Washington —- Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton talk about their faith more often than Democrats in previous presidential races, and John McCain is working hard to make amends to his party's evangelicals after alienating them in 2000.

The price these politicians are paying now for cozying up to controversial religious leaders, however, is prompting some party elders to suggest that it's time to redirect the conversation.

"I think we should be moving away from so much discussion of public policy in terms of religious beliefs," said Roy Romer, the former governor of Colorado, who was general chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1997 to 2000. "We have to be careful of religious zealotry."

Ironically, such suggestions come at a time when the 2008 presidential campaign is likely to become even more faith-based. Progressive evangelicals are gearing up to press their case on issues of ethics, compassion and global warming —- well beyond the cultural agenda of banning abortion and gay marriage that the religious right has advanced during the past three decades.

"The level of religious rhetoric is likely to remain high for the remainder of the 2008 campaign because a large number of religious groups are politically active, some old and some new to the process," said John Green, an expert on the intersection of religion and modern politics and a research fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Few in the Democratic Party have heeded Romer's advice, especially as the party has tried to close what Green and others describe as the "God gap" between Democrats and Republicans.

In fact, in the campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, Obama and Clinton have spoken often about the deep influence their personal faith has had in shaping their progressive politics.

Obama's religious ties led to the current controversy over the inflammatory anti-American comments in sermons delivered by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the longtime minister of the Afro-centric Trinity United Church of Christ, which Obama has attended for more than two decades.

Fellowship of faith

Even before the Wright controversy erupted, though, Obama often professed his Christian faith, occasionally going a step further to declare that "secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square."

Similarly, at a forum last summer sponsored by the liberal Sojourners/Call to Renewal evangelical organization, Clinton called for "interject[ing] faith into policy."

Long before Obama's relationship with Wright created a political firestorm, Clinton raised eyebrows at the beginning of her campaign with the hiring of Burns Strider, a strategist on winning so-called "values voters," as director of faith-based operations. He produced a six-page talking-points memo for members of Clinton's Faith Steering Committee.

The memo highlighted Clinton's "strong Methodist family" and childhood, how the principles of the Methodist church were "the guiding light" of her life, how she "learned the value and power of prayer" at an early age, how her faith is "deeply personal and real" and how she often finds "inspiration from scripture."

Attention to Clinton's religious faith reached a high point at the Sojourners forum when she was asked how she coped with her marital problems and the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal that nearly toppled the presidency of her husband, Bill Clinton.

"I had a grounding in faith that gave me the courage and the strength to do what I thought was right, regardless of what the world thought," she answered, crediting an "extended faith family" that had come to her spiritual aid.

In its September 2007 issue, the liberal Mother Jones magazine described Clinton's "faith family" as a confederation of "conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as 'the Fellowship,' " a connection reprised this week under the headline "Hillary's Nasty Pastorate" in The Nation, a liberal magazine that has endorsed Obama.

'Spiritual guide'

McCain ran afoul of the Republican Party's evangelical base when he ran for the GOP nomination in 2000 against Bush and called the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson "agents of intolerance." Consequently, in his successful bid for the party's nomination this year, he has sought a rapprochement with the religious right —- and not without controversies of his own.

The McCain camp is making efforts to distance the candidate from the heated anti-Islamic rhetoric of the Rev. Rod Parsley, an Ohio megachurch and television pastor who endorsed the Arizona senator and appeared with him at a Cincinnati rally last month.

At that event, a week before the Ohio primary, McCain praised Parsley as a "spiritual guide." The campaign, concerned about Parsley's inflammatory rhetoric, now explains that Parsley is not and never has been the spiritual guide for McCain, who attends the North Phoenix Baptist Church.

Parsley has used books, TV and the Internet to rail about Islam, brand Europe as a "godless pit" and criticize a welfare system under which "out-of-wedlock births are generously rewarded, while morally pure women are penalized."

McCain's Web site makes no mention of Rev. Parsley. A search for "parsley" produced one hit —- in Cindy McCain's recipe for crab scampi and whole wheat spaghetti.

His campaign's effort to put some distance between the candidate and Parsley comes after he received an endorsement from Texas pastor John Hagee, who has called the Catholic Church "the great whore" and a "false cult system."

McCain's campaign refused to comment on specific statements from Parsley, including a passage in his 2005 book "Silent No More" that discussed a "war between Islam and Christian civilization," a war that he said must end with the destruction of Islam, which he branded as an "anti-Christ religion."

"The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed, and I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore," Parsley wrote.

The McCain campaign says the two men met for the first time in the weeks leading to the Ohio primary and had no more than four meetings. Parsley is not McCain's spiritual guide, the campaign has emphasized; the "spiritual guide" comment was meant in a broad sense, not in a personal sense.

Despite the campaign's effort to make the important distinction between being "a" spiritual guide and McCain's spiritual guide, the connection is being made by McCain detractors.

YouTube clips of some of Parsley's more controversial comments have been posted with comments incorrectly identifying him as "McCain's anti-gay 'spiritual guide' " and "John McCain's 'spiritual guide.' "