Can Leah Daughtry Bring Faith to the Party?
By Daniel Bergner, New York Times Magazine, July 20:

On Sundays she is a Pentecostal preacher. During the week she is planning the Democratic convention....

In her positions as Dean’s top aid and the convention’s top official, Daughtry, who is 44 years old, is leading the Democratic Party’s new mission to make religious believers — particularly ardent Christian believers — view the party and its candidates as receptive to, and often impelled by, the dictates of faith. She sparked this crusade, both to transfigure the party’s image as predominantly secular and to take enough votes from the Republicans to win this year’s presidential election, in the aftermath of George W. Bush’s 2004 defeat of John Kerry. And in her vocation as a Pentecostal pastor she stands for faith in an extreme form. There is nothing equivocal about her belief. Hers is a religion not only of divine healing but of talking in tongues....

...in early 2005...Dean....asked her to stay on as chief of staff and backed her plan to hire a team, to be known as Faith in Action, that would help the party to hear, and to be heard by, voters of deep religious conviction. Gradually she put together the F.I.A. group that has met weekly at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in Washington: three evangelicals, a Catholic, a Muslim and a Jew, all with backgrounds blending work in religion and politics. (F.I.A., Daughtry says, will very likely be melded now with the Obama campaign for the coming months, then recommence on its own after the election.)....

This will be the first Democratic convention to start with a religious service, another sign meant to prove that the party is serious about belief, and the F.I.A. members, who have worked for months on how best to inject faith into the convention, want to be sure the gathering is led, and well-attended, by a wide range of the religious....

The big tent theory behind this all is a political good. But it is ok to politely refuse the pompoms and quietly think "ick ick ick, no thanks, I think I will be busy doing other stuff that week?"  This is coming from someone who has often disagreed with the more radical fundamentalist atheist contingent in the blogosphere:  the idea of an "old timey religion" populist revival convention really does turn me off. I really do still like the overall political marketing potential of a moderate version of the separation of church and state thingie, and I think a lot of fellow Americans cynical about politics right and left might agree with me on that front.