If last night's Iowa results prove anything, it's that religion isn't leaving the public square when W. rides home to Texas. Huckabee's huge victory over robot Republican Mitt Romney is the most obvious sign that Holy Ghost power still matters in power politics. But Obama's victory should be read as almost as big an indicator that we are living in a deeply religious moment. Of course, other factors played bigger roles in both men's victories -- Huck's faux-populism, Obama's pure charisma -- but there's no denying that both Republicans and Democrats in Iowa chose the two most faith-fueled candidates.

I comment here as Ishmael, but I write about the religious right for magazines such as Harper's, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, and others under my real name, Jeff Sharlet. I've been writing about religion for 12 years, and the religious right for six. I've taught American religious history at NYU, and next spring, HarperCollins will be publishing the result of several years of research, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. I mention this only to bring whatever credibility I've earned to my main argument: The religious right isn't dead, it's changing, just as as it always has. Progressives who succumb to wishful thinking are setting themselves up for a fall.

This past April, I wrote a diary following the Monica Goodling scandal titled "Yet Another 'Sleeper Cell,'" in which I identified a few more fundamantalist activists like Goodling working within federal government. I also proposed that bloggers systematically take up the work mainstream media had failed to do: Looking beyond the headline names in government to the mid-level positions that actually effect how things are run.

Me with my big ideas. My editor for a major national magazine had the very same idea, only, instead of suggesting the blogosphere take it up, he suggested I take it up for a fall issue of this magazine. So my job this summer is to see if there aren't more Monica Goodlings out there -- not just in DOJ, but throughout federal government.

Kossacks -- help!

Earlier this year, I traveled with Senator Jim Webb and his staff through Southwestern Virginia, his first visit to the region since his upset victory over George Allen. I was on board as a writer for Rolling Stone, but I was there as a fan, too -- of his politics, sure, but also of his fiction. There has never been as talented a novelist in national American politics. But what impressed me most about Jim Webb were the people who supported him, so it's with them that I decided to begin my story for Rolling Stone, just published in the issue on the stands now (look for Amy Winehouse on the cover--much cuter than Jim Webb). Here's the lede:

There's much concern that the Bush administration has been allowing the infiltration of federal government by Christian fundamentalist "sleeper cells," political appointees whose first loyalty is not to the Constitution, but a reductionist understanding of the Bible. It's true, of course, and here's another one...

As Liberalpragmatist pointed out, Fred Thompson, former GOP senator fromTennessee, is a more serious presidential candidate than one might guess based on his acting career. Why not? His roots in the Republican culture of cover-ups run deeper than his current work on behalf of Scooter Libby.

Or, the unofficial lobbying fest known as the National Prayer Breakfast

Today our nation celebrates the 55th annual National Prayer Breakfast, Washington's annual ritual of dedication to the ecumenical Christ. You know the one -- the God we all agree on, whether we're Muslims, Christians, or Jews. All of whom are invited at the Prayer Breakfast to pray to Jesus with the president of the United States.

Yes, the National Prayer Breakfast is that weird...

Actually, it's the scorecard for the 2nd session of the 109th Congress, and the fundamentalists in question, the Washington D.C. lobby shop at the Family Research Council (a spin-off of James Dobson's Focus on the Family) don't represent ALL fundamentalists, of course. But FRC is currently the most powerful of the Washington Christian Right organizations, particularly adept at buttressing its militant faith with pseudo-social science that manages to persuade the dimwitted and/or opportunistic.

First prize in those categories must be shared by the four Democrats to get 100% "True Blue" ratings from FRC, Lincoln Davis of Tennessee's Fourth District, Mike McIntyre of North Carolina's 7th, Collin Peterson of Minnesota's7th, and Jim Marshall of Georgia's 8th...

Condemning Hillary Clinton's war views on Kos may be an exercise in preaching to the choir, but since she's making anti-war noises -- and because I'm flabbergasted at how baldly cynical they are -- I think it's worth taking a moment to review Clinton's latest maneuvers. The fact is, she'll manage to peel off some Kossacks who lose their nerve about standing up to this right-wing Democrat. Consider this a bid to keep those defecting numbers as small as possible.

Two coal miners died today in West Virginia, buried alive when the mine they were working in collapsed, reports the Associated Press. Last year, 47 miners died in mining accidents -- the highest death toll, says the AP, since 1995. As if 1995 was ancient history. The fact is that miners -- and workers in hundreds of other dangerous jobs -- die for two reasons, and both are only hinted at in this story...

Harper's has just posted online my cover story from the December, 2006 issue, "Through a Glass, Darkly: How the Christian Right is Reimagining American History." Since the magazine is postdated, the piece actually arrived in subscribers' mailboxes the second week of November, after the big Democratic win. As is usual when one publishes in Harper's, I was asked to be a guest on a bunch of radio shows. Almost without fail the first or second question was, "Isn't the Christian Right a spent force in American life?"

I don't think so. The death of the Christian Right has been prematurely declared with cyclic regularity ever since the Scopes trial of 1925. They weren't dead then, nor was the movement dead even at the height of the New Deal, when it identified organized labor as a main enemy and began organizing to lobby conservative congressmen, an effort that resulted in Taft-Hartley in 1947 and the destruction of progressive labor. They weren't dead in '64, when they couldn't push Goldwater over the finish line, and they weren't dead in '74, when Billy Graham's pal Nixon revealed his dirty tricks. They keep on ticking.

A long diary on the latest Iraq war feature film -- Children of Men -- and one of the first -- David O. Russell's 1999 Three Kings and why we need populist art to keep reminding us that "Not good enough" is the only honest analysis of left/liberal political activism (so far).

“I believed what I was told.” So said Ford, after not knowing Nixon’s perfidy became impossible. The big question about Ford is, What was he told? Not just about Nixon, but about suffering, politics, life, God, etc. A quietly religious man, he forgave Nixon one Sunday morning –- between church and golf –- so that what he termed “healing” could begin. Now we’re told (should we believe it?) in the gently approving psycho-biography that follows the death of any big man -- even Saddam, today, is given credit for his "courage" -- that Ford, ironically, could never fully forgive his father, who beat his mother and abandoned her when young Ford, nee Leslie Lynch King, Jr., was two.

Such is the paradox of Ford...

(cross-posted at Call Me Ishmael)

An exclusive interview with the chief of staff of Christian Embassy, the behind-the-scenes ministry in the news for proselytizing in the Pentagon.

By Jeff Sharlet

(Cross-posted at The Revealer)

Those who want to understand the mindset of the fundamentalist longterm plan for power may want to check out my friend Kathryn Joyce's startling portrait of the "avant-garde" of fundamentalism in the latest issue of The Nation, "Arrows for the War." More -- 550 million more -- after the jump...

Last spring, the southern magazine Oxford American asked me to write a short essay for their annual Southern Music issue. At the time, I was reading old issues of Vietnam GI, an anti-war paper published in the 60s by and for the men of the paper's title, and edited by the man after whom I'm named. I decided that I would write about that, through an essay about a song. What does this have to do with music? Or with contemporary politics?

Part of the reason I wanted to write the piece, and am re-posting it here, is because I wanted to pay tribute to my late uncle, Vietnam GI's editor, and to call attention to a brilliant new movie dedicated to his memory, Sir! No Sir!, by David Zeiger -- "the suppressed story of the GI Movement to end the war in Vietnam." It's an important movie about the war in Vietnam, which makes it an important movie for those who care about the war in Iraq.

Sounds like a story, right?