THE BOOK

Religion is playing a bigger role in American politics than ever before. James Dobson, the nation’s most powerful Christian Right figure, has said he’ll oppose John McCain for president, raising questions about McCain’s ability to win his party’s own base. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, have hired evangelical outreach directors to woo Dobson’s followers. And uproars over Obama’s pastor are dominating the headlines.

In the new paperback edition of The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America are Winning the Culture War, Beliefnet.com Politics Editor and U.S. News & World Report Contributing Editor Dan Gilgoff explains how Dobson succeeded in injecting religion into American public life in unprecedented ways. In a new afterword, Gilgoff shows how evangelicals could expand their influence in the ’08 race by becoming a swing constituency that’s much more receptive to Democratic candidates.

The Jesus Machine provides the first inside look at Dobson’s vast national network, the most powerful web of organizations the Christian Right has ever known. The book base been praised as “remarkably astute” by the conservative National Review Online and as “masterful” by the liberal Daily Kos.

Consider the passage of two-dozen amendments to state constitutions banning gay marriage. Or the reelection of George W. Bush by winning 80 percent of the evangelical vote. The Terri Schiavo congressional intervention. The Christian Right has achieved more in the last few years than at any time in its history. Yet the story of the man and the organization that have orchestrated those successes—James Dobson and his Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family—has gone almost entirely untold. Until now.

From its origins as a Southern California radio show dispensing parenting advice, Dobson has turned Focus on the Family into the command center for an unrivaled grassroots army. Dobson’s daily radio show reaches six to ten million Americans a week and elicits so much listener mail—173,000 pieces per month—that Focus needs its own zip code.

Gilgoff was afforded wide access to Focus on the Family’s Colorado Springs headquarters, its so-called Washington embassy, the Family Research Council, and its state-level affiliates. In addition to rare interviews with Dobson himself, The Jesus Machine features interviews with Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, Chuck Colson, the scandal-plagued Ted Haggard, and scores of others.

Besides discovering how Dobson became more powerful than Falwell, Reed, or Pat Robertson ever were, readers will learn:

» How Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton applied the lessons of the Democrats losing the “values” vote in 2004 to wage their 2008 campaigns.

» Why John McCain’s evangelical and Catholic outreach helped win him the Republican nomination, even though he once denounced Christian Right leaders as “agents of intolerance.”

» Why evangelicals are identifying less as Republicans than they did juat a few years ago.

» How Focus on the Family’s Ohio affiliate organized the 2004 get-out-the-vote drive that sent Bush back to the White House.

» How a handful of evangelical activists in Dobson’s network coaxed Congress into intervening in the Schiavo case, even as most evangelical Americans opposed the effort.