Deep in the heart of Florida.

Interstate 4, bisecting Florida along a line running from Tampa-St. Pete in the southwest through Orlando to Daytona Beach in the northeast, is the state's cultural equator. South of this equator is a Florida colonized by displaced, often elderly Yankees. North of it is a Florida that belongs in spirit to the Confederacy.

A year ago, I gave a lecture at a small Christian liberal-arts college just north of I-4. My host was an Evangelical Christian liberal, an Army chaplain who was also a professor in the Stetson College Department of Religious Studies. During my visit, I met with his honors theology class, where one young man seemed particularly alert and engaged. Later, I learned that this student, a churchgoing Presbyterian, was under some pressure from other students to leave his church and "become a Christian." His very willingness to discuss belief openly in class was thought a warning sign that he was not saved.

In late October, I attended a conference on secularity and belief in New York titled, topically and astutely, "Us vs. Them." I was "them" in that company. My Stetson College colleague would have been even noticeably "them." But down in DeLand, Florida, he was only dubiously counted among the Christian "us." Another of his students, he told me, once asked him what party he belonged to. "I am a registered independent," he answered, "but I usually end up voting for the Democrats." The student replied, dismayed, "But, professor, I thought you were a Christian."

Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, was the Bush campaign's southeast regional chairman. Increasing voter turnout among Evangelical Christians was a top goal for Reed, and he succeeded brilliantly, not least along the I-4 corridor. At a campaign rally held in a church in the I-4 town of Lakeland, Reed boasted last September that he had seventy-three thousand Florida volunteers. They were motivated not just by conservatism, but often by faith also--or by the two fused as they were for the Stetson College student who found "Christian Democrat" a contradiction in terms.

If the United States is to arrest its accelerating slide toward one-party government, the Democrats must find a way to make that phrase not just thinkable but inspiring. Then, turning inspiration into political hardball, they have to muster the nerve to attack the Republican agenda of rampant self-interest and deference to wealth as a disgrace to Christianity.

This won't come easily to the minority party, but the truth is that George W. Bush talks a better Christian game than he plays. To begin with, he does not regularly attend church. As Amy Sullivan put it in the October 11 New Republic, "The emperor has no church." The president's churchgoing habits appear more liberal-Democrat than conservative-Republican. Jimmy Carter, a liberal who taught Sunday school for his entire term as president, puts Bush to shame.

Shaming the opponent on religious grounds is scarcely the Democratic style, but that must change, or one-party rule is here to stay. Shame worked in the civil-rights era. It can work again. Read the Gospels. No one knew better than Jesus just how to shame. Here's how Jim Wallis, another liberal Evangelical and the editor of Sojourners, put it:

  Our vision--a progressive and prophetic vision of faith and
  politics--was not running in this election .... Kerry did not strongly
  champion the poor as a religious issue and "moral value," or make the
  war in Iraq a clearly religious matter. In his debates with George
  Bush, Kerry should have challenged the war in Iraq as an unjust war,
  as many religious leaders did--including Evangelicals and Catholics.
  And John Kerry certainly did not advocate a consistent ethic of human
  life as we do--opposing all the ways that life is threatened in our
  violent world.

The deeper challenge, however, is not how to reclaim political Christianity but how to breathe life back into the Founding Fathers' vision of a religiously neutral state in a religiously diverse society. That vision brilliantly accommodated the several forms of Protestantism competing for leadership in late-eighteenth-century America, but its core commitment derived from the Enlightenment. It was Enlightenment tolerance that enabled the United States to enrich itself by the assimilation of Catholics and Jews and, since the mid-1960s, of Hindus and Muslims in numbers large enough to matter.

For two centuries, the enlightened American way in religion commanded the warm allegiance of virtually all Americans. In the past thirty years its power to inspire began to fade. Though American liberalism cannot afford to surrender Christianity to the foe, that battle is not the only one that lies ahead, and we have not yet begun to fight.

Jack Miles has, most recently, contributed the introduction to The Best Spiritual Writing 2004, edited by Philip Zaleski (Houghton Mifflin).