Andy, if I read your response to my post correctly, I don’t think there’s much disagreement here. The beauty of the conservative formulation “it depends” is that it is even more elastic than I suggested, in that it depends on the religion, the candidate and, most of all, the voter in question. I’m not trying to stretch things to meaninglessness and beyond. But what I was trying to say is that this is all a question of degree. I also think I was probably wrong to include voters in the way I did because ultimately the criteria used by the individual voter is necessarily, and gloriously, beyond the ability of the state, the press or the candidates to determine. People make their choices in the voting booth for all sorts of reasons, including the insane, the profane and the inane (make the rhyming stop!). Your vote, your rules.

Rather, I should have addressed myself more to the way we collectively discuss and investigate these things. As I suggested last week in my column on Ron Paul, I think his personal religious convictions matter less than Huckabee’s because Paul subscribes to a vision of government that renders most of his personal preferences irrelevant. So to the extent you believe he is a sincere libertarian the less you should care what his religious views are. As for Huckabee, he explicitly says his religion informs his approach to public policy so his interpretation of his religion is fair(er) game. As for Romney, I don’t think it will quite do for him to claim as a major qualification the fact that he’s a “person of faith” but then suggest that the details of his faith are somehow beyond scrutiny. I don’t think he’s explicitly said this, but that’s how he sounds sometimes.

But getting back to “it depends.” I think you’re right that if a candidate were a Muslim he’d have more to answer than if he were an Episcopalian. This is not a “religious test” — as some readers complain — it is a political reality. Voter preferences are inherently subjective. Candidates who want to win need to account for this fact. Nor would it be a sign of bigotry — necessarily. To be sure, a Muslim candidate would not get much of the (non-Muslim) bigot vote. But lots of other people would want to know how a Muslim candidate reconciled his faith with the context of the war on terror and the rest. In short, there are no hard and fast rules and either/or choices when it comes to an issue as rich, complex and deep as “religion” in American politics. It simply depends.