This may seem strange since Asay works for Plugged In, a media Web site sponsored by Focus on the Family — a powerful brand name in evangelical media. Yes, he knows the hip writer, actor and director is a proud, articulate atheist. However, he also thinks that Gervais is “actually quite talented and a very funny guy.”

Thus, Asay had mixed feelings when he reviewed, “The Invention of Lying,” the comedian’s new comedy. After all, Gervais had publicly pledged that it would be both a “sweet Hollywood” romantic comedy and the “first ever completely atheistic movie with no concessions.”

For Asay, watching the movie became a “frustrating, disturbing, deeply saddening experience. And it was funny. Which makes it, in some ways, that much worse.” While the movie displayed Gervais’ talents, it also revealed that he has “very little knowledge of what he seeks to skewer. He takes an infantile interpretation of spirituality — one that most of us leave behind for deeper truths by the age of 3 or 4 and deconstructs it to the point of imbecility,” wrote Asay.

But here’s the plot twist. While “The Invention of Lying” has received bad reviews from most religious critics, it has not provoked headline-friendly calls to arms by the usual suspects on the religious right.

This has not, in other words, been “The DaVinci Code,” “The Golden Compass” or even the anti-faith “Religulous” sermon from provocateur Bill Maher. So far, the Gervais opus is drawing small crowds into theaters and zero protesters onto sidewalks. As it began its third week, it had grossed only $16,956,375 while sliding to 16th place at the box office.

“The whole movie industry today is such a one week and you’re done affair,” noted Asay. “If you don’t make waves right away, you’re kind of over. … In retrospect, Gervais and his people may have wanted to pump up that atheism angle in the marketing to get a bigger splash in the press. They needed to do something.”

“The Invention of Lying” takes place in a parallel world in which people cannot lie. Thus, advertisements are rather blunt. The Pepsi slogan is, “When they don’t have Coke,” and a nursing home is called, “A Sad Place for Hopeless Old People.”

Then along comes Mark Bellison, a pudgy loser who, in a moment of desperation, intentionally overdraws his bank account and gets away with it. This discovery changes his life, but he also learns that lying cannot solve all his problems. In the movie’s pivotal scene, the liar played by Gervais comforts his dying mother by telling her she soon will be reunited with her loved ones in a land of peace, love and happiness, where there is no pain.

Hospital workers overhear this proclamation and the loser quickly becomes a pseudo-messiah, offering stunning revelations about a great “man in the sky” who controls people’s lives and decides whether they spend eternity in a good place (lots of ice cream) or a bad place.

Nevertheless, the prophet knows he is a fake. While visiting his mother’s grave he confesses, in a fit of guilt: “I know you’re not up there in a mansion. You’re right here in the ground and I’m the only one who knows that.”

It was impossible to watch that scene, and others in “The Invention of Lying,” without feeling some kind of compassion, said Thaisha Geiger, a language arts teacher who reviews movies for the ChristianAnswers.net Web site.

Since she was not familiar with Gervais, she did some online research to learn more about his beliefs. She was struck by the fact that Gervais lost his faith as a young child. However, he also told ShortList.com, “I always knew that if my mum asked me when she was dying if there was a heaven, I’d say yes. … I think that’s how religion started — as a good lie.”

That painful conflict made it onto the screen, said Geiger.

“The movie really is about his beliefs … so he was probably expecting Christians to yell and scream after they saw this movie,” she said. “But I didn’t feel anger when I saw it. I really walked away feeling sad. … I thought, ‘He’s an atheist. We should pray for him.’ Maybe he’s disappointed that more people aren’t mad.”

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As any evangelical worth his or her salt knows, that question sounds like this: “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” Super aggressive believers prefer: “Are you saved? If you died tonight, would go to heaven or hell?”

Carter remembers replying: “I’m, yeah, actually I have.”

What happened next was strange. The young man was “visibly disappointed” and “wore a look of minor defeat” because he wouldn’t get to save a soul during this lunch period. He ate quickly and departed and, this is the crucial detail for Carter, they never spoke again.

The evangelist wasn’t looking for a friend or dialogue with a believer. He wanted to carve another notch on his Bible, using techniques learned during a soul-saving workshop. If his blunt approach offended strangers, or even strengthened their “Fundie-alert systems,” that was their problem, not his.

Every decade or so there are new, improved techniques for making these spiritual sales pitches, each backed with snappy catch phrases and, these days, with hot websites, books and videos. Then everything changes again a generation later, noted Carter. What you get are stacks of leftover “Left Behind” video games, “What Would Jesus Do?” bracelets, “emerging church” study guides and copies of “The Prayer of Jabez.”

It helps to know that Carter is himself an evangelical who is concerned about evangelism issues. As a journalist, the 39-year-old former U.S. Marine has worked for a number of conservative causes, including World Magazine, the Family Research Center and the presidential campaign of Mike Huckabee. He recently finished helping build Culture11.com, a right-of-center forum for evangelicals, Catholics and mainline Protestants interested in discussing how religion, culture and politics mix in daily life.

That website’s future is uncertain, but before his recent departure Carter nailed a manifesto to that cyber-door — dissecting 10 fads that he believes are hurting evangelical organizations and churches. While most conservatives have been arguing about their political future, in the Barack Obama era, Carter decided to focus on faith issues.

It’s a list that will be puzzling to outsiders not fluent in evangelical lingo. The “Sinner’s Prayer, which reduces the quest for salvation to a short “magical incantation,” made the list, as did the emphasis on “premillennial dispensationalism” and other apocalyptic teachings in some churches.

Carter is also tired of long, improvised public prayers in which every other phrase contains the word “just,” as in, “We just want to thank you Lord.” He would like to hear more sermons focusing on the life of Jesus, as opposed to preachers and evangelists focusing on their own dramatic life “testimonies.” And while he is in favor of growing churches, Carter is worried that the “church growth movement” has evolved from a fad into a permanent fixture on the American scene.

“What most people call the church-growth movement is something that grew out of business principles, instead of growing — organically — out of the life of the church,” he said. “People started trying to figure out how they could change the church so they could get more people to come inside, rather than doing what the early church did, which was going outside the church and reaching people by actually getting to know them. …

“It’s like people started saying, ‘What kind of music do we need to play so that more people will join? What do we need to do to the preaching? What kind media can we add to the services?’ “

But the thread that runs through this online manifesto is that Carter is convinced that evangelicals need to spend less time striving to make quick conversions and more time training disciples who stay the course.

In the end, he said, techniques will not carry over from one generation to another.

“Part of the problem is that evangelicals really don’t have traditions,” said Carter. “Instead, we have these fads that are built on the strengths and talents of individual leaders. … But a real tradition can be handed on to anyone, from generation to generation. It’s hard to hand these evangelical fads down like that, so it seems like we’re always starting over. It’s hard to build something that really lasts.”

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“What Americans would have found absolutely intolerable only a few years ago, a majority now not only tolerates but celebrates,” proclaimed Paul M. Weyrich, chairman of the Free Congress Foundation.

Then came the statement that set pundits to chattering for weeks.

“I no longer believe that there is a moral majority,” proclaimed Weyrich, in a 1999 epistle that made many liberals cheer and some conservatives grumble.

It helps to understand that Weyrich — who died shortly before Christmas — was the strategist who coined the “moral majority” label for the Rev. Jerry Falwell and his new grassroots network. Weyrich urged conservative intellectuals and donors to build think tanks, political-action committees and lobbying groups — mirroring strategies on the left. Above all, he helped lead efforts to convince conservative Catholics, Protestants and Jews that, when it came to issues of faith and family, they could find unity in their shared cultural values.

For many activists, noted direct-mail pioneer Richard A. Viguerie, this legacy is enough to put him on the right’s “version of Mount Rushmore” with William F. Buckley, Jr., Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

But for others — Sen. John McCain leaps to mind — this same Weyrich was a narrow true believer who was a faithful Catholic conservative, first, and a loyal Republican, way, way, second.

Weyrich knew that his famous 1999 epistle on politics and culture was a turning point. After all, the founder of the Heritage Foundation was arguing that America’s cultural heritage was cracked. The leader of the Free Congress Foundation was saying that a GOP-driven Congress was failing, on cultural issues.

For many years, he argued, conservatives assumed that most Americans agreed with them on moral and cultural issues. They also believed that “if we could just elect enough conservatives, we could get our people in as Congressional leaders and they would fight to implement our agenda.” But this equation didn’t work.

“The reason, I think, is that politics itself has failed. And politics has failed because of the collapse of the culture,” he argued. “The culture we are living in becomes an ever-wider sewer. In truth, I think we are caught up in a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics.”

In an interview months after issuing that letter, Weyrich explained that two radically different groups of politicos — with sharply different motives — misinterpreted his main message.

On the political left, many said he had issued a ringing call for religious conservatives to go back to church and stay there. On the political right, many of his friends and allies were angry and felt betrayed for the same reason. Apparently, they read right past his statement: “Please understand that I am not quarreling with anybody who pursues politics, because it is important to pursue politics, to be involved in government.”

The key, said Weyrich, was that he had become convinced that many conservatives couldn’t see that it is almost impossible to pass legislation that produces change at the level of homes, churches, schools, theaters and malls. It is almost impossible for politics to shape or redeem culture. Instead, the realities of media, education and mass culture are what shape — over time — America’s political trends.

The political strategist knew that “values voters” in red zip codes would continue to win some battles in the years ahead. But the political victories that would matter the most, he said, would be the defensive moves that protected their own churches, schools, missions and other religious groups from future legal attacks.

Weyrich never urged anyone to quit. But the former journalist did warn religious leaders that it was time to focus on winning the “culture wars” in their own homes and sanctuaries.

“We probably have lost the culture war,” he concluded, in the 1999 letter. “That doesn’t mean the war is not going to continue, and that it isn’t going to be fought on other fronts. But in terms of society in general, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important. …

“We need to drop out of this culture, and find places … where we can live godly, righteous and sober lives.”

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And, lo, the former Southern Baptist pastor told the voters: “Are you about worn out by all the television commercials you’ve been seeing, mostly about politics? I don’t blame you. At this time of year, sometimes it’s nice to pull aside from all of that and just remember that what really matters is a celebration of the birth of Christ and being with our family and our friends. I hope that you and your family will have a magnificent Christmas season. And on behalf of all of us, God bless and merry Christmas.”

This caused a firestorm among the political elites that symbolized the year’s biggest trend in religion news — the revenge of the infamous “values voters” who, apparently, remain alive and well in church pews across the heartland.

But will the Republican Party win this “pew gap” contest again? That was the question that dominated the Religion Newswriters Association poll to determine the top 10 religion news stories in 2007. There were plenty of new signs that the so-called religious right exists, but that it isn’t a monolith after all.

Here’s how America’s religion-beat specialists described the year’s top story: “Evangelical voters ponder whether they will be able to support the eventual Republican candidate, as they did in 2004, because of questions about the leaders’ faith and-or platform. Many say they would be reluctant to vote for Mormon Mitt Romney.”

Then, in the number-two slot, was the flip side of that political coin: “Leading Democratic presidential candidates make conscious efforts to woo faith-based voters after admitting failure to do so in 2004.”

The rise of Huckabee was the strongest sign that the “values voters” are still out there, but that they are not meshing well with the Republican Party establishment. The latest Southern Baptist from Hope, Ark., has been preaching a blend of conservative morality and populist economics that made him sound like an old-fashioned Bible Belt Democrat from the days before Roe v. Wade.

“The Huckabee surge represents a break with what has been standard operating procedure within the GOP for more than a generation,” argued columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr., of the Washington Post, an outspoken Catholic who remains a Democrat. “The former Arkansas governor has exposed a fault line within the Republican coalition. The old religious right is dying because it subordinated the views of its followers to short-term political calculations. The white evangelical electorate is tired of taking orders from politicians who care more about protecting the wealthy than ending abortion, more about deregulation than family values.”

Here is the rest of the RNA top 10 list:

(3) The Anglican wars continued, as an Episcopal Church promise to exercise restraint on homosexual issues failed to bring peace in the global Anglican Communion. Doctrinal debates about marriage and sex continued to cause tensions in other flocks as well, both Christian and Jewish.

(4) Debates about global warming increased in importance, with many oldline Protestant leaders giving the topic a high priority. Meanwhile, some evangelical leaders argued about its importance in comparison with other social and moral issues.

(5) Religious leaders on both sides of the aisle questioned what to do about illegal immigration, with some clergy daring to shelter undocumented immigrants.

(6) Thousands of Buddhist monks led a pro-democracy movement in Myanmar, which was then crushed by the government.

(7) Conservative Episcopalians kept leaving the U.S. church in order to align with traditionalist Anglican bishops in Africa and elsewhere in the global South, initiating yet another round of legal disputes about church endowment funds and property.

(8) In another round of 5-4 votes, the U.S. Supreme Court took conservative stands on three cases with religious implications: upholding a ban on partial-birth abortions, allowing public schools to establish some limits on free speech and rejecting a challenge to the government’s Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives.

(9) Transitions continued at the top of major Evangelical Protestant institutions, as symbolized by the deaths of Jerry Falwell, Rex Humbard, Ruth Bell Graham, D. James Kennedy and Tammy Faye Messner, the ex-wife of Jim Bakker.

(10) Roman Catholic leaders in the United States wrestled with the high cost of settling legal cases linked to decades of clergy sexual abuse of children and teen-agers. The price tag reached $2.1 billion, with a record $660 million settlement in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

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“I am an evangelical Christian who tries to live under biblical authority. A fundamental is the dignity of human life. We are all created in the image of God,” said Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine and author of “God’s Politics.”

But it’s time for new strategies, he said. Evangelicals should try to “dramatically reduce the number of abortions in America” through adoption and education, while striving to find “common ground to actually save unborn lives.”

The message between the lines: Think about voting for Democrats.

But Land insisted that evangelicals must continue to demand legal protections for the unborn.

“I want to put together a coalition that will work and do what we can to save individual babies one at a time,” said Land, leader of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. “But the fact is, if we didn’t have laws against segregation, we would still have it. If we didn’t have laws against slavery, we would still have it.”

The message between the lines: Stay the course with the GOP.

Both of these preachers knew that evangelical Christians — especially young ones — have yet to embrace a 2008 presidential candidate. That’s why Republicans are sweating and Democrats are praying, even in public.

Wallis and Land were arguing for a reason. Young evangelicals are losing faith in the current occupant of the White House, according to new numbers from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Many would be willing to listen to a Democrat who risked blending progressive politics with traditional moral values. But is that heresy?

Here’s the big news. Five years ago, President Bush’s approval rating with white evangelicals between the ages of 18 and 30 was 87 percent — a number that has fallen to 45 percent. Meanwhile, 52 percent of older evangelicals continue to back the president.

Back in 2001, 55 percent of the young who called themselves “evangelicals” or “born-again” said they were Republicans, as opposed to 16 percent who were Democrats and 26 percent independents. This time around, it was 40 percent Republican, 19 percent Democrat and 32 percent independent.

“It isn’t 100 percent clear why this has occurred,” said John C. Green of the University of Akron, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum. “The young evangelicals remain quite conservative on moral and social issues. That just isn’t changing or it isn’t changing very much. …

“There is a real sense that they are afraid of being seen as being judgmental, but if you push further you find out that they are still not backing away from traditional Christian beliefs.”

On abortion, 70 percent of young evangelicals said it should be “more difficult for a woman to get an abortion” — a stance claimed by 55 percent of older evangelicals and 39 percent of young Americans in general.

Nevertheless, it’s possible that subtle changes are happening behind the political headlines, according to sociologist Michael Lindsay, author of “Faith in the Halls of Power.” The “populist evangelicalism” of the past is evolving into a “cosmopolitan evangelicalism” that seeks success in Hollywood, on Wall Street and in the Ivy League, as well as on Capitol Hill.

Some of these young evangelicals don’t want to hang Thomas Kinkade paintings on their walls, fill their bookshelves with “Left Behind” novels or sing pseudo-romantic praise choruses in sprawling megachurches. And when it comes to politics, they also care about the environment, health care and social justice.

Eventually, these changes will affect their politics. The young evangelicals want to keep their conservative approach to faith, but apply it to a wider spectrum of issues, while using a different style of activism.

“The edges have been softened,” said Lindsay, at a forum dissecting the Pew Forum research. Thus, while “populist evangelicals want to take back America” or contribute to the “Christianization of this country, cosmopolitan evangelicals have a more modest goal.

“They simply want their faith to be seen as legitimate, authentic, and — they hope in the end — attractive and winsome. In the same way, they do want their faith to draw others, but they use different forms of mobilization that are far more subtle, more nuanced, and because of that, more significant.”

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Gov. Mike Huckabee thought about that after Hurricane Katrina. The ordained Southern Baptist minister also knew that the summer camping season was over and that thousands of people fleeing New Orleans had to go somewhere.

“I saw on TV people on the bridges of Interstate 10 stranded for days without water, and I thought, this isn’t Rwanda. This isn’t Indonesia. … This was the United States of America,” said the former governor, who is now part of the throng of Republican presidential candidates. “These were the neighbors just to the south of us in Louisiana. It was beyond my comprehension that we could get TV cameras to those people but we couldn’t get a boat or a bottle of water to them.”

Thus, he asked religious leaders to open camps all over Arkansas to the evacuees, while urging the public to rally around this blunt public policy: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

This was one case in which critics didn’t challenge his link between private faith and public action, said Huckabee, meeting with journalists at a recent talkback session at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. This didn’t turn into another nasty clash between God and the government because the need was great and this faith-based effort united citizens instead of dividing them.

Activists on the right will have to do more of that. Of course, Huckabee told the journalists that he has no intention of surrendering on moral issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. Nevertheless, religious conservatives need to be less confrontational when it comes to convincing skeptical Americans that faith can be a positive force in the public square.

After all, he said, it’s hard to believe that anyone actually thinks that political leaders are supposed to separate their personal beliefs from their public convictions.

“I sometimes marvel when people running for office are asked about faith and their answer is, ‘Oh, I don’t get into that. I keep that completely separate. My faith is completely immaterial to how I think and how I govern,’ ” he said. “To me, that is really tantamount to saying that one’s faith is so marginal, so insignificant and so inconsequential that it really doesn’t impact the way one lives. I would consider it an extraordinarily shallow faith that does not really impact the way we think about other human beings and the way we respond to them.”

No one debated that concept after Katrina. Thus, Huckabee listed several other unifying moral issues that he thinks deserve attention on the political right.

While Americans disagree on what to do about health-care reform, the nation could rally around efforts to provide health care for children, he said. Liberals and conservatives also could focus on funding health-care programs that fight the big three activities — smoking, overeating and “under-exercising” — that fuel soaring medical costs.

While Huckabee acknowledged that environmental issues cause heated debates, he believes that it’s time for conservatives to become more involved in efforts to promote the “better stewardship of the environment and in development of an energy source that is not foreign based but domestically produced.”

And then there is the issue of corporate corruption, with business leaders drawing giant bonuses while wrecking their companies. Surely, conservatives can agree that this is immoral, said Huckabee.

“I don’t see how we can call it anything other than a moral issue,” he said. “That’s not free enterprise. That’s theft.”

The point is that religious conservatives are will have to broaden their agendas and be willing to work on new issues, said Huckabee. They can do this without compromising on the essentials.

“I really do think that if Christian conservatives, who have … held the Republican Party’s feet to the fire on issues as they relate to traditional conservative social areas, no longer play that role, it not only is going to be the end of relevancy for them, but I also think that it means that the Republican Party will lose a lot of people. They will say, ‘Well, you know what, if they’re not going to be the party that really cares about these issues, I’ll go home to the Democratic Party.’ A lot of those folks came from the Democratic Party to begin with.”

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So Barack Obama caused raised eyebrows when he turned to that page in the evangelical songbook during the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

“We worship an awesome God in the Blue States,” he said, in the speech that made him a rising star. “We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. … We are one people.”

Obama has mixed gospel images and liberal politics ever since and his ability to reach pews without frightening the skeptical elites is crucial to his White House hopes.

Thus, all kinds of people paid close attention last week when he spoke to the 50th anniversary convention of the United Church of Christ, a small flock that has proudly set the pace for liberal Christianity. At the heart of his speech was his own spiritual rebirth two decades ago, when he responded to an altar call by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

“He introduced me to someone named Jesus Christ,” said Obama. “I learned that my sins could be redeemed. I learned that those things I was too weak to accomplish myself, He would accomplish with me if I placed my trust in Him. And in time, I came to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world and in my own life.

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No, wait, honest. Stop laughing.

The leaders of a liberal advocacy group called Media Matters for America recently released a study entitled “Left Behind: The Skewed Representation of Religion in Major News Media” that says journalists consistently dedicate more ink to covering conservative leaders than to those on the left side of the spectrum.

“Coverage of religion not only over represents some voices and under represents others, it does so in a way that is consistently advantageous to conservatives,” according to the study. “Religion is often depicted in the news media as a politically divisive force, with two sides roughly paralleling the broader political divide: On one side are cultural conservatives who ground their political values in religious beliefs; and on the other side are secular liberals, who have opted out of debates that center on religious-based values.”

The bottom line, according to Media Matters, is that religious conservatives were “quoted, mentioned or interviewed” 2.8 times more often than liberals. The study focused on coverage between the 2004 election — the “values voters” earthquake — and the end of 2006. It focused on coverage in major secular newspapers, the three major broadcast television networks, major cable news channels and PBS.

With a few exceptions, the study contrasted the coverage of a small circle of evangelical Protestants with the coverage of a more complex list of liberal mainline Protestants, progressive evangelicals and others.

The 10 conservatives included James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Charles Colson of Prison Fellowship, Franklin Graham of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network and the late Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority.

The 10 liberals and “progressives” included Robert Edgar of the National Council of Churches of Christ, C. Weldon Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance, Rabbi David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, Jesse Jackson of the Rainbow Coalition and Jim Wallis of Sojourners.

Were these lists fair representations of a spectrum of beliefs on either the left or the right? The conservative list does not, for example, include a representative or two drawn from the ranks of Roman Catholic clergy, Jewish rabbis or doctrinally conservative mainline Protestants. The list on the left is better, but there are glaring omissions — such as Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State or the Episcopal Church’s Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori.

It is certainly true that leaders on the religious right have drawn more than their share of news coverage during recent decades of American political life. However this raises a crucial question, which is whether religious movements should be judged by the political maneuvers of a handful of outspoken leaders. Should politics always trump doctrine?

Meanwhile, many conservative evangelicals, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox believers and others have to cringe whenever they see themselves represented in the national media by more quotes from Dobson or Robertson. Who are the leaders on the religious left who make other liberals cringe whenever they open their mouths?

So why have a few religious conservatives dominated the news, while religious liberals have been left in the shadows?

For starters, conservative groups have been growing in size and power, while liberal groups — especially mainline Protestant churches — have lost millions of members. Journalists pay special attention to groups that they believe are gaining power.

Journalists also focus on trends that they consider strange, bizarre and even disturbing. Certainly, one of the hottest news stories in the past quarter century of American life has been the rise of the religious right and its political union with the Republican Party. For many elite journalists, this story has resembled the vandals arriving to sack Rome.

One of the nation’s top religion writers heard an even more cynical theory to explain this evidence that journalists seem eager to quote conservatives more than liberals when covering religion news.

“Personally, I think there’s much truth to what the study claims,” said Gary Stern of the Journal News in Westchester, N.Y., in a weblog post. “But why? Some progressive religious leaders have told me one theory: that media people are anti-religion, so they trot out angry, self-righteous, conservative voices who make all religion look bad.”

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According to a fictitious poll by CNN, Time and Cat Fancy Magazine, 52 percent of calico cats surveyed were afraid — even deathly afraid — of the attorney general and another 36 percent were “somewhat afraid.” Some cats said they believed Ashcroft is, in fact, a sign of the devil.

“There have been reported cases of young kittens actually dying of fear when Ashcroft appears on television,” said the fake news story. “Luckily for them, they have nine lives.”

Behind the satire was an Internet report that spread as a rumor that became an “urban legend” about the Pentecostal Christian who was the highest of lightning rods during the first administration of President George W. Bush. Ashcroft will soon leave the cabinet, but this episode offers a window into how the religious and secular left viewed his faith and even the faith of his boss.

The rumor? Here is how it was stated by the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society (www.snopes.com): “Attorney General John Ashcroft believes calico cats are a sign of the devil.” The site says this rumor is “false” and calls it “one of the most bizarre items we’ve had to tackle in recent memory.”

The key to understanding urban legends is that the people who spread them sincerely want to believe they are true, said Barbara Mikkelson, a curator at this urban legends research site. They don’t believe they are spreading lies.

“People have a tendency to immediately believe rumors about people that they don’t like or that they don’t respect,” she said. “We tend to spread the stories that, on some level, we agree with. It tells us that we are right.

“So along comes this story that is perfect and it confirms all of those views that we already hold. Of course we want to share it. It’s just too perfect.”

In the Internet age, legions of people click “forward” and pass the rumor along to friends through email, many of whom do the same or even post it somewhere on the World Wide Web.

Urban legends are especially popular among religious conservatives, millions of whom believe that mainstream media conspire to hide the best and the worst of the news. Thus, digital true believers excitedly circulate reports about NASA confirming biblical miracles, evil activists asking the Federal Communications Commission to zap religious media and a born-again president boldly sharing his faith with troubled teens.

But this particular legend sprang up on the left, beginning with web columnist and Democratic National Committee treasurer Andrew Tobias. Citing anonymous sources, he wrote that members of Ashcroft’s advance team had confirmed that their boss “believes calico cats are signs of the devil” and wants them removed from his path.

When pushed, Tobias declined to be more specific about sources. The tale of the demonic cats leapt into cyberspace and assumed a life of its own, as anyone can learn by typing “Ashcroft,” “calico” and “Satan” (or “devil”) into a computer search engine.

The attorney general laughed off the rumors — again and again. Finally, a reporter from The American Enterprise asked if he had any idea how the rumor began.

“Absolutely none. … In any case, there’s no truth to it,” said Ashcroft, a graduate of Yale and the University of Chicago Law School. “I owned a calico cat on the farm I lived on until I went away to be the state auditor of Missouri.”

Still, the urban legend grew. It even reached the New York Times.

The natural tendency, said Mikkelson, is to focus on who starts the rumor. The more important question is this: Who is spreading the urban legend and why are they doing so? The Ashcroft rumor is especially interesting because it was spread by powerful people in the mainstream of politics and media.

“What we have here is a mirror held up to the people who are spreading it,” she said. “What it shows us is something about their values and their hopes and their fears about the world around them. … Even if the story isn’t true, they believe that it ought to be true. They want it to be true.”

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Thus, Candy Crowley of CNN found herself sitting with John Kerry in a super-ordinary coffee shop in Dubuque, Iowa. The veteran political correspondent ordered coffee.

The senator, from Massachusetts, ordered green tea.

The waitress, from Iowa, was puzzled.

“I advised the senator that he would need to carry his own green tea in Iowa and probably several other states, as well,” quipped Crowley, speaking at the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches in South Florida.

Yes, it’s time for “post mortems” on 2004. So far, said Crowley, the experts insist the race was decided by — take your pick — the 22 percent of the voters that yearned for “moral values” or the 23 percent that were white evangelical Christians.

Crowley grew up in the Midwest and she thinks she can tell red zones from blue zones. Democrats have cornered the green-tea crowd, she said. Republicans are winning what Capital Beltway insiders now call the “Applebee’s vote.” This schism may have as much to do with cappuccinos and chainsaws as with the New York Times and the Southern Baptist Convention.

Faith played a major role, but it’s simplistic to say that religious people voted for President George W. Bush and secularists for Kerry, said Crowley. The religious left has its own moral and spiritual beliefs and it will, in future elections, find ways to express them in the public square.

It would also be inaccurate to claim that evangelicals marched into voting booths and seized control. Bush won 52 percent of Catholic voters, facing a Catholic candidate, and 59 percent of the overall Protestant vote. The New York Times noted that the president, in four years, raised his share of the Jewish vote from 19 to 25 percent, winning two-thirds of the Orthodox Jewish votes.

The elites just didn’t get it. “Somewhere along the line, all of us missed this moral-values thing,” said Crowley.

This will be painful for journalists to hear. It is one thing, after decades of dissecting media-bias statistics, to know that armies of religious conservatives believe American newsrooms are packed with God-forsaken libertines. It will be harder for journalists to admit that they are blind to important stories.

Nevertheless, it’s time to face the facts, said Roy Peter Clark, senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.

“I am now taking seriously the theory that we mainstream journalists are different from mainstream America. ‘Different’ is too pale a word. We are alienated. We may live in the same country, but we treat each other like aliens,” he said, in an essay called “Confessions of an Alienated Journalist.”

“The churched people who embrace Bush, in spite of a bumbling war and a stumbling economy, are more than alien to me. They are invisible. … My blind spots blot out half of America. And that makes me less of a citizen, and less of a journalist.”

As a Catholic progressive, Clark said he finds it hard to hear “moral values” without thinking of “showy piety and patriotism, with more than a dash of racism and homophobia.” He knows all about “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and Bubba the Love Sponge. How come so many other Americans know what it means to be “evangelical,” “charismatic” and “born again” and feel at home at church suppers?

Right now, there needs to be “more self-doubt in the journalistic system, as opposed to arrogance,” said Clark, reached at his office. “We need to be able to say that we don’t know it all and that we need to learn. We need to take a step back.”

Most of all, said Crowley, journalists and blue-zone leaders must grasp that many parents feel threatened by the “coarsening” of American culture. They feel attacked.

“It’s like they are saying, ‘I was made to feel like a freak because I go to church’ or ‘I was made to feel like I was an idiot because I believe in God,’ ” she said. “They’re telling us, ‘I want my family safe and I want to be able to teach my children what I believe is true.’

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