"Everybody sings ee-oo", recites the thirty or clean cut on the front of the huge room. California Ten thousand voices respond. More than a backup power chords on the rise, the soloist launches into an ecstatic hymn in the style of 1980: "If you're alive and you have been redeemed, / Arise and sing, get up and sing."

Pastor Rick Warren, the most important religious leader of the United States since Billy Graham, it appears from the wings, wearing jeans and a shirt with short sleeves, a cropped beard and CEO of a little more weight than your doctor recommends. When he speaks, his words are as warm as the sun Orange County: the homily is a practical and advise parents to pay more attention to their children. In the giant television screens, on the cross Jesus tells John to take care of his mother when he dies.

This talent for simple presentation of Bible lessons for an age close behind The Purpose-Driven Life, Warren's book detailing his 40-day plan for "the Christian life in the 21st century", which is on the shelf almost all households in the U.S. evangelical . It has become one of the books in hardcover nonfiction best-selling in American history, becoming the pastor in a kind of spiritual Oprah with proprietary books and podcasts and presentations at Wal-Mart. Warren's face has been on the cover of Time, and was elected to offer prayers at the inauguration of Barack Obama.

Warren Saddleback Church established in 1980, the selection of the location - Lake Forest, a suburb of mansions and shopping centers - for the floating population, but growing. That first Easter Sunday, 200 attended; Saddleback has since grown into a campus of 120 acres with an average attendance of 22,000 weekend. Again, the stereotype of evangelicals in the South, rural and poor could have been true. Now, they are much more likely to be college-educated, upwardly mobile professionals.

Sixty miles south of Los Angeles, a chair back is one of the mega-churches (those with at least 2,000 faithful) that make up the stretch between Los Angeles and San Diego known as the "belt of southern California Bible . In its preamble, information booths, directing users to make maps of various white tents that offer different styles of worship, crystal fountains are bubbling and a font that looks like it belongs in a luxury spa. area teens, meanwhile, is deliberately scratched the future. It contains a large mural on AIDS in Africa - the issue on which Warren has had its greatest impact on evangelicals.

AIDS has been largely ignored either by the evangelical churches of America or treated as a punishment from God. Warren's views are closely aligned with those of conventional religious right in many areas - in 2004, said the stem cell research was "not negotiable" and compared abortion to a "holocaust."

However, a year earlier, had attended a church conference in South Africa with his wife, Kay. She was recovering from cancer and was willing to take a great cause. "So we went to this small town and found this church tent," he said. "There were 50 adults and 25 children orphaned by AIDS." Since then he has joined the Bono / Bill Gates philanthropy club, dispatch 7500 Saddleback volunteers in developing countries. "I will work with anyone to stop AIDS - Christian, Muslim, Jew, atheist," he says. "That really makes the crazy fundamentalists."

Fresh blood

When I visit his office at Saddleback, David Chrzan, chief of staff of Warren, said that the media are looking to appoint Warren as the fundamentalist leader. "But Rick would say openly that he is not the leader of the religious right. Do not want to be," says Chrzan. "The bottom line is that everyone needs a savior - Republican, Democrat or Partier tea.

"In the last two or three decades, the church became so associated with Republicans. Now people are saying, 'Hey, we support the church - not just two people involved in homosexuality issue and the abortion. "" In a 2005 survey of evangelical pastors, 51 percent said their congregation is predominantly conservative. In 2008, depressed by the unpopularity of Bush in his later years, that figure had fallen to 33 percent.

There is little evidence that evangelicals are less concerned about abortion, stem cell research or gay marriage. But since the recession, moral questions are down the priority list. At Saddleback, the government too much, not too little, is blamed for California's dire financial situation. "The government is greedy," a pastor of Ray-Ban sunglasses and a leather jacket he says, "and began taxing business too much."

Most members seem to whistle the old tunes of the law is concerned even though newfound Africa's dispossessed. Like the Tea Partiers are so contemptuous of many Republicans and former country because they are Democrats and the call for "fresh blood" in Washington. "If Palin becomes a viable candidate, you might see it as one of their own - an evangelical person could reach the White House," says Scott Thumma of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.

So progressives who predict the defanging of the Christian right should recall that we have been here before. Ten years ago, a former heavy drinker who had found Jesus ran for president, promising a mark of solidarity and consensus of evangelical politics.

We all know what happened next.