Bob Casey returned to his law school, Catholic University, last week, to deliver a message on how his faith informs his public life.

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This Wednesday, Dr. James Dobson, the popular and influential evangelical broadcaster, will appear at the Mellon Arena.

Sen. Rick Santorum, whose reelection is being challenged by Mr. Casey, won't be there and won't be endorsed formally at the gathering, but the selection of Pittsburgh as a site for pre-election Stand for the Family rallies shows how highly the conservative Republican is valued by Dr. Dobson and his colleagues.

"Pennsylvania is too important for us not to be here ... especially in your Senate race," Dr. Dobson said in a radio interview last week. "Get to the polls. You know who to vote for. I won't tell you, because you already know."

The two events highlight the importance of religion in this race and in the broader national struggle between parties eager to appeal to "the values voter," that many analysts saw as a decisive factor in the 2004 presidential race. Since that election, Democrats nationally have struggled to find a natural voice on religious issues.

"I really think they understand that they've missed the boat and they've ceded all this territory to the Republican Party,'' said Laura Olson, a Clemson University scholar and the author of "Religion and Politics in America: Faith, Culture and Strategic Choices.''

"On the other hand," she said, "you can't really turn around all of a sudden and say, 'OK, I'm going to talk about religion.' "

A recent survey by researchers at Baylor University confirmed earlier findings that regular church attendance had a high correlation to support for Republican candidates. The latest in a series of surveys on religion and politics by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life offered similar conclusions. Both surveys noted that white evangelical Protestants were the most monolithic of religious groups in their support for conservative candidates and issues.

That tendency should be unmistakable in the presentation by Dr. Dobson and his colleagues. While, for tax reasons, the group is barred from making formal endorsements in the race, anyone who walks away not knowing their preference won't have been paying attention. Mr. Santorum, while a Roman Catholic himself, had a prominent place in a Time Magazine survey of the most influential figures in the evangelical movement.

"Obviously, we're coming to a state where the stakes are pretty high," said Tom Minnery, Focus on the Family's vice president for public policy and the leader of its political arm. "We won't be telling people how to vote, but we'll be laying out the differences."

If the electorate were limited to religious conservatives, Mr. Casey would face prohibitive odds in November. But some analysts see a broader problem for a party whose brand name has become associated with a more secular approach to public issues.

"The root of the Democratic Party's religious woes may not lie solely in the fact that they have been spurned by religious conservatives," Pew researchers Gregory Smith and Peyton Craighill wrote in a commentary on the latest survey. "Contributing to the party's electoral misfortunes may be that even moderate citizens and voters view the Democrats as being unfriendly toward religion."

The introduction to the report itself said the Democrats have a "God Problem,'' with only a quarter of voters saying that the party is friendly toward religion. It went on to note, however, that "the proportion of Americans who say the Republican Party is friendly to religion, while much larger, has fallen from 55 [percent] to 47 [percent] in the past year, with a particularly sharp decline coming among white evangelical Protestants (14 percentage points)."

Mr. Casey's Catholic University speech was an implicit effort to counter his party's image.

Mr. Casey, like his opponent an observant Roman Catholic, invoked the Conference of Catholic Bishops' "Guide to Faithful Citizenship," and said, "My understanding of the common good also comes from my faith: faith in God, that all things will ultimately work to his greater good."

Back in the 'public square'
Mr. Santorum, in his book, "It Takes a Family" and in numerous speeches has complained about a society that would ban religion from the public square. He argues in his book: "Most liberals seem really to believe that this widespread worry about values is nothing more than a version of the Marxist 'false consciousness,' a form of mass hysteria created by urban legends and stoked by talk show hosts like Sean Hannity, Dr. Laura, and Rush Limbaugh and evangelicals like Dr. James Dobson."

Jay Reiff, Mr. Casey's campaign manager, argues that such a characterization can't be tagged on the challenger

"Bob is a new kind of Democrat and is hoping to be a model of bringing faith to the public square," he said.

One of the factors cited by analysts in Democrat Timothy Kaine's victory in last year's Virginia governor's race was his ability to speak comfortably about his faith. Early in the campaign, the Virginian-Pilot reported, he ran radio ads on small Christian broadcasting stations saying that, "My family and Christian faith are the core values that guide me.''

Handicapping the Virginia race in an appearance on "Meet the Press," Howard Dean, the Democratic National chairman, said, "We ought to talk about our values. Tim Kaine did it. I don't think that's the only reason he won, but it's certainly one of them."

This rebranding effort has skeptics, however, both in and outside the party.

"I'm not comfortable with the way the Democratic Party has tried to become religious," the Rev. George Regas, pastor emeritus of All Saints Church in Pasadena, Calif., said at a panel discussion on religion and politics last week at the Warhol Museum. "There's an inauthenticity about it."

The Rev. Regas, who supports abortion rights, said he was frustrated at Democratic efforts to defend liberal positions on issues such as abortion and gay marriage from a civil liberties standpoint rather than a moral one.

Some Democrats eager to portray their candidates as more friendly to religious audiences have launched the Web site, FaithfulDemocrats.com. One of its key figures is a former DNC chairman, David Wilhelm, an investment banker and practicing Methodist.

The site describes itself as "an online community of Christian Democrats -- religious leaders, political leaders, writers, and regular Americans who are committed to the Gospel and the common good. ... We don't believe that good Christians have to be Democrats. Nor do we believe that one religion has a monopoly on faith. But we make no apologies for rooting our identity as Democrats in our faith as Christians."

To the Democratic hierarchy, a big part of Mr. Casey's appeal as a candidate was based in part on his ability to fit a similar profile. He shares Mr. Santorum's overall positions on abortion and stem cell research. Both support the death penalty. Like the incumbent, Mr. Casey opposes gay marriage, but supports civil unions for gay couples. And while he supports previous legislative definitions of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman, he derided the effort to insert similar language as an amendment to the Constitution as a partisan ploy by congressional Republicans.

Abortion off the table?
At a recent Labor Day picnic, while Mr. Casey worked the crowd a few feet away, Westmoreland County Commissioner Tom Balya said he expected Mr. Casey to run well in his socially conservative county because, in his view, he takes the polarizing issues of abortion, along with gun control, off the board.

That Democratic hope won't be realized for every voter, however. Referring to the premise that Mr. Casey's candidacy moots the abortion issues, Helen Cindrich, president of People Concerned for the Unborn Child, said, "He's going to be surprised if he thinks that's true.''

LifePAC, the political arm of Mrs. Cindrich's group, endorsed Mr. Santorum last week. The veteran anti-abortion activist described herself as a longtime admirer of Mr. Casey's father, the late governor, who was an outspoken foe of abortion and who even considered running for president on a pro-life platform.

"We interviewed him before the primary," she said of the Democratic candidate. "We were kind of thinking, 'Here comes Robert P. Casey all over again.' He said to me, 'I'm not my father.' "

"The fact that he says that Plan B is a good thing really rankles," Mrs. Cindrich said.

Mr. Casey supports the so-called morning after pill -- Plan B -- and the recent FDA decision to allow its sale over-the-counter, an issue that both Mrs. Cindrich and Mr. Minnery, of Focus on the Family, cited as important to their constituencies.

In his recent appearance on "Meet the Press," Mr. Casey said that the Plan B pill is a contraceptive. Mr. Santorum and many abortion foes oppose it, however, arguing that it can, in some instances, be tantamount to an abortion.

Mr. Casey also differs from Mr. Santorum in supporting government aid to family planning organizations. He has argued repeatedly that both pro-life and pro-choice groups can find common ground in supporting polices that reduce the number of abortions.

"In my view, neither party has gotten it right when it comes to life issues,'' Mr. Casey said in his Catholic University address. "We can't realistically tackle the difficult question of abortion without embracing the 'radical solidarity' with women who face pregnancy that Pope John Paul spoke of many years ago. If we are going to be pro-life, we cannot say we are against abortion of unborn children and then let our children suffer in degraded inner city schools and broken homes.''

Mr. Reiff, the Democrat's campaign manager, pointed out that Mr. Casey has made efforts to reach out to a variety of faith-based groups, including the Pennsylvania Pastors Network, a coalition of nonprofit groups, working to increase the turnout of religious voters in November. Mr. Casey spoke to a meeting of the group in July, but its first session, early this year, featured a seven-minute videotaped greeting by Mr. Santorum.

In Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the country, GOP outreach to such church groups proved a decisive factor in the 2004 presidential results.

All of this suggests several tactical issues about this Senate campaign. Mr. Santorum seems certain of retaining the allegiance of most of the more conservative religious groups, but will Mr. Casey's relatively conservative social positions, and comfort in discussing his faith, allow him to peel off at least some of that conservative support?

Conversely, will more socially liberal voters, such as those in the crucial Philadelphia suburbs, perceive Mr. Casey as relatively moderate compared to the incumbent, or will they place both candidates in the same pro-life niche?

"Because Casey is able to present himself as a moderate, it creates a strategic opportunity for the Democrats to peel off moderates,'' said Ms. Olson, the Clemson scholar. "It seems to me that the 2006 elections are not going to be decided on the same culture wars as in the past."