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Evangelicals sway policy in new era
... The women bow their heads and close their eyes. Young begins.

"We thank you for opening our eyes to the issues at hand, Lord," she says. "We want to raise President Bush up to you, with everything he's dealing with."

Beth Campbell prays for Bush's Cabinet and Hillsborough County Commissioner Ronda Storms, and "that people will just wake up, and that we will get back to what is right is right, and what is wrong is wrong."

Ede Crosby's voice is low and urgent. "We know you're angry about everything that is happening in our country, our schools, our homes," she says. "We ask how we can be of help, what action points we can take, Lord."

For Young and her guests, all members of the Tampa chapter of Concerned Women for America, there is much to pray about these days. Gay marriage, pornography, the media's liberal bias and myriad attacks on religion -- the courts' hostility to the Ten Commandments, schoolchildren learning about Islam while being hassled for saying grace, Christians coerced to profess "tolerance" for co-workers whose homosexuality offends their beliefs.

As America wades into another presidential election, many evangelical Christians say their beliefs are under assault by the government and mainstream culture, a feeling bolstered by leaders of "profamily" groups who vow to convert that anxiety into votes come November -- to re-elect those already running the country.

"Let's Take America Back!" goes the current campaign of the Christian Coalition. Alan Keyes, candidate for the U.S. Senate in Illinois and founder of Renew America, a conservative political action group, warns that "American liberty is under internal attack as never before in our history."

At the same time, scholars who study the nexus of religion and policy say recent victories in the courts, in state legislatures and in Washington, D.C., have given religious conservatives greater influence than at any time since the Temperance Movement, which led to Prohibition in 1919.

President Bush is an evangelical Christian who talks openly about his faith and who says America is doing God's work in Iraq and Afghanistan, and whose religion regularly affects his policy, from limiting embryonic stem cell research to proposing nearly $3-billion to promote traditional marriage.

The Republican Congress, too, has pleased Christian conservatives lately. In April, Congress banned late-term "partial birth" abortions, though the law likely is bound for the Supreme Court. It also passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which adds penalties for hurting a fetus while committing a crime. Opponents say it's a ploy to undermine legalized abortion.

Congressional Republicans are pushing a constitutional amendment outlawing same-sex marriage, a priority for conservative groups. At least 39 states already have banned it, and Missouri voters recently became the first in the union to outlaw gay marriage in their state Constitution. Conservative leaders, meanwhile, brag that their lobbying led to the Food and Drug Administration's unusual decision in May to ignore its own advisory panel and reject over-the-counter sales of Plan B, which can prevent pregnancy after sex.

And the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that "under God" should remain part of the Pledge of Allegiance, which many schoolchildren recite.

Philip Goff, a religion professor at Indiana University-Purdue University, describes a wide gap between the political strength they have and the strength they think they have.

"They have taken government. There's no doubt about it. They have more power than any time at least in our lifetime," said Goff, director of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture there. "But they can't say that they have control, because then they lose power. They have to continue to use that rhetoric -- that paradigm of religious outsider -- in order to rally people to the cause....