But if his divided religious childhood raised questions for him, by the time he finished serving in Vietnam, Gore wanted some answers. According to Bob Zelnick's biography "Gore: A Political Life," while in Vietnam, Gore had written to a friend from Fort Rucker in Alabama, telling of having seen women and children shot down by Huey helicopters. When he got home, Gore wrote to his friend, "I'm going to divinity school to atone for my sins."

He enrolled in Vanderbilt Divinity School back home in Nashville, and Jack Forstman, the longtime dean, recalls Gore relaying a similar sentiment. "He simply said to me that he had been in Vietnam and what he had seen there and his experiences there had raised a lot of troubling questions in his mind."

The "inhumanities that take place in war" had Gore's "foundations shaking a little bit ... He wasn't in bad shape or anything. He was a little serious, as he tends to be about everything. Perhaps too serious," Forstman says, laughing. "But as an undergraduate at Harvard he'd taken a class in religion, and he thought that at that point, taking some classes would be helpful."

"It was purification," Tipper once said of her husband's decision, as quoted by Zelnick.

So Forstman and the Divinity School faculty took this senator's son and "did with Al what we did and do with others like him -- we had a good many around that time -- and we found a slot for him." Gore enrolled in the master's program though "it was clear that he did not want to pursue a degree."

Still, he worked hard. "He was a very motivated member of the seminar," says now-retired professor Eugene TeSelle, who taught a course called "Theology and Natural Science" that "dealt with various aspects of religion in science and the impact of religion on science through the centuries." Gore, says TeSelle, was "reflective," especially when it came to issues of ecology and pollution.

Gore was no less impressive to since-retired theology professor Edward Farley. "He was quite determined that he needed this course for the issues he was struggling with, though he didn't have much background with it," Farley says.

But in the midst of his second semester, in 1972, Gore dropped out of the program altogether when he went from working nights to days as a reporter at the Nashville Tennesseean. He got five Fs that semester and still owes Farley -- among others -- a paper.

These days were the beginnings of Gore's amateur dabbling as a theologian; many of the lessons he learned then have apparently stayed with him. Farley said he was pleased to read in the New Yorker how Gore would reference the philosophers he studied in Farley's class. "I never knew until then that my course had any lasting impression," he says.

Likewise, TeSelle was intrigued by the passages in Gore's environmental tract, "Earth In the Balance," that dealt with the interconnectedness of spirituality and environmentalism. In the book, Gore promulgates the concept of monotheism, which "identified the natural world as sacred, not because each rock and tree was animated by a mysterious spirit, but because each rock and tree was created by God."

After he dropped out of the program, Gore's father, according to Time magazine, asked him: "Did you find the answers you were looking for?"

"I've learned to ask more intelligent questions," Gore replied. He would later call his time at divinity school "one of the most valuable years that I ever spent in my life."

"Gore loves Scripture, he loves to interpret it," says Dixon. Both Bush and Gore "talk about religion, and it means something to each of them, but they do express it differently. Bush is not a theologian -- he doesn't talk like one, you can tell that. Gore is more likely to talk like a theologian."

Even in his controversial April 18 deposition with Justice Department campaign finance investigator Robert Conrad, Gore thought to discuss his religious inquisitiveness -- in the context of the infamous Buddhist temple fundraiser.

Master Hsing Yun, Gore said, "was very proud of an exhibit that they had that depicted different religious stories in Buddhism in a kind of a diorama-type way, life-size sculpted figures. I don't know what they were made out of, but it was this sort of tableaus, one after the other." More important, Gore said, was his conversation with Hsing Yun, which was about "theological issues. Having been a student at the graduate school of religion at Vanderbilt, I was asking him a lot of questions about aspects of his faith that I knew nothing about. And it was quite an interesting conversation and made an impression on me."

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