In the early summer of 2000, the Houston megachurch pastor Kirbyjon Caldwell got a phone call that would change his life. The George W. Bush campaign was on the line, wanting to know if Caldwell would introduce his friend the governor of Texas at the Republican National Convention. "I was shocked. I did not expect the call," Caldwell recently said over lunch in Houston. "And I told the guy, I've got to pray on this. This is big."
It was big. George W. Bush was—to state the obvious—a Republican, and in Texas, as elsewhere, relations between African-Americans and the GOP were strained. Caldwell himself was a registered Democrat, though he had voted for Bush for governor. The last Republican president to garner more than 30 percent of the African-American vote was Richard Nixon in 1960. As the pastor of a huge congregation, Caldwell knew that 11,000 mostly working- and middle-class...
