It seems likely that DeLay will work hard on behalf of his supporters at the conference. After all, as the scandals swirling around him become a cyclone, the theocrats are his most loyal constituency. Several people at the conference wore "Hooray for DeLay" buttons, and Schlafly called on everyone to stand behind him.

Nor is DeLay this crowd's only firm ally in Congress. Michael Schwartz, the longtime right-wing operative who now serves as Sen. Coburn's chief of staff, made The Hammer sound soft. "This problem that we're dealing with fundamentally is a question of sovereignty," he said. He went on to argue that, "when the Supreme Court says that there is a right to kill babies in the Constitution and therefore we can't have laws against that, or there is a right to commit buggery in the Constitution and we can't have laws against that," it implicitly asserts that "the people have no right to make laws."

As long as the Supreme Court purports to "grade the papers of Congress" -- in other words, to evaluate its laws -- "it is counter to the very basis of this republic." Thus, until America throws out the principle of judicial review, "it is a sick and sad joke to claim we have a Constitution."

No wonder Phillips seemed so confident that, despite the congressional no-shows, his agenda has champions in the federal government. Although they weren't there, "Coburn and Brownback are totally in sync with the people here," he told me.

The conference attendees took their warfare metaphors seriously. They exist in a parallel reality, with its own history and its own news, and in that reality, the Schiavo case dwarfs the war in Iraq or the budget deficit in its import. The Terri Schiavo story that has so galvanized them wasn't the same one shown on CNN or reported in the New York Times. Rather, it was an act of, as one conference participant called it, state-sponsored terrorism, designed to demonstrate the court's terrible power to take life at will. The narrative that Gibbs presented on Thursday seemed familiar to his audience, but it was new to me.

To begin with, in his version of the story, Michael Schiavo probably caused his wife's brain damage by beating or choking her until she was near death.

There were three leading theories about what happened to Terri all those years ago, he said. The first was that she had a heart problem. The second was that she had an eating disorder. There was no evidence, he said, for either of those.

"The third leading theory -- and as you can see, the first two seem to be sort of eliminated -- is that there was some form of foul play," he said. "That some sort of strangulation or violence occurred, at the hand of the husband possibly."

Gibbs offered nothing to substantiate this rather serious claim.

With his wife hospitalized, Gibbs said, "the husband did everything he could to keep people away from Terri, because if television cameras or regular people got in to see her, they would clearly see how alive she was."

Nor was her condition irreversible. "I firmly believe that for all the depravation and abuse she suffered at the hand of her husband  if she'd have had any therapy she wouldn't even have needed a feeding tube," he said.

In Gibbs' telling, Circuit Court Judge George Greer cavalierly ignored all this overwhelming evidence. Such villainy, he said, is the direct result of a legal system that has tried to cast off God's dominion.

"Our Founding Fathers," he said, "they were going to take the word of God, and God has given us in the Bible his word, and they said this book will always be true, and if there is ever a close call in policy, in leadership, in law, in society, if there's ever a question, we want to look to the source of absolute truth. That's why the Ten Commandments are so important. They were the original source of American law."

That version of history is taught at Christian schools like Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, Gibbs' alma mater. It is also a virtual fairy tale. The Constitution contains not a single mention of God, Christianity or the Bible. As the historians Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore wrote in their book "The Godless Constitution," such secularism wasn't lost on an earlier generation of Christian conservatives, who decried America's founding document as a sin against God.

They quote the Rev. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, who said in 1812, "The nation has offended Providence. We formed our Constitution without any acknowledgement of God; without any recognition of His mercies to us, as a people, of His government or even of His existence. The [Constitutional] Convention, by which it was formed, never asked even once, His direction, or His blessings, upon their labours. Thus we commenced our national existence under the present system, without God."

If the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration has its way, the present system will soon be coming to an end.

As Gibbs finished speaking, Scarborough invited the audience to get on their knees. All over the room, people dropped to the floor, heads bowed. From somewhere in the audience, a preacher started up:

"Father, we echo the words of the apostle Paul, because we know Judge Greer claims to be a Christian. So as the Apostle Paul said in First Corinthians 5, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus."

It sounded like a prayer for death.

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