Earlier this year, when former Governor Howard Dean was still very much in the running for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, there was an insightful column in The Boston Globe by Cathy Young, one of the paper's two "conservative" columnists and a contributing editor at Reason magazine.

Ms. Young's article bore the headline, "The new discrimination against the nonreligious" (Jan. 20). Howard Dean happened to provide the hook.

Governor Dean had been asked, not by an evangelical Protestant paper or magazine, but by Newsweek no less whether he believed Jesus Christ to be "the son of God and ... the route to salvation and eternal life."

Young pointed out that Dean's "somewhat cagey" answer would probably do little to assuage the doubts and concerns of religiously conservative voters. He said that he "certainly" sees Jesus as "the son of God," but that salvation is "not gonna be up to me." When he discusses "spirituality," he admitted, "it is generally divorced from any mention of God or church."

Ms. Young was astonished that Governor Dean would be asked such a personally intrusive question by so mainline a publication as Newsweek. She suggested that Dean had become "the target of something dangerously close to a religious witch-hunt."

Indeed, in late December The New Republic magazine had published a cover story on the then-leading candidate for the Democratic nomination. It was entitled, "Howard Dean's religion problem."

The story proposed that Dean would have trouble running as a moderate or centrist in the general election because he is "one of the most secular candidates to run for president in modern history," having acknowledged, for example, that he does not attend church very often and that religion does not inform his views on public policy.

Ms. Young pointed out that, in reaction to the negative publicity generated by the article in The New Republic, Dean tried to "repackage himself, rather clumsily, as a man of faith." This made him look "opportunistic and insincere" to others.

Around the same time, a rabbi, writing on the web site, beliefnet.org, gratuitously charged that nonreligious people have a problem taking a strong stand against evil, and cited Dean's position on the war in Iraq in support of his claim. "What piffle," Cathy Young retorted.

The columnist pointed out what many non-ideological people of faith have always recognized, namely, that religion can be a force for good or a force for evil. It inspires some people to rise to new and unexpected heights of generosity, self-sacrifice, and courage in the face of injustice. It generates in others, however, feelings of superiority, self-righteousness and even sometimes the desire to kill "in the name of God."

Although the United States is often cited as one of the most "religious" nations in the world, the actual breakdown of sentiment suggests a more complex picture.

The Pew Research Center released a poll this January that disclosed that six out of 10 Americans acknowledged that religion seldom or never influences their voting decisions. And in a Gallup poll last year, 60 percent of Americans said that religious leaders should not try to influence public policy on abortion.

The conclusion to Cathy Young's column in The Boston Globe is especially pertinent to our reflections here: "Political leaders whose faith is central to their lives, such as President Bush or Democratic candidate Joseph Lieberman, have every right to discuss their religious beliefs in public; to muzzle them would be intolerant and illiberal.

"But what about the intolerance of stigmatizing secularists? Polls show that approximately 40 percent of Americans do not belong to a church and do not consider religion as a very important part of their lives. The state of political discourse today seems to reduce them to second-class citizens."

A few conservative pundits have been proudly pointing out ever since the 2000 election that George W. Bush received a far greater percentage of the votes of those who attend church regularly than did Vice President Al Gore, while Gore came out ahead among those who are not actively religious.

The implication is clear: one candidate was the choice of most of the country's good, God-fearing people, while the other was favored by most of those who do not pay much, if any, attention to God --- and, therefore, are bad, or at least in a moral category well below "good."

Building on statistics like these, Pat Roberston, a Pentecostal Protestant broadcaster and sometime politician himself, announced recently that God had assured him that President Bush will win re-election in a "blowout."

Apparently, Governor Dean had more than the media to worry about.

Father Richard P. McBrien is the Crowley-O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.