In a year when pundits say religious faith will decide votes, the Rev. Jay Geisler is troubled by both political parties and uncertain which presidential candidate should get his vote.

But he is certain that God calls him to defend the unemployed men and single mothers who seek help from St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in McKeesport. So on Saturday he will host the Rolling to Overcome Poverty bus tour of Call to Renewal, a Christian group that gets ideological opponents to lobby together on behalf of the poor. It is one of three groups in town this week that aim to calm the storms of partisan faith.

The Red God, Blue God Forum is at noon tomorrow in the Assembly Room of the William Pitt Student Union, Oakland. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Executive Editor David Shribman will moderate a panel representing religious liberals, religious conservatives and political analysts who interpret data on faith and politics. Started by President Bill Clinton's former press secretary Mike McCurry, now a Kerry adviser, one goal is to restore civility to discussions of faith and politics.

The Rolling to Overcome Poverty tour will kick off at 3 p.m. Friday in the William Pitt Student Union, where Call to Renewal founder the Rev. Jim Wallis will speak. At 7:30 p.m., a rally will take place in East Liberty Presbyterian Church, and on Saturday, there will be an 8 a.m. prayer breakfast at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, McKeesport, followed by a prayer service and advocacy fair at 9:30 a.m.

At 3 p.m. next Sunday in the Wesley Center African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Hill District, the Pittsburgh Interfaith Impact Network and Gamaliel Foundation expect to rally 1,200 people of faith to lobby state and local officials on concerns such as public transportation.

All three in some way challenge assumptions that flow from polls showing that white Christians who attend church regularly favor President Bush, while those with more tenuous ties to faith favor John Kerry. Political operatives have tried to exploit these trends, with Republicans implying that a Kerry administration might ban biblical teaching on homosexuality, and Democrats portraying Bush as a zealot who thinks God told him to go to war.

Geisler loathes both stereotypes. He appreciates Democratic concern for health care and other safety net issues, but finds merit in Republican pledges to encourage marriage and discourage abortion.

"Theologically, I'm in that broad, silent majority that at some point is being forced to speak up because this polarization is tearing churches apart, tearing our country apart. Each side wants winner-take-all. We don't seem to want to see win-win anymore," Geisler said.

Wallis, an evangelical whose social views are closer to Pope John Paul II's than Pat Robertson's, founded Call to Renewal in 1995 to bring together Christians who have clashing world views. Getting Catholics and black Pentecostals to cooperate was relatively easy.

The challenge was roping in liberal Protestants, represented by the National Council of Churches, and conservative Protestants, represented by the National Association of Evangelicals.

"I think ours is the only table where those two sit together. I often joke that it's like working with the Crips and the Bloods. I like to have a Mennonite sit between them to make sure nothing happens," Wallis said.

But they have lobbied Washington together for welfare reform and other policies.

"The cry of the poor rings from cover to cover in the Bible," Wallis said. "I think poverty has more potential than any other issue to unite people with different theological views."

Geisler, a former Catholic priest who joined an evangelical Episcopal diocese, sees Pittsburgh as fertile ground for the politics of reconciliation. Religious and ideological lines are not as sharp here as elsewhere, he said.

"The Republicans and the Democrats here tend to be moderate and conservative. Even our liberals are kind of in the moderate range," he said.

"Whichever party wins the White House, I hope they remember the Rust Belt. These people were the heart of America for 50 years. Now they've been abandoned."

That is an issue for the Rolling Thunder tour of the Gamaliel Foundation, an interfaith group that trains volunteers to identify community needs and work for change......

Regional equity, a cause embracing public transportation, public schools and taxes, is a key issue here, said Evans Moore Jr., executive director of the Pittsburgh Interfaith Impact Network.

They are trying to get Gov. Ed Rendell to the meeting next Sunday to answer questions about the Port Authority of Allegheny County, which has drafted a "doomsday" plan to cut service at after 9 p.m. on weekdays.

That's not a partisan issue, Moore said, because hotel janitors who ride the bus from Homewood and lawyers who ride the T from Mount Lebanon all will be affected.

"It would shut down Downtown if they make those cuts," Moore said.

Through his organization, suburban and urban clergy work together to get local legislators to address regional issues. Highly divisive issues, including abortion and gun control, are banned from the agenda.

Polls show that most religious conservatives believe that the government has a duty to help the poor, said John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron and an authority on the intersection of faith and politics.

But that doesn't mean there is agreement with liberals on methods, he said. Evangelicals might address poverty by funding projects to encourage marriage, while liberals might work for state-funded abortions.

Sorting through differences is a goal of the Red God, Blue God Forum, named for televised images of states that went for Bush and Gore in 2000 election.

The Rev. Shaun Casey, assistant professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., helped found Red God, Blue God to counter stereotypes. A political liberal, Casey belongs to the Churches of Christ, a tradition so biblically conservative that it forbids the use of musical instruments in church because they are not mentioned in the New Testament.

Although representation on Red God, Blue God panels tilts leftward, they always include a powerhouse conservative.

"I think the real God gap between the two parties is institutional in the sense that, in the last 30 years, the Democratic Party has walked away from explicit [religious] constituencies, and the Republicans have been building relationships," he said.

Michael Cromartie, vice president and director of the Evangelicals and Civic Life Project of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and a stalwart in the Red God, Blue God, agrees that the Democratic Party stopped speaking the language of faith, but says that created a huge God gap.

"Sure, you have a lot of progressive religious people and, politically, they are going to vote for Kerry. Your problem is that you have a small but significant cohort in the Democratic Party that is really anti-religious and doesn't want to bring religious values and norms into the public arena," Cromartie said.

"That makes it difficult for people from a more moderate to conservative bent religiously to be around the party. They feel excluded and unwanted."

Cromartie doubts Red God, Blue God will solve the problem, but believes that civil discussion is important.

"The way to bring light to a topic is to hear all the viewpoints and then sort out where the differences are. It's what I call achieving disagreement. Oftentimes, what is understood as disagreement is confusion."