Presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and John McCain are publicly grilled today by the massively popular pontiff of Protestant Evangelicalism - a deceptively genial inquisitor who, standing in the shoes of Billy Graham, could make or break either man's candidature
United States presidential candidates are on a pilgrimage this weekend - one that is a peculiarly American mix of religion and politics with a sensibility that is as far from Compostela as, well, California.
Which is in fact where Barack Obama and John McCain's questing will take them on Saturday: to Orange County, an upmarket suburban sprawl south of Los Angeles where the two men will pay homage to the mightiest religious figure in the land today - a burly fellow named Rick Warren, whose Hawaiian shirts and irrepressible gregariousness can make him seem like an ageing party animal at a college reunion. But don't be fooled by Warren's appearance.
Pastor Rick is the real successor to Billy Graham, not only because he is so religiously and politically savvy, but because he is the embodiment of the regnant American faith - a dress-down Christianity for a shopping mall spirituality that is preached in PowerPoint services spread across an entire weekend in order to accommodate the 23,000 members of Warren's fabulously popular Saddleback Church.
Channelling the spirit of Wal-Mart, "megachurches" like Saddleback are in effect the superstores of retail religion, profiting from economies of scale and offering a consumer-friendly experience that is not as far from the nation's revivalist heritage as it may look. The emphasis remains on cultivating a personal relationship with Jesus without the mediation of liturgy and clergy and tradition per se, and if megachurch Evangelicalism doesn't go too far beyond that (a weakness for the long term, as recent studies have shown) it's pretty good for now.
Critics may call this Christianity Lite, a capitulation to culture that discards the fire-breathing elements of colonial-era preachers to recast Jesus as friend more than saviour, and an affirmation of the American dream rather than a challenge. Yet it is enormously successful.
If Saddleback is the latest reincarnation of Evangelical Protestantism, then Rick Warren is its pontiff, and more. As he sits down on Saturday to interview Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, and Obama's Republican counterpart, John McCain, Warren will be assuming a role unlike that of any other clergyman. He will spend an hour talking to each man in an unmediated, unfiltered conversation about their faith and how it applies to the challenges facing the nation and the world.
So how did Rick Warren snag this gig? One answer: he earned it. He is the author of The Purpose-Driven Life, a new kind of Christian self-help manual that is one of the biggest-selling books of all time, and he is an organisational genius who has applied his networking skills to a church-planting movement that makes St Paul look like a piker. At 54, he retains an infectious enthusiasm and prodigious energy. He and his staff have given "purpose-driven training" to half a million pastors around the world, and he claims that one in 20 churches in the US has adopted his church-growth methods.
Evangelicalism is, spiritually if not religiously, the closest thing America has to a national church. Between 25 and 40 per cent of American believers could be described as Evangelicals, a range that remains fuzzy because Evangelicalism's creedless formulae - a "born- again" experience, accepting Jesus as personal saviour, and so on - can apply across denominational boundaries. Catholics constitute the largest single Church in the US, with close to one-quarter of the populace (and the electorate). But Evangelicals are much more unified. Culturally, they are dominated by suburban, middle-class whites, and politically they are the backbone of the Republican Party.
In 2004 this formidable bloc gave George W. Bush 78 per cent of its votes, and is widely credited with having secured Bush's victory in key states such as Ohio and Michigan. If Obama can peel away even a few votes from this base, it could mean victory in November.
More than any other presidential candidate, including Bush, Obama speaks easily and convincingly of his Christian conversion and faith's influence on his life and his progressive politics. He can cite Scripture like a Sunday school teacher, and his campaign speeches ring out like a preacher's sermon. Yet Obama's God-talk has actually prompted criticism that he has a messiah complex, or even that he may be the Antichrist of Revelation. Moreover, even after Obama spent months dealing with fallout from the incendiary words of the former pastor of his Chicago church, some 12-15 per cent of Americans still think Obama is a Muslim. On the other hand, Obama's visit to Rick Warren is a pilgrimage of hope as much as faith. Polls show that while McCain enjoys a large lead over Obama among Evangelicals, about 60 per cent to 24 per cent, his support in that constituency is much softer than Bush's was.
There are two main reasons for this shift. One is that the well-deserved stereotype of the religious Right as a collection of moral scolds condemning rampant secularism, gay marriage, and easy-access abortion is beginning to change. Several lions of the Christian Right have died, and none of their successors has the fangs to make politicians quake. Above all, the flock is changing its priorities. With a failing economy, rising petrol prices and an endless Middle East war, so-called "values" issues now come in last on the electorate's agenda. At the same time, an emerging generation of Evangelicals - what some are calling the "religious Left" - is more concerned about issues such as global warming than sexual libertinism.
Rick Warren himself represents this shift. The son of Baptist pastors going back three generations, Warren was early on an heir to that social conservatism, stressing the priority of bedrock "non-negotiables" such as opposition to gay marriage and abortion, and positioning himself as a player in Republican politics. But in this election cycle he has undergone a conversion of sorts, calling himself a "whole-life" Christian whose agenda now includes the environment, poverty in Africa and Aids. It almost sounds like Catholic social teaching, though with a Jimmy Buffet soundtrack. If Obama can resonate with some of these new Evangelicals, he could have a shot.
John McCain, on the other hand, is no George W. Bush. Raised an Episcopalian, McCain and his (second) wife attend a Baptist church in Phoenix, but he has never been baptised himself. "I didn't find it necessary to do so for my spiritual needs," as he said in a rare comment on his faith. In a way, McCain is a throwback to an earlier time of public reticence about religion rather than public piety.
McCain's personal faith was really forged in the crucible of a Hanoi prison where he spent more than five brutal years as a captive of the North Vietnamese after his fighter jet was shot down in 1967. In McCain's Time magazine testimony, he again recounts his POW story, and how he sees faith as something that people rely on "in the darkness", as he did, a support during times of difficulty rather than a programme of societal change.
"In the life of our country, faith serves the same ends that it can serve in the life of each believer, whatever creed we might profess. It sees us through life's trials. It instils humility, calling us to serve a cause greater than ourselves," says McCain, which is powerful in its way, but hardly the stuff of a born-again believer. McCain's real hurdle, however, is his history of animosity toward the religious Right. When he was Bush's political rival in 2000, McCain famously referred to leaders of the Christian Right as "agents of intolerance" and made it clear he was not their toady. They made him pay for his disloyalty, and during this campaign McCain has diligently courted those same preachers, along with their flocks.
As McCain goes before Saddleback's genial inquisitor this weekend, the risks are as great as they are for Obama. The trick for McCain is to convince the faithful that he believes as deeply as they do; the challenge for Obama is to show them that he doesn't believe so deeply that he'll do something radical if elected.