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One thing we can count on is that it will be perceived by most political analysts, spin doctors and media commentators as a problem. It's the one thing that U.S. vice-presidential candidates Joe Biden and Sarah Palin have in common: their public identification with religion.

Most likely, it's the only thing they have in common. Mr. Biden's Catholicism and Ms. Palin's non-denominational evangelicalism will be parsed, probed and permutated until they are rendered innocuous. In short, the problem will be solved.

Or at least shelved. But why is it that we see it - faith, that is - as a problem to be eclipsed or erased but not as a dimension of the person to be respectfully encountered?

We all know that religion and politics are a potent mix and that any attempt to bring them together is seen by many as pure folly. For sure, there are grounds for thinking this way, and there are not a few political careers wasted in such an effort.

As a society, we seem to lack the sophisticated tools to make critical distinctions, to appreciate the role of ritual and spirituality in the lives of people who choose to serve in political life, to eschew a reductionist bias in favour of an enlightened understanding of theological and doctrinal differences, and to value the role religion can play as a constitutive rather than decorative component of one's life and beliefs.

In Canada, we have an impressive cohort of think tanks, consultants and lobbyists who can advise our political mandarins, their backroom strategists and public-relations professionals on every possible fiscal, labour, social, environmental and military matter, but somehow seem incapable of providing the knowledge and sensitivity on religious issues that will allow us to move forward.

Although as a nation we are not comfortable with demonstrations of piety by our politicians, there are alternatives to the God-invoking and Bible-toting American variants.

For certain, Barack Obama has survived the intense scrutiny accorded his relationship with his former minister/mentor Jeremiah Wright, and John McCain has managed to choreograph his complex pas de deux with the Christian right in a way that has deftly avoided his political self-immolation. But why is it that even the most tenuous association with organized religion rings the alarum bells of the self-styled guarantors of democratic freedom?

Religion isn't reducible to the political. It is rich, organic and multidimensional, and it deserves the same seriousness of treatment we bring to other aspects of our social-political mosaic.

It is not that religion does not have its dark side - there has been plenty of evidence on that score ranging from conflict in the Balkans, to the Middle East, to Rwanda and Sudan. And it is not that we should defer to religious authority - as if that is a historical possibility - but only that we should take it as something more than a problem.

Britain's chief rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, in an address he gave to the Anglican episcopate gathered for its decennial meeting at Lambeth last month, noted that a key role of religion can be found in its covenantal aspect, by which he meant its capacity to provide a moral framework for building up the common good. In other words, religion can be as much the glue that holds society together as it can be the poison that dissolves it. We need to discern the difference.

So, in my view, it is fair game to submit Mr. Biden's and Ms. Palin's respective faiths to appropriate investigation in pursuit of a deeper understanding of the convictions that shape them. Their religious beliefs may indeed prove to be a problem, but the fact that they have religious beliefs at all is not. It is our problem in thinking so.

Michael Higgins is professor of English and religious studies and president of St. Thomas University in Fredericton.