"You have to say in public that you believe in God, or somehow you are not patriotic? — that you are un-American if you don't accept a belief in God" as it relates to government, McCleary said.

Many politicians take their religious teachings into office, and that is fine, she said.

"You swear to uphold the Constitution" when you take the oath of office. "But you don't swear a belief in God to serve, and you shouldn't have to.

"We have a belief in this country that we don't let government interfere in religions. It is the same the other way around, too," she said.

The Rev. Tom Goldsmith of Salt Lake City's First Unitarian Church said Leavitt "has taken a deep plunge into the pool of mythology in seeing the Founding Fathers as he has. To say they were near (Leavitt's) thinking on this subject is just crazy."

Most of the Founding Fathers were deists and Unitarians, and James Monroe was the most articulate spokesman for separation of church and state, Goldsmith says.

Jason Chaffetz, a Republican who also is running in the 3rd Congressional District this year, said he has read Leavitt's religious/public stand, "and I find it odd."

"It infringes on the separation of church and state, in my opinion," Chaffetz said. Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution says there shall be no religious test to serve, and Leavitt's "articulation in this matter oversteps that line. I would not go there. And it is not the role of the federal government" to ensure that there are public observances of God.

"We are 'One nation under God,' but (Leavitt's assertion) is not the way to go," said Chaffetz.

Leavitt is right when he says that most Americans believe in God. A 2006 USA Today article quotes a Gallup poll that shows that 91.8 percent of Americans believe in God, or some kind of supreme being. But the poll also found a great variation in what that belief means, including those who accept a supreme being but don't believe that the entity gets involved in individuals' lives or government actions.

"It is important for even the non-believer — that 8 percent of the population — to allow for public expressions or institutional beliefs in an over-arching supreme being," Leavitt said.

Leavitt is the younger brother of former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, now secretary of Health and Human Services in the Bush administration, who perhaps took that opinion one step further. The Salt Lake Tribune reported several months ago that Mike Leavitt, as he readied for his second term as governor in 1996, held a number of early morning meetings in the governor's mansion with trusted advisers to talk about applying Mormon/religious doctrines to make state government better, more humane and accountable.

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E-mail: bbjr@desnews.com