HOLY TOLEDO.

Pastor Rod Parsley stood on a flag-bedecked dais on the steps of Ohio's Statehouse last October and, amid cheers from the crowd below, proclaimed the launch of "the largest evangelical campaign ever attempted in any state in America." A nationally known televangelist and the leader of a twelve-thousand-member church on the outskirts of Columbus, Parsley had gathered a thousand people for the event, and attracted bystanders with a multimedia performance involving a video on a Jumbotron and music by Christian singers and rappers broadcast so loud that it reverberated off the tall buildings south of the Statehouse. TV crews from Parsley's ministry taped the event. "Sound an alarm!" he boomed. "A Holy Ghost invasion is taking place. Man your battle stations, ready your weapons, lock and load!" In the course of the performance, Parsley promised that during the next four years his campaign, Reformation Ohio, would bring a hundred thousand Ohioans to Christ, register four hundred thousand new voters, serve the disadvantaged, and guide the state through "a culture-shaking revolutionary revival."

Among those who spoke at the rally were Senator Sam Brownback, of Kansas, and Representative Walter B. Jones, of North Carolina, both Christian conservatives, and J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio's secretary of state, who is now the Republican nominee for governor. All talked about the need to bring God and morality back into government. "We refuse to give up or back up or shut up until we've made a better world for all," Blackwell said.

For the past two years, the religious right in Ohio has been on a victory march. In 2004, a coalition of conservative Christian organizations campaigned statewide for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, enlisting hundreds of pastors and collecting half a million signatures. The ballot initiative, known as Issue One, passed with sixty-three per cent of the vote, and many concluded that this effort to bring out "values voters" won the state for President Bush, and returned him to the White House. Parsley and another megachurch pastor, Russell Johnson, of the Fairfield Christian Church, campaigned hard for the initiative, as did Ken Blackwell, whose role in overseeing the election procedures caused a controversy of its own, and who was the only Republican leader in the state to join them. Subsequently, the two pastors formed organizations--Reformation Ohio and Johnson's Ohio Restoration Project--to get out the vote in 2006 and beyond. This year, there is nothing like Issue One on the ballot, but Blackwell, who carries the standard of the religious right, could become governor of Ohio.

Blackwell, a six-foot-four African-American former college football star, is a thoroughgoing conservative. He's a supply-sider who for years has advocated a flat tax and a constitutional limit on state spending. His views on abortion, gay marriage, school vouchers, and stem-cell research coincide with those of the religious right, and his position on concealed weapons with that of the N.R.A. He is also a media-savvy politician who has held statewide offices for the past twelve years, and he is well connected in George Bush's Washington. (His backers include Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich, Governor Jeb Bush, and Senator John McCain.) With rimless glasses and a small mustache, Blackwell, at the age of fifty-eight, has an air of authority, and he is at ease with all kinds of audiences. At a breakfast for young executives in Columbus, in April, he began, as he often does, with a humorous story about his days as a football player, then told them what he had learned from a peanut seller he had worked for as a kid about the importance of "asset building" as a way out of poverty. (Blackwell is, in fact, a rich man, thanks to an investment he made in a broadcasting company in the nineteen-nineties.) Turning to the economic problems facing the state, he spoke about confiscatory taxes inhibiting capital flows and the need for a new budgeting process. No one challenged him--though some certainly held doubts. In debates, he is aggressive and given to cutting one-liners. He said of one opponent, "He has a difficult time holding a consistent position for six months without fainting from exhaustion."

But Blackwell can be a mesmerizing speaker. At an Ohio Restoration Project rally in a church outside Columbus, in March, he gave what amounted to a sermon about the obligation of Christians to "serve and engage." There are, he said, "social, cultural, and political forces that have tried to run God, faith, and religion out of the public square. The issue is, will you take a stand?" His big, deep voice filled the sanctuary, and, speaking without notes, he cited chapter and verse of the Bible. His delivery had members of the audience, which was almost entirely white, shouting out "Amen!" and interrupting his performance with bursts of applause. Before such audiences, he often quotes Martin Luther King, Jr., on the social responsibility of the church, but he is, as National Review has called him, a "post-racial, post-civil-rights campaigner." Many people like him in spite of his politics, or because they can't believe that he's really a doctrinaire right-winger. He still has friends from the early days of his political career, when he was far less conservative, and some of them remember his saying that he would be the first black President of the United States.

In the primary, in May, Blackwell beat Ohio's attorney general, Jim Petro, with fifty-six per cent of the vote. His victory has shaken the traditionally moderate Ohio Republican establishment, and Parsley's and Johnson's efforts to get out the vote have driven liberal members ...