Like it or not, religion is already playing a major role in the 2008 presidential race. Most everyone knows that Mitt Romney is a Mormon and Rudy Giuliani is a Catholic whose social mores are too loose for conservative Christians, but what else do you know about the religious affiliation of the men and woman who want to run the free world?

To sort fact from fiction, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has created a site called Religion & Politics '08. Here is a sample of Barack Obama's religious biography:

After graduating from college, Obama began attending a congregation affiliated with the United Church of Christ, a mainline Protestant denomination with 1.2 million members. Obama has said that he was moved by the "power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change" while working as a community organizer for a group of churches in Chicago, and that he "felt God's spirit beckoning me." He was baptized in the church he now attends, Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ.

So far, Romney, Giuliani and Obama have had the sharpest focus placed on their religious beliefs. Polls have asked whether Americans would elect a Mormon, Christians have expressed apprehension about a candidate on his third marriage and accusations, since fully discredited, were made by Fox News and Insight Magazine that Obama had attended an Islamic extremist school in Indonesia. There also was the sculpture of Obama, dressed like the Messiah, that went on display in Chicago.