A friend of mine recently sent me this link to a story about a Harding University professor who is challenging, to a certain degree, Fred Thompson’s affiliation with the Church of Christ.

Back in March, Professor Mark Elrod had issued his (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) “I Saw Fred Thompson at a Church of Christ” challenge (later clarifying the blog post after it hit the news), following the suggestion by some religious pundits that Fred wasn’t religious and the campaign’s subsequent release that Thompson was “baptized into the Church of Christ.”

For what it’s worth (very little, I’m sure), I stumbled onto Fred’s Facebook profile today and discovered that his religious affiliation wasn’t included.

What could that mean? Well, for the sake of comparison, John McCain’s “religious views” are listed:

The same was true of Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo, but surprisingly not of Sam Brownback:

Brownback is often held up as the religious right’s standard-bearer this election cycle, so it’s curious to see his “religious views” missing.

I was not confident, though, that each of the candidates’ Facebook profiles were legit; it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between “official” profiles, mock profiles and fan pages on Facebook. In addition, we can’t know for certain if even the “official” Facebook profiles were reviewed by the candidates themselves or constructed wholly by staff.

Still, it was fun to investigate. And you might not be surprised to see that the “religious views” category on Mitt Romney’s profile is left off:

It’s interesting how the media template for one Republican candidate is that he’s trying to run away from his religion (Romney), while another is mocked for his assumed lack of religious devotion (Thompson).

Meanwhile, the Democrats host a “forum on faith and values,” in which the top tier candidates pledge to uphold the sacred Jim Wallis doctrine that all faiths are equally generic and that Christianity is just slang for socialism.