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Tavis: Ray Suarez is, of course, the senior correspondent at 'The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,' and host of a monthly series from Public Radio International called 'America Abroad.' His new book is called 'The Holy Vote, The Politics of Faith in America.' Ray, nice to have you on this Coast.

Ray Suarez: Great to be here, Tavis.

Tavis: Good to see you, man.

Suarez: Good to see you.

Tavis: We, of course, appreciate your work on 'The NewsHour.'

Suarez: Thanks.

Tavis: Is there politics in faith in America these days? (Laugh)

Suarez: A little. Enough to make that book, anyway.

Tavis: How annoying is that, or perhaps a better word, alarming, is that reality today for you?

Suarez: Well, I wouldn't say either annoying or alarming. It's taking new forms. There's always been religion as part of the makeup of what makes people take the political stands they make. You can go back to the fight over Temperance or abolition, or the women's right to vote. Religion has been in there, soaked up into the pores of it. But it's the kind of way we're doing it now which I found interesting, and I found it a departure from other times in our history. And it just sort of kept tugging on my sleeve until I finally sat down and took a look at it.

Tavis: A departure in what way, specifically?

Suarez: Well, never has a party signed on so closely, so overtly, and over such a long time, with one particular party. Made an electoral alliance and said, basically, a group of denominations and a group of Christians, in this case, voters in the United States, we're with you, and we're gonna ride this baby as far as it goes. That's different.

Tavis: What, specifically, and I don't mean to ask this question out of any naiveté, has driven that particular alliance in a way, as you argue, that we have not seen heretofore?

Suarez: Well, I think historical forces started to gather. After the Supreme Court decisions that took the bible readings and the daily prayers out of classrooms, after the Roe V. Wade decision, after the beginning of the realignment of American politics, where southern Whites, mostly working class and middle class Whites, were free agents after they unhooked themselves from a lifetime in the Democratic party.

In the face of the Civil Rights Acts of 1965, they were at loose, they weren't sure where they were gonna land up. And the Republicans said, come with us. The realignment kept on going. More evangelicals came off the sidelines and started to punch their weight, as a group, with the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976. But again, four years later, disaffected, not sure where their home was, Ronald Reagan said, come on in. You're with us, we're with you, let's go.

Tavis: How unlikely, in retrospect, that a guy from Hollywood happens to be the guy that rallies these conservatives when you would typically think of that relationship as nonexistent? That is to say, anything out of Hollywood and a conservative following?

Suarez: A former governor of California, a man of kind of indistinct religious affiliation himself.

Tavis: And that's the other part of it. Himself, exactly. (Laugh)

Suarez: Not someone, like with Bill Clinton, that we saw coming out of a church on Sunday with a bible in his hand and his wife at his side.

Tavis: Or George Bush, yeah.

Suarez: Not publicly identified. If we went out onto the street here on Sunset Boulevard and asked people what denomination was Ronald Reagan? I doubt one in a hundred would know.

Tavis: Do a comparison for me between Reagan and his, again, certainly not being public about his faith, and the President we have now, who invokes it almost, well, consistently.

Suarez: Well, Ronald Reagan began to mention it in speeches. He said to the National Association of Religious Broadcasters, you may not be able to endorse me, but I'm gonna endorse you, and got this enormous hand. And they knew they had somebody here who, who could really make common cause with them. He had the grace notes. He understood how to put a phrase in a speech, and let that do all the talking.

Because you didn't have to elaborate on it, you didn't have to over-sell it. But everybody in the audience, when he spoke in Nashville, when he appeared at the Grand Ole Opry during his campaigns, people knew what was up with that. But it's different with George Bush, as you know.

Tavis: Yeah. To that very point, what chapter, pardon the pun, in this dialogue - or let me put it another way. Describe for me what the chapter reads like that George Bush, current president, is inserting into this conversation.

Suarez: George Bush understood, as a governor of Texas, as a person who grew up in Texas and watched that state move from sort of the middle tier to one of the biggest, most populist, richest states in the country, with a growing Congressional delegation, with mega-churches just off the next freeway exit, that this was a force that his party and he himself as a national politician, had to take account of. How are we gonna do that?

How are we gonna welcome these people into the tent, and make it clear that their issues are our issues? He started the faith-based initiative, and though now, six years later, a lot of people say it wasn't really as successful as all that, in a way, it didn't need to be. You just needed to talk about it during election years, where you would say here's an example. They say they don't want government money going into churches and overtly sectarian social services.

We say it's more important to get people the social services. And if you give them a little scripture, and if you make them go to a little chapel, that's okay with us. Saying we wanna renegotiate this relationship. That's a big thing. Catholic Charities is already one of the largest government contractors in the United States. But the whole deal was look, if you give people nutrition counseling, if you give people affordable housing counseling, don't also give them the catechism. That was the deal. But now they're saying, you can give them the catechism and the housing counseling, and we're gonna pay for it with government money. That's a very big deal.

Tavis: This alignment, this realignment, put another way, that you spoke of earlier, certainly back in the day had leadership that we all recognize. There are individuals, and I'm not gonna get into the calling of the names. We all know who we're talking about here. Well, I'll call names. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, long list of these guys, who were at the forefront of leading this realignment of politics and faith.

As these guys get older, number one, what happens with that leadership? And I ask that only because it seems to me that without that, there is the chance that that realignment may start to fall apart.

Suarez: There's a whole new generation of evangelical pastors and organizational leaders that have, in a more effective, less divisive way, taken up the roles that Robertson, Falwell, et al, played in the seventies and eighties. Men like Pastor Ted Haggard, who has been the leader of the National Association of Evangelicals. He is out of Boulder Springs, excuse me, out of Colorado, and he is a force to be reckoned with in Christian politics, and in politics in general.

The Reverend Rick Scarborough, who has a mega-church in Texas. Very influential man. There are a lot of names like this, and there's sort of a triple-A set of them ready to make it to the big leagues. But when Falwell and Robertson, because of their advancing years, pass from the scene, there'll be many to take up the institutional and church-based leaderships.

Tavis: Let me go from the right to the left. You remember some weeks ago the big, some months ago now, the big gathering in DC where Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama spoke at this Jim Wallace gathering of progressive evangelicals, progressive Christians at this gathering, had these Senators speaking about their faith in a very public way. Barack Obama was hailed for the speech that he gave. It circulated all along the Internet. What's happening on the left, with regard to this conversation about politics and faith?

Suarez: Well, what's different about the left is that, and there is politics over there. And conservative viewers of this program shouldn't think oh, man, he's only talking about one side, and not the other. There's always been a component of the religious movement inside progressive politics. Look at the coalition that filled in behind Bayard Rustin and Dr. King in the early sixties.

That was shot through with clergy from different denominations. Bill Coffin at Riverside Church on the upper west side of Manhattan, one of the most outspoken liberal religious leaders in the country. So yes, there's plenty of action on that side. But the difference is on that side, they'll make coalition with people who agree with them on the issue, without having to agree with them on everything else.

So if you are a Christian environmentalist, you don't have to just make common cause with other Christian environmentalists. You'll make an alliance with anybody who's into the environment as a cause. Ditto women's health; ditto feeding the hungry in developing parts of the world. While on the right side of the ledger, they tend to want to just make coalition around people who are also down with them for the other parts of the agenda.

So often, these movements are shot through with Christians, but don't call themselves that because they think it's much more important to get the issue out front and center. So there's a different style on the left side of the agenda.

Tavis: Let me ask you, if I can, a two-part exit question that has to do, in part, with what I am looking at now with the two of us sitting here. Two people of color. One of Latino, Hispanic, Chicano descent, the other of African descent. Clearly, you cannot win one way or the other in this country, increasingly, without the African American vote and certainly, we know now, without the Latino vote. Where do Black folk and Brown folk, separately, fit into this conversation, this holy vote conversation?

Suarez: Well, Ken Melman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, has been crisscrossing the country speaking at Latino Protestant churches, and very conservative catholic congregations that are Spanish-speaking. And in African American churches throughout the country, where there's an outspoken conservative social agenda. And there are many. And he's saying, you guys, maybe you didn't realize it, but you're natural Republicans.

Come with us. And he wants to not take away 50 percent. You don't have to take away 50 percent. He knows that if you peel away 10 or 20 percent from these two groups, you create a coalition that's unbeatable with the White evangelical vote and with economic conservatives, that together, that coalition is unbeatable, and would mean Republican rule, House and Senate, White House, for decades to come.

Tavis: But historically, Black and Brown people have not been one-issue voters.

Suarez: Right. And I talk to both the leaders of some African American mega-churches, and some Protestant Latino pastors about the overtures they've gotten from the White House. And they say, the real problem that we have with the so-called religious right is that they don't understand that we have to get it right on the bread and butter issues, too. Gay marriage, abortion, is not gonna be enough to bring my 15,000-strong, 20,000-strong congregation over into this column.

Because there are economic justice issues that we have to get right. And if we don't, we can't be your allies. So it's an interesting difference. There's a lot of similarities, and that's what gets Ken Melman into your pulpit on a Sunday morning in the first place. But the differences may be enough to just not keep the alliance from happening.

Tavis: So finally, beyond this conversation, where is this conversation headed, you think?

Suarez: Well, some people have been telling me that they think that some of the so-called Christian right may take its bat and ball and go home in 2008, because they feel they gave a lot in 2000 and 2004, and didn't get what they came for. They helped bring a Republican majority to both Houses on the Hill, to the White House, and to the Supreme Court, and still haven't gotten what they wanted on right to life issues.

On choosing the time of death. On sex ed and evolution in schools. On a whole raft of social issues that they wanted action on. And when George Bush leaves the White House in 2009, they may still be the way they were before he got there.

Tavis: The new book by Ray Suarez is 'The Holy Vote, The Politics of Faith in America.' Of course, you know him from 'The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.' The senior correspondent there. Right here, weeknights on PBS. Ray Suarez, nice to have you here.

Suarez: Great to see you, Tavis.

Tavis: Thank you for the opportunity to talk to you.

Suarez: Bye-bye.

Tavis: Up next on this program, a look at African Americans and technology with Vernon Irvin. Stay with us.