Such pious talk marks a departure from how the president discussed his faith life before his White House years.

Back then, Obama cited his religion more as a basis for social action than for spiritual sustenance. He would temper declarations of belief with affirmations of doubt.

Asked in a 2004 interview whether he prayed often, Obama, then a candidate for U.S. Senate in Illinois, responded: "Uh, yeah, I guess I do."

In a 2007 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Obama voiced skepticism about Scripture.

"There are aspects of the Christian tradition that I'm comfortable with and aspects that I'm not," he said. "There are passages of the Bible that make perfect sense to me and others that I go 'Ya know, I'm not sure about that.'"

These days, Obama forgoes such equivocations in favor of a full-throated Christianity.

To Mansfield, the evolution of Obama's comments on religion bespeak a born-again experience, prompted largely by the president's break with Wright and his arrival into a circle of spiritual counselors that includes many evangelicals.

The White House declined requests to speak to Obama.

But Hunter, the president's closest spiritual counselor, says Obama has technically been a born-again Christian for more than 25 years, since accepting Jesus at Wright's Chicago church in the 1980s.

But it's in the last four years that the president has become more evangelical in his habits.

He now begins each morning reading Christian devotionals on his Blackberry.

And then there's the circle of pastors Obama has begun praying with before big events like the first presidential debate.

A circle of evangelicals

After landing in Washington following his 2008 election, Obama shopped around for a new church. But he wound up making his spiritual home instead among a circle of far-flung pastors that includes Hunter, Jakes and Caldwell, the minister from Texas.

Conference calls with the group started while Obama was still a presidential candidate, including on the night of his 2008 victory. The president-elect spoke by phone with Hunter and other Christian ministers, rejoicing in victory but also grieving the death of his grandmother, who helped raise him, just a few days earlier.

The migration from Wright -- who almost brought down Obama's campaign with videos that showed him sermonizing about "God damn America" and "the U.S. of KKK A" -- to this new group, says Mansfield, has been underappreciated.

"[Obama] went into the Oval Office ... questioning the only pastor he'd ever had," Mansfield says. "Wright left him humiliated."

"And there were deeper questions about the theology that [Obama] had received," Mansfield continues. "Some part of Wright's religious orientation had failed."

Where Wright is a liberal mainline Protestant, emphasizing liberation and social action, Obama's new circle of pastors includes theologically conservative evangelicals like Hunter and Jakes, who stress God's grace and personal transformation.

Mansfield notes that the chaplain who has presided for the last few years at Camp David, where Obama spends many Sundays, is also an evangelical.

Some of Obama's spiritual counselors credit Joshua DuBois, executive director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, with leading Obama to a more evangelical-flavored Christianity. Caldwell calls him the president's personal pastor.

A former associate pastor at a Pentecostal church in Boston, DuBois is the one responsible for sending Obama Scriptures and scriptural meditations five days a week; Hunter does it on the other two days.

DuBois convenes a daily 8:15 a.m. conference call with pastors to pray for the country and the president, who is not on the call. (Lately, those calls have also included prayers for Mitt Romney.)

And it's DuBois who organized the president's circle of spiritual advisers. After graduate school at Princeton, DuBois talked his way onto Obama's staff at the U.S. Senate, repeatedly driving to Washington to make his case after job applications were rejected.

When Obama launched his presidential campaign a few years later, DuBois was plucked as its faith outreach director.