"Merry Christmas! Our president is too Christian for America!"

That's how one person — in an email subject line to the GetReligion team — boiled down today's mammoth, front-page Washington Post story on "The quiet impact of Obama's Christian faith."

Now, the fact that an elite, inside-the-Beltway newspaper seems to really love Obama's brand of faith won't trigger any breaking news alerts.

Obama is, after all, the kind of Christian even a non-Bible-thumping journalist could love. GetReligion's editor, Terry Mattingly, has described the president this way: "a liberal believer who made a profession of faith and joined the United Church of Christ, a denomination that has long represented the left edge of free-church Protestantism." 

What prompted today's 3,000-word Post homage to Obama's faith? There appears to be no strong time element. Instead, this is one of those evergreen stories on which the writer noted on Twitter that he worked for a while.

"Hope it is revealing," the writer said in that same tweet.

Is it revealing? Yes and no. 

On the positive side, I enjoyed reading the Post story and appreciated the behind-the-scenes insight into some of Obama's perspective concerning his Christianity and its role in his policy approaches. I found myself thinking: This story would make a great "West Wing" episode. 

Imagine this opening scene, only with real-life Obama instead of the fictional President Josiah Bartlet: