The president’s first Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships delivered a 163-page report in March 2010 and then disbanded. The second council has waited more than a year for a full slate of appointees and has yet to meet. And the hottest issue — whether religious groups that receive public money can discriminate in hiring — remains unresolved more than three years after Obama promised to address it.

“It’s the mysterious, disappearing faith-based council,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who advised the first council.

The extended hiatus has suddenly become more glaring as the issue of faith, an undercurrent of the 2008 campaign, makes a fierce and early appearance in the 2012 race.

Obama ignited the furor last month when he decided to mandate that religious-affiliated employers provide their workers with free birth control coverage. Since then, the attacks from his Republican challengers have been relentless: Rick Santorum accused Obama of practicing a “phony theology,” Mitt Romney claimed the president has “fought against religion” and Newt Gingrich alleged that the administration is “engaged in a war on religion.”

The absence of a functioning council prompted some of the original members to suggest that the White House would have benefited from one as it muddled through the contraception uproar. Some former members were so dismayed by the administration’s initial ruling Jan. 20 that they took it upon themselves to press the West Wing into reconsidering the move after the fact. They worked the phones and a handful of them signed a private letter.

“It would have been the council’s role to weigh in, and we did individually,” said Arturo Chavez, an original council member and president of the Mexican American Catholic College in San Antonio, Texas. “There was a failure somewhere in really weighing the consequences of this, and I don’t think the president was advised sufficiently about the consequences with the faith community.”

The Rev. Joel Hunter, a former council member and spiritual adviser to Obama, added: “Whenever there is a huge blowback on any move, there is a hesitancy and a questioning of are we still taken into consideration before something is put out.”

Any kind of formal action by the full council wouldn’t have been likely, given its narrow mandate to focus solely on how government can improve its partnerships with faith-based and nonprofit groups — controversial issues such as abortion and religious hiring were deemed off-limits from the start, irking some members. But individual appeals to the West Wing were always welcome, administration officials said.