A colleague -- a respectable citizen by all accounts -- let loose with a dark observation last year: "Too many Christians," he sighed, "not enough lions."

I don't know how original it was, but it made me laugh. It was only while kneeling at the communion rail later that week that I thought it the better part of valor to repent for having found such subliminal hostility amusing on some level.

While known to darken a church door fairly regularly himself, my colleague has never had much use for the histrionics of the religious right. Though I'm more self-consciously "Christian" than he is, we share a similar disdain for the phoniness of the moral values crowd.

Lately, I've been wondering whether my colleague's joke was, in some ways, weirdly prophetic. Last week, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's office announced that the charisma-challenged wannabe presidential candidate will participate in a nationally-televised right-wing pity party called "Justice Sunday" on this coming Sunday.

Billed as a corrective to "the liberal, anti-Christian dogma of the left," the ironically named "Justice Sunday" will attempt to stiffen the spines of Republicans in Congress who may have second thoughts about the wisdom of ending the right to filibuster by heathen Democrats.

If this sounds like an unconscionable attempt by tax-exempt religious institutions to dictate the contour of American democracy, it is. Frist, R-Tenn., could care less about fairness if appearing on a program with known theocrats will curry favor with the mullahs who'll be fashioning the Republican presidential platform in 2008.

The stated purpose of "Justice Sunday" is summed up in its subtitle: "Stop the Filibuster Against People of Faith." The "people of faith" are presumably the 10 conservative judicial nominees Democrats have vowed to block.

Frist is no dummy. He knows he'll have access to a potential audience of millions of fundamentalists and evangelicals across the country who'll be watching on Christian television, the Internet and in churches. Not many politicians have the intestinal fortitude to ignore so large an audience, especially if it is already predisposed to see things their way thanks to weekly harangues by resentful clergy.

While clicking around the dial several weeks ago in a hotel in Michigan, I came across Dr. D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., assuring his millions of viewers that the current interpretation of religious neutrality was, at best, "one of the greatest deceptions of all time."

Kennedy insisted that there is no such thing as "separation of church and state." He ridiculed what he considered the only document that ever hinted at such a thing: the 1802 letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to Danbury, Conn., Baptists.

It was in this letter that Jefferson used the metaphor "a wall of separation" that Kennedy says Christians have unnecessarily abided by ever since. He further turned Jefferson on his head by insisting that he wanted more church influence on the state, not less.

By the time Kennedy was through, he had turned the famous Deist into an advocate of America's "Christian nationhood," though he modestly declined to assign Jefferson to the ranks of "born again" Founding Fathers like Washington, Adams and that rascal Benjamin Franklin.

Kennedy's name hasn't surfaced in any of the literature about "Justice Sunday," but many of his fellow theocrats will be on hand to pull the strings from behind the scenes. As the biggest king maker on the religious right, Focus on the Family's Dr. James Dobson and his surrogates have long argued that Democrats are against Christians and other "people of faith."

These days, being a card-carrying member of the so-called "anti-Christian left" may be the better part of valor, democratically speaking. Too many Christians, indeed.