ihlin is right that
African-Americans find the church central to their politics. This is not a new phenomenon. It goes back to America's first African slaves, when white masters, believing that biblical passages about obedience would make their slaves more subservient, allowed blacks to pray and eventually preach the Word of their God. (Indeed for a long time, Sunday service was the only semi-formal education available to African-Americans.) But, while the white preachers were deifying the role of the father (master) and arguing that black subjugation was a product of divinity, it was scripture about equality and freedom that resonated best in the enslaved community, particularly among those who were born slaves and knew no life but slavery. So it should be no surprise that black churches were integral to the beginning and maintenance of the slave rebellion, abolition, and civil rights movements.
Today, just as then, the same scripture is used for two distinctly different reasons.
In church, Republicans and Democrats alike argue that the country and world is imperfect and can only be made right with the participation of the religious. However, Republicans and their ministers preach that this impurity is the result of too much freedom. Freedom for all, they say, is an encroachment on freedom for them, and the only way to save the world, as they live it, is to further centralize/recentralize power among themselves (the saved white Christians). Democrats suggest the precise opposite. We assert that the flaws of our country and world are the result of immoral/discriminatory restrictions, corruption and exploitation, which are all inevitable results of centralized power.
For Republicans and their preachers, the idea that further centralization will lead to a peaceful world for blacks is a hard sell. The African-American community, after all, holds a naturally patriotic skepticism of the country and government due to past and current disenfranchisement, and the pervasion of black inferiority in every aspect of daily life. Having a sense of entitlement and therefore a belief that your values/interests are/would be lessened by total enfranchisement is the product of a superiority complex. The superiority complex is the foundation of racism.
Racism and fear as an aspect of entitlement explains the current disconnect with blacks and the Non-Christian Republican Party. It is also, why the exploitation of the pedophilic homosexual stereotype is so much more likely to be electorally-effective with white voters than black voters. Contrary to what ihlin suggest and many believe, African-Americans do not rank gay marriage far lower than issues like economic justice because they are disproportionately economically-challenged, for Democratic Party support remains strong across black economic classes and Republican support is unbelievably strong in many dirt poor white regions of the country. It's the superiority complex along with the real world experience of government and corporate abuse that differentiates the two races on this issue.
Additionally, collectivism is intrinsic in African-American culture - a stark contrast to the individualism that white Americans are renowned for worldwide. Even though the majority of teenage African-Americans likely don't know David Walker, Richard Allen or A. Philip Randolph (due a systematic effort to minimize revolutionary African-American icons in public school teachings and American life), every black child born in America is told that their opportunities are the result of those that came before them - that many of their current freedoms and rights are the result of collective power. (Walker, Allen and Randolph were all ordained ministers by the way). Therefore, the improvement of individual conditions cannot completely be at the expense of the community. Instead, blacks are more likely to use their personal wealth to improve the community from which they came. Again, the contrast, which purports that success is the product of birth, is a result of the white American entitlement/superiority complex.
Finally, I think if you asked those 50% of blacks who said Bush should use more religious rhetoric to expand on their belief, they'd respond, "He's so far from Christ, it would take a lot more Jesus to awaken the dumb bastard."
(I'll leave it up to you all to decide whether to recommend it or not to stand in contrast to ihlin's diary)