In 2003, soon-to-be New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller tried to explain what was happening at the intersection of evangelical Christianity and the Republican Party to an audience that was most assuredly anxious.

Democrats were worried in those days about creeping theocracy; that born-again President George W. Bush was using the post-9/11 conflict with militant Islamism and the fight against gay marriage to turn America into some kind of Christo-fascist state.

The rediscovery of Margaret Atwood’s "The Handmaid’s Tale," Bill Maher’s proselytizing atheism and, most explicitly, Michael Moore’s "Fahrenheit 9/11" all pointed to the left-wing fears about evangelical and fundamentalist Christians moving the United States away from a pluralistic, religiously free nation into some kind of Bible-beating dystopia.

Keller was writing for the same audience that Moore, Maher and Atwood were all reaching for, but he offered a different, much more accurate view: “The interesting story, then, is not that Mr. Bush is a captive of the religious right, but that his people are striving to make the religious right a captive of the Republican Party.”

What Keller could not have known, but might have been able to foresee, was that it wasn’t just one party doing that work. Far more effective than anything Karl Rove could have imagined was what Democrats did to stampede the devout into the opposing side.

As it turned out, being called “America’s own........

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