At a presidential debate yesterday in Iowa, Howard Dean was asked, “Governor Dean, you said this week that you plan to begin including more references to God and Jesus in your campaign swings to the South. Some of your critics and columnists immediately seized upon this and said it smacked of political opportunism, which goes to something I hear from Democratic voters time and time again this year, a frustration that the Democratic Party seems to have a difficult time talking about religion and matters of faith.”

The former governor of Vermont responded, “You know, I have grown up in the Northeast my entire life. And in the Northeast, we do not talk openly about religion. “To this, one can only wonder what Dr. Dean is talking about.

Start with Massachusetts, where the Pilgrims made a compact in 1620 that referred to their voyage as having been “undertaken for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith.” In Boston today, the influence wielded by Catholic church leaders is famous. When that Southerner Martin Luther King Jr. wanted a Ph.D. in theology, he went to Boston University to get it. The Christian Science mother church is in Boston.

Or, regard Connecticut. It is the home of the major Democratic presidential candidate who is perhaps most comfortable talking openly about religion, Senator Lieberman. It is at Yale, in New Haven, where Jonathan Edwards, a key figure in the religious Great Awakening that preceded the American Revolution, was educated and worked as a tutor.

Here in New York City, we have had no shortage of recent leaders who speak easily of religion, from the late Lubavitcher rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson of Crown Heights, Brooklyn; to the Catholic archbishop, John Cardinal O’Connor, and the pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, Calvin Butts III, to name but three. Brooklyn, with an estimated 1,000 religious congregations, is known as the borough of churches. The National Council of Churches is headquartered in Manhattan on Riverside Drive. The American Bible Society is headquartered on Broadway near Lincoln Center. The Union Theological Seminary, the Jehovah’s Witness world headquarters, the Jewish Theological Seminary of Conservative Judaism, Yeshiva University of Orthodox Judaism — all in New York City.

Dr. Dean only hurts his credibility in the Northeast by asserting that people in the Northeast “do not talk openly about religion.” And we doubt he helps himself in the South either, as there are probably few voters there in either party so unsophisticated as to fall for the claim that discussion of religion is somehow confined to below the Mason-Dixon Line. No one, leastwise this newspapers, suggests there ought to be a religious test for the presidency. But if Dr. Dean keeps sticking his foot in his mouth like this, he’s going to need divine intervention to win the primary, let alone have a serious shot at unseating President Bush, who seems to understand intuitively that faith knows few boundaries.