By Jeff Sharlet

If tonight’s Iowa results prove anything, it’s that religion isn’t leaving the public square when W. rides home to Texas. Huckabee’s huge victory over robot Republican Mitt Romney is the most obvious sign that Holy Ghost power still matters in power politics. But Obama’s victory should be read as almost as big an indicator that we are living in a deeply religious moment. Of course, other factors contributed to both men’s victories — Huck’s faux-populism, Obama’s pure charisma — but there’s no denying that both Republicans and Democrats in Iowa chose the two most faith-fueled candidates.

Imagine a Huck vs. Obama general election: the two candidates most comfortable at a pulpit fighting it out for the hearts and minds of American evangelicals. That’s right — Obama has almost as much of a shot at a big chunk of the evangelical vote as Huckabee. Huckabee may be a pastor, but Obama talks more like a prophetic preacher. Huckabee may come from an evangelical denomination, the Southern Baptists, but Obama’s church, an Afrocentric UCC congregation, worships in a style more recognizable to the multitudes of a megachurch nation.

Southern Baptists are famous for sitting on their hands; members of Obama’s church put their hands in the air. Huck has distanced himself from the economically conservative leaders of his demonination, increasingly out-of-touch dinosaurs who long for a revival of the Reagan coalition. Obama has distanced himself from the pastor of his congregation, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a tough-talking progressive preacher in the tradition of black liberation theology, as critical of establishment liberalism as of conservatism — scary stuff for the nice white Dems who want to believe racism is solely a Republican affliction.

Southern Baptists, a mostly-white denomination, have the kind of race problem that embarasses mainstream white evangelicals who hunger for “racial reconciliation” — a way to sidestep the still-harsh reality of the color line. Obama, to color-sensitive evangelicals desperate to seem color-blind, looks like a solution.

Ask yourself: Who would Rick Warren vote for? (Better yet, reporters, ask Rick Warren.) It has to be Huck on the issues. Despite the newsweeklies’ decision to anoint Warren as the face of a new, moderate evangelicalism, his finger punches the hot buttons in the same pattern as the 1,000-year-old fundamentalist, Pat Robertson. It’s not a matter of substance, it’s style — and in that arena, it’s all about Obama, who had the savvy to pay a visit to Warren’s massive Saddleback congregation. (With sad Sam Brownback in tow — guess who got the good press in evangelical media?)

So far, the press has had a rough time understanding the religion of both men. Jodi Kantor at the NYT ran afoul of Obama’s pastor when she inadvertently characterized him as a radical at odds with white people. Huckabee has faired even worse, his faith played for laughs, as if Gomer Pyle had been cast in the role of the evil preacher in Night of the Hunter. The truth is that Obama’s faith — and his pastor — are more conservative than the press understands, and Huck’s religion isn’t as hick as the hacks covering the campaign imagine.

Huck sounds like William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner; Obama, with a better claim to almost all of Bryan’s positions, sounds like Norman Vincent Peale, the conservative “apostle of posititive thinking.” Were Peale alive to today, he’d likely hold his nose and vote for low-class Huck, fried squirrels and all. (Were Bryan alive, he’d run away with the nomination.) Both candidates look like they might represent the “third way” more and more rank-and-file evangelical haqve been waiting for. Such Christians are conservative on sex, paternalistic on poverty, and more inclined to support missionaries than militarism. They’re big on government and big on God, which means the results on Iowa portend a big year for faith in the main event of American civil religion.

Jeff Sharlet is the editor of The Revealer and author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, forthcoming from HarperCollins this spring.