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" (Optional soundtrack to this blog post...)      FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. \u2014 Pastor Tullian Tchividjian was preaching on what it meant that Jacob had come to wrestle with the Lord, getting himself both a new name \u2014 &amp;quot;Israel&amp;quot; \u2014 and a dislocated hip for his trouble. &amp;quot;God gave him a new name because only through God can we get a new identity. That&amp;#039;s something that Madonna&amp;#039;s always talking about \u2014 how, with every record, she has to reinvent herself, that she always has to reinvent herself. It was no different with Jacob. He said, &amp;#039;I&amp;#039;ve got everything I need right here.&amp;#039; And then he realized that he really had nothing without the power and presence of God. His original name meant The Deceiver, whether that meant stealing his brother&amp;#039;s birthright, or stealing a man&amp;#039;s cattle to make himself wealthy. But God gave him a new name, Israel, that really meant The Fighter, because only God has the real power to change who we are.&amp;quot; The Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church looms about U.S. 1 here like something huge and white that has landed from another dimension. It a complex of bright white buildings with the steeple above the sanctuary throwing a shadow over the entire place. The congregation was following right along with Pastor Tully, even when Madonna made what admittedly was a rather startling cameo in the sermon. (Me? I was sitting in the back of the church and, profane jackeen that I am, I kept thinking about reinvention in the context of Willard Romney. It&amp;#039;s probably best that this campaign is winding down.) Coral Ridge is an important place in the rise of what used to be known as the Religious Right in this country before it became known, in the South at least, as The Republican Party. Places like Coral Ridge were central to how the Christian fundamentalist churches organized themselves into the political force that they have become.  Pastor D. James Kennedy founded the Coral Ridge church in 1960. By 1974, he had built one of the very first powerful television ministries, The Coral Ridge Hour. Eventually, the Coral Ridge ministry became a $37 million-a-year enterprise. While not as well known as Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, Kennedy was no less powerful in his ability to link his ministry with the centers of the power in the rising conservative movement. Kennedy often preached on the topic of America&amp;#039;s being a Christian nation; indeed, he&amp;#039;s credited by many people with bringing that particular bundle of historical bushwah into the national dialogue again. He also founded a study center in Washington that gave out an annual award. Recipients included Tom DeLay and John Ashcroft. In the person of James Kennedy, you can see the transformation of the Republican party from a haven for stuffy financial Babbitts to a choir of howling theocrats. In places like the Coral Ridge church, you can see the power of that transformation made flesh, and these are the places without which Republicans cannot win anymore. They also were the places in which most of the purely theological doubts about the advisability of handing the presidency over to a Mormon burned most brightly. Until this year, of course, when minor theological quibbles over whether or not the risen Christ paid a visit to the Algonquins were set aside for the high mission of extracting the current president from the White House and, as they say, getting our country back. That action came after the services. As they were leaving the sanctuary, the faithful were handed &amp;quot;voter&amp;#039;s guides&amp;quot; from something called the Florida Family Council, which lined up candidates for every office on a scorecard showing how they stood on certain issues. You can probably guess most of them. All the Republicans supported all the issues in question \u2014 a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution, a constitutional amendment to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Often enough, most of the Democrats were not listed as against any of this. Most of them were listed as &amp;quot;non-responsive.&amp;quot; In other words, most of them blew off the Florida Family Council. Which is understandable, I guess, although why some of them wouldn&amp;#039;t take the time to tell the Florida Family Council, which wouldn&amp;#039;t support a Democrat if he were running against Charlie Manson for school board, to stuff its opposition to gay marriage is something that leads me to wonder if Democrats ever really will engage these people on their own ground. Pat Marscheck stood at the door at the front of the sanctuary, handing the voter&amp;#039;s guide to everyone who came out. &amp;quot;The idea is for Christians to pray to God for guidance in voting, as far as looking for Biblical principles, and to apply them when we go to vote,&amp;quot; she told me. &amp;quot;The paper that you have has some information about it. For instance, God cares for everybody, for all people, for babies. God cares about unborn babies and when we consider what candidates we&amp;#039;re going to vote for, we should take that into consideration, as to the kind of decisions a person should make. If they believe in murdering babies and taking tax money to pay for murdering babies, we should consider that when we vote. People were polite to Patricia, even to the point of handing the guides back if they&amp;#039;d already voted. Things were a little livelier in the Fellowship Hall, in which Barbara Caputo and her husband were leading a discussion of the election at a back table that was sufficiently enthusiastic to alarm some elderly ladies sitting at a table nearby. &amp;quot;You know,&amp;quot; Barbara told her friends, &amp;quot;if that Obamacare isn&amp;#039;t repealed, we&amp;#039;re going to lose all our doctors. There just waiting to see if it stays and, if it does, they&amp;#039;ll leave. They&amp;#039;ll leave the country.&amp;quot; Somebody else mentioned the president&amp;#039;s plan to arrest doctors who refuse to be part of his health-care plan. &amp;quot;That sounds like a dictatorship,&amp;quot; someone said. &amp;quot;Well, it is a dictatorship,&amp;quot; someone else responded, as the elderly ladies across the room pursed their lips and tried not to notice. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s a Socialist, that&amp;#039;s what he is.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;He doesn&amp;#039;t even go to church,&amp;quot; Barbara said. &amp;quot;My daughter, she talked at a college up north, and she told me that they&amp;#039;ve all had all this stuff just force-fed to them. She said that they all believe in evolution, that we all descended from monkeys. All the teachers and professors are Communists.&amp;quot; Everyone at the table nodded. The old ladies across the way looked off out the windows. Barbara moved down here from New Jersey, where she has relatives who survived the storm in good order. &amp;quot;Thank Jesus for that,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;I think Romney&amp;#039;s going to make this country proud again, like it should be. But, as for Obama, I think he&amp;#039;s a Socialist. He wants to keep everybody even. He doesn&amp;#039;t want anybody to be successful. I raised my daughter to give her a better life and he wants to take that incentive away from all of us. And I believe the man is a Muslim. I don&amp;#039;t believe he is a Christian like he says he is. And he&amp;#039;s not going to take care of Israel, and that&amp;#039;s God&amp;#039;s country and that&amp;#039;s where we have to be. &amp;quot;Since the beginning, we read his book. We&amp;#039;ve researched it and that&amp;#039;s my opinion, that the man is a Muslim. And, well, our soldiers, the Democrats are noted for hating the military. They want to cut their budget and they&amp;#039;re pulling our men, not that I ever want to see anyone go to war and lose their sons, but we need to protect this country. And if they think just because they killed... whatever his name is \u2014 what&amp;#039;s his name? Bin Loudon? \u2014 that it&amp;#039;s over. It&amp;#039;s not over, you know?&amp;quot; Barbara went off home, and one of the elderly ladies grabbed my elbow as I was following Barbara out. &amp;quot;They were talking about politics,&amp;quot; she said to me. &amp;quot;And, my Lord, they were loud.&amp;quot; I agreed with her. People talk politics in this country. And they&amp;#039;re loud. I found Pastor Tully in a small reception area in another part of the complex. Children, full of the Holy Spirit, cookies, and high-octane lemonade, were scuttling around everyone&amp;#039;s feet. I wondered if, give Coral Ridge&amp;#039;s importance in the history of politically weaponized conservative religion, Pastor Tully had found it hard to resist the temptation to bring politics into the pulpit. After all, there&amp;#039;s something of a family tradition here. Pastor Tully is the grandson of Billy Graham, preacher to presidents, who personally had officiated at the consecration of this huge church almost forty years ago. &amp;quot;I am a fan of making sure that, on Sunday morning, what we&amp;#039;re celebrating is our citizenship in God&amp;#039;s kingdom and nothing smaller,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Oh, no, it&amp;#039;s one of the things that I say, no, absolutely. I think it is a huge, huge, huge mistake to use the sacred space of the pulpit to address political issues. They&amp;#039;re just too small. If I&amp;#039;m preaching through the Bible, and I come to something that might be relevant to something that we&amp;#039;re currently dealing with, then that&amp;#039;s different. On Sunday morning, it&amp;#039;s very specific. God gathers sinners to hear good news from all tribes, tongues and nations, so that we can celebrate our citizenship, not in America, but in his kingdom. It&amp;#039;s a reminder that worship is not an escape from the real world, but that this world is not all that there is.&amp;quot; The crowd long since had melted away into the bright morning, gone off again into the profane world in which we will come to elect another president on Tuesday. Pastor Tully&amp;#039;s good faith aside, politics hung in the air again like a cloud. It never leaves a place like this. It was mixed in with the bricks and mortar of the place. Politics lodged long ago in the spirit, darkening its outer edges. Stay tuned to The Politics Blog on RSS and Twitter for more coverage from Florida, and all week from writing from every single swing state.... "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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