UPDATE: Read about a three-day Christian revival service held at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan in the Danger Room. The headline of the Air Force’s press release on it: “Revival Rocks God’s House.”

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Paul Krugman penned a column (TimesSelect; subscription required) last week on the subject of my recent post “Your Resume is God’s Instrument.”

Make no mistake: There is definitely a concerted effort to ensure that there are enough Christian conservatives working within administration that promoting the religious rights’ ideological tenets is automatic — without much, if any, pressure from above. True technocrats — you know, qualified people — might actually rebel against such orders.

Krugman quotes Gary North, a writer from the Christian Reconstructionist movement, as writing, “Christians must begin to organize politically within the present party structure, and they must begin to infiltrate the existing institutional order.”

This sounds much like Ralph Reed’s crazy quote, “I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag.”

Krugman makes an important distinction as well:

The infiltration of the federal government by large numbers of people seeking to impose a religious agenda — which is very different from simply being people of faith — is one of the most important stories of the last six years. It’s also a story that tends to go underreported, perhaps because journalists are afraid of sounding like conspiracy theorists.

Too often, the religious right uses “people of faith just voting their values” as cover for pushing their harsh beliefs on the rest of the country.

Krugman also has a more substantial list of the Christian conservatives (including more from Regent University School of Law) in the Bush administration:

• Monica Goodling, “the former top aide to Alberto Gonzales[,] who appears central to the scandal of the fired U.S. attorneys and has declared that she will take the Fifth rather than testify to Congress on the matter.”
• “Kay Cole James, who had extensive connections to the religious right and was the dean of Regent’s government school, was the federal government’s chief personnel officer from 2001 to 2005. (Curious fact: she then took a job with Mitchell Wade, the businessman who bribed Representative Randy ‘Duke’ Cunningham.) And it’s clear that unqualified people were hired throughout the administration because of their religious connections.”
• “The Boston Globe reports on one Regent law school graduate who was interviewed by the Justice Department’s civil rights division. Asked what Supreme Court decision of the past 20 years he most disagreed with, he named the decision to strike down a Texas anti-sodomy law. When he was hired, it was his only job offer.”
• “George Deutsch, the presidential appointee at NASA who told a Web site designer to add the word ‘theory’ after every mention of the Big Bang, to leave open the possibility of ‘intelligent design by a creator.’ He turned out not to have, as he claimed, a degree from Texas A&M.”
• “Rachel Paulose, the U.S. attorney in Minnesota — three of whose deputies recently stepped down, reportedly in protest over her management style — is, according to a local news report, in the habit of quoting Bible verses in the office?”
• “Claude Allen, the presidential aide and former deputy secretary of health and human services, who stepped down after being investigated for petty theft. Most press reports, though they mentioned Mr. Allen’s faith, failed to convey the fact that he built his career as a man of the hard-line Christian right.”

And as proof that 2008 Republican presidential hopefuls are still kowtowing to the religious right: “Next week Rudy Giuliani will be speaking at Regent’s Executive Leadership Series.”