Perhaps the most obvious way in which religion influences Beltway players is that it provides a rare space where Republicans and Democrats can come together. Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, raves about the weekly prayer breakfast that members of the Senate host every Wednesday morning at 8 a.m. “While religion can sometimes divide people, it’s the one time that people put all that stuff aside and just pray,” she says. On the Wednesday I spoke with her, she said that Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina had given “a beautiful speech about his life, and his own faith” that morning. The group always begins with a hymn—Democratic Senator Daniel Akaka of Hawaii used to lead them in a “beautiful voice,” Klobuchar says, before he retired—and then 20 to 25 senators move on to pray for each other, and for the country.

Klobuchar—who grew up attending a Congregationalist church every Sunday in Minnesota—credits her faith with helping her through some tough times. There was the long period after her daughter was born that the baby struggled with a serious illness—“we had to feed her with a tube every hour, 24 hours a day.” And there was her father’s battle with alcoholism, including three DWI arrests, which Klobuchar says he overcame only when he was “pursued by grace.”…

THE MISPERCEPTION that few Washingtonians are religious has all sorts of roots. Democratic Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland offered one theory when we spoke: “Some people seem to think that just because you’re for the separation of church and state, you’re somehow antagonistic to religion, but that’s just not true. We believe in church-state separation because it protects believers from government regulation … But that doesn’t make us any less faithful.”…

One reason people in Washington aren’t always quick to talk about their faith, Powers says, is that “Christians don’t have a great reputation … If you were to say to someone, ‘I’m an evangelical’ or ‘I’m born again,’ that carries heavy political baggage here. People think you must have supported the Iraq War, or be against women’s rights, or hate gay people. But none of those things describe me.”