In a presidential election where candidates’ personal beliefs matter less than any other election in recent memory, religion is rarely represented in the campaign.

Vice President Kamala Harris plans to attend services and speak at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church outside Atlanta on Sunday, while her vice president, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will visit Victorious Believers Ministries in Saginaw, Michigan.

Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump on Thursday criticized Harris for skipping the Al Smith Dinner in New York City, a high-profile fundraiser for Catholic Charities, saying her absence was “very disrespectful to our great Catholic community.” . Instead, Harris sent a video.

While candidates from both parties have traditionally sought to emphasize their piety to appeal to religious voters and signal their personal integrity, Harris, Trump and their running mates have not made their faith a focus this year.

That’s a stark contrast to President Joe Biden, a lifelong Catholic who regularly attends church services, quotes hymns and figures like St. Augustine and is seen on Ash Wednesday with ashes on his forehead.

Barack Obama’s religion was a major factor in his 2008 campaign, both because of its influence on his oratory and because of criticism of his relationship with his former pastor Jeremiah Wright, a controversial figure whom Obama ultimately rebuked.

Obama made a name for himself as a community organizer in Chicago, working for a coalition of Catholic churches. And his comfort in religious situations was evident throughout his presidency, from the five calls from God in his first inaugural address to his spontaneous singing of “Amazing Grace” at Mother Emanuel AME Church after a white supremacist killed nine people at the historic Black church had killed Charleston, South Carolina.

But the United States has become even more secular in the eight years since Obama left office. A record 28% of U.S. adults identify as religiously unaffiliated, according to Pew, surpassing evangelical Protestants and Catholics to become the largest religious group in the country.

As recently as 2007, as Obama was preparing his first presidential run, the religiously unaffiliated — which includes people who identify as atheists, agnostics and “nothing in particular” — made up just 16% of the country in Pew data.

And presidential historian Michael Beschloss said Americans are becoming more cynical about their politicians and what their religious affiliation might say about their character.

“We learned a lot about a lot of politicians who seemed to be very religious but didn’t necessarily adhere to the tenets of their faith one way or another,” Beschloss said, pointing out that religion has become just as much about politics how about personality. “So for many people, religion may no longer say much about a person’s personal character.”

“There is now less incentive for candidates to flaunt their religiosity — and even a potential danger for irreligious voters, particularly on the left,” said Massimo Faggioli, a theology professor at Villanova University who wrote a spiritual biography of Biden has.

And Harris and Trump and their running mates have complicated religious backgrounds that are harder to “sell” politically than Biden’s trusted Catholicism, he said.

“There is secularism on the one hand and a more complicated religious mix on the other,” Faggioli said. “And for Harris, there is a risk that religion will be seen as a form of oppression in the eyes of some voters.”

Trump’s coalition is largely driven by evangelical Christians, but their support for him is based more on a shared political agenda than a spiritual connection. According to Pew, only 8% of people who had a positive view of Trump at the start of the year thought he was “very” religious.

Trump was raised a Presbyterian but said in 2020 that he considers himself a non-denominational Christian, although he is known not to regularly attend church services.

“There is no longer any claim that this is a true love story. It’s a marriage of convenience,” Faggioli said. “The relationship has become much more transactional.”

In fact, at the Al Smith dinner, Trump made it clear: “Catholics, you must vote for me.” You better remember: I’m here and they’re not.”

Harris, meanwhile, is a rare political figure who may have downplayed her spiritual life in public, given anti-religious sentiment in her native California Bay Area and a complicated personal religious journey.

Harris is a Baptist who was raised by a black Anglican father and an Indian Hindu mother and is now married to a Reform Jewish husband.

She is a long-time member of the historic Third Baptist Church in San Francisco and has a close relationship with her pastor, Rev. Amos Brown. As vice president, she attended services at Baptist churches in the Washington, D.C. area and spoke at the 2022 National Baptist Convention.

Brown was one of the first people Harris called after Biden decided not to run for re-election, and she managed his 1999 campaign for San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

“She is a strong, spiritual person who comes from a strong, spiritual family that we have known for a very long time,” Brown said in an interview with a newspaper in his hometown of Mississippi earlier this year.

Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, said in his speech at the Democratic National Convention that “Kamala has connected me more deeply to my faith” and that they attend both synagogue and church on holidays.

In her 2019 memoir, Harris wrote about her mother making sure she was exposed to both Hindu and African-American Christian religious traditions, adding that she and her sister Maya were in the choir at the 23rd Avenue Church of God in Oakland would have sung.

“I believe we must live our faith and show faith in actions,” she wrote.

But aside from asking Brown to say the closing prayer at this summer’s convention and occasionally making references to her church, particularly when speaking to black audiences, Harris rarely speaks of God, and her oratorical style is more of a Accuser than a preacher.

“I grew up in the black church,” Harris told radio host Charlamagne tha God last week when a pastor asked about partnering with faith communities. “Our God is a loving God. Our faith drives us to act in ways that are about kindness, justice and mercy.”

She contrasted this with Trump’s belief that strength lies in “who you knock down,” which she called “totally contradictory to the church I know.”

Walz, on the other hand, was raised Catholic but became a Lutheran after marrying his wife Gwen. Lutheranism is a major Protestant denomination, but in the United States it is concentrated almost entirely in the Upper Midwest while having little prominence in the rest of the country, where it makes up only a small percentage of the population.

Walz rarely talks about his religion and sometimes jokes that his Midwestern sensibilities make it difficult to open up.

“Because we’re good Minnesota Lutherans, we have a rule: If you do something good and talk about it, it doesn’t count anymore,” Walz joked in a speech to unions this year.

Meanwhile, Trump’s vice presidential running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, has written about his personal journey. Although he was raised Protestant, he rarely attended church services and became an atheist as a young adult before converting to conservative Catholicism as an adult.

Vance’s wife, Usha, was raised as a Hindu in a “religious household,” and she and Vance married in an interfaith ceremony that included both Bible readings and a Hindu pundit.

These stories of conversion, intermarriage, and deferred religiosity reflect the spiritual lives of Americans today, but may not make for neat stories on the stump.

“If you don’t feel comfortable talking about religion, it shows clearly, so it makes sense not to,” Faggioli said.