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A book group in Denver was chatting about the recent dispute overt Rev. Al Sharpton's comment on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Mormonism.

In a debate with atheist Christopher Hitchens, Sharpton said, "As for the one Mormon running for office, those who really believe in God will defeat him anyways, so don't worry about that. That's a temporary situation."

I don't know what book the Denver book club was discussing, but the conversation prompted one former Nevadan, an old friend of mine, to note that Nevada's U.S. Sen. Harry Reid is a Latter Day Saint.

"No one else had heard that," she wrote me in an email message. "I remember one mention in a news report when he [Reid] became the Senate Majority leader, but I haven't seen anything since...The good people of Nevada have elected him (wasn't he an assemblyman and Lt. Gov?) since the late 60's, and I don't remember the fact that he's a Mormon ever coming up."

She said the book group had some other questions. "I questioned last night why Harry didn't speak up when Romney was under fire (not only by Sharpton, but by other pundits' innuendos). I thought it would have been a good opportunity to show his magnanimity and brotherhood with a fellow Mormon. ... Has he personally come under fire for being Mormon? Is he devout? ... Did he get an opportunity to defend Romney's and his religion?"

It was an interesting exercise. I did not address the question of how devout Reid is, letting him speak for himself on that issue. As it happened, Reid had sent a short essay on his reasons for his faith to the Washington Post's new religion page this month, so I sent that to my friend. I found an interesting 2002 Las Vegas Review Journal piece on Reid and Mormonism and sent that to her along with a piece the senator wrote for Mormon Life.

I wrote to her that Reid has experienced very little anti-LDS activity in Nevada. Nine percent of the state's population, after all, is Mormon, a higher percentage than any states except Idaho and Utah.

But in November 2004 when Reid was running for Democratic floor leader of the Senate, the liberal blogosphere cited his church membership as proof that he was too conservative at a time when the Democratic Party needed a combative leader to draw clear lines on issues and philosophy between Democrats and Republicans. Their assumption seemed to be that a Mormon was by definition a conservative, an uncertain proposition. Mitt Romney's father, also a Latter Day Saint, was the most liberal candidate in the 1968 GOP race for president.

I also suggested to my friend that Mitt Romney was NOT under fire from Sharpton. While Sharpton had expressed himself badly, I think what he was saying was that because many evangelical Christians disdain Mormonism, and because the evangelicals have a powerful role in the Republican nominating process, they will veto Romney's candidacy. I have seen at close range the derision many evangelicals exhibit toward Latter Day Saints.

As for why Reid did not speak up for Romney, Sharpton made his comment the second week of May. At the time, Reid was deep into the issue of funding for Iraq, to say nothing of immigration. More often than not when leaders of his stature comment on things outside their normal bailiwick it's because they're asked about it, and I notice that some right wing web sites have faulted the press for not raising the Sharpton issue with Reid. Newsbusters.org, for instance, criticized the New York Times story: "What Democratic Sen. Majority Leader (and Mormon) Harry Reid thinks of Sharpton's comments or his church's racial history was left unexplored." In addition, Reid - like members of any religion - is probably fairly sensitive to when his faith is being attacked, and he may not have read the Sharpton observation that way.

It was an interesting exercise to examine Sen. Reid from a religious viewpoint, but one thing I didn't tell my friend was something that kept running through my head: Whenever U.S. citizens have shown a lot of interest in the religious views of their leaders (particularly the Klan-dominated 1920s), it has usually helped make unhappy times in the nation's history.