the evangelicals who attend church weekly -- the majority of evangelicals and the religious group that is most responsible for Mr. Bush's victories -- believe abortion should be illegal in most or all cases. An even higher percentage say that homosexuality should be discouraged by society as a way of life.

Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention is not surprised. Evangelicals, he says, are not about to "exchange global warming for the sanctity of life or traditional marriage." While most Americans support stricter laws to protect the environment, evangelicals are still lagging behind the progressive curve. Three-quarters of atheists, Jews and Buddhists favor those regulations, according Pew's results, but only 54% of evangelicals do. Another study -- out in June from the Henry Institute on Religion and Public Life at Calvin College -- reports that evangelical support of environmental regulation declined by almost 10 percentage points between 2004 and 2008 (while remaining steady among the general public). According to John Green, a senior fellow at Pew, the drop may be evidence that evangelicals, who have been openly debating this issue for some time, have reached a "turning point" in their discussions. This is not a big shock: More than most other voting groups, evangelicals support smaller government in all areas of life.

It also turns out that there is still a significant divide between evangelical voters and the rest of the country on foreign policy. About 38% of evangelicals believe that military strength is the best way to ensure peace, compared with 28% of the general public. And the difference is much more stark when it comes to the Iraq war. According to the Henry Institute, 57% of evangelicals believe that "the U.S. did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq," compared with general public's 39%. It can hardly be a surprise, then, that a recent Washington Post poll shows Mr. McCain with 68% of white evangelical support, compared with 22% for Barack Obama.

Mr. Obama has tried to have his cake and eat it too when it comes to faith in this election. He has touted his spiritual journey, most recently in the current issue of Newsweek, but has then said that he didn't go to church often enough to hear his pastor's outrageous sermons. He has accused the right of politicizing religion but has acknowledged in his memoirs that he picked his church based on his "community organizing" goals. And now he says that he won't pick a new church until after the election. Most sincerely religious people would find this odd, to say the least.