Rev. Billy Graham’s last crusade in New York last week spawned a great deal of hagiographic reporting on the career of the famous evangelist. But one of Graham’s less reported legacies is his catalytic role in the formation of the modern Christian Right.

James Ridgeway, longtime Washington correspondent for The Village Voice reports this week that “If there is any one person responsible for George W. Bush’s presidency it is Billy Graham. It is safe to say that Graham, old and sick now, is the most politically adroit religious figure of our time.”

Ridgeway, who is a reader of FrederickClarkson.com and Bruce Prescott’s Mainstream Baptist has a succinct round-up of some of the more significant leaders of the Christian Right including Tony Perkins, Albert Mohler, Ralph Reed, and Ted Haggard.

Here is what he write about Haggard: “Pastor of Colorado Springs’s large New Life Church and head of the National Association of Evangelicals, with a membership of 45,000 churches, Haggard talks to the president or his advisers regularly. His is the most powerful religious lobby in the U.S. Pastor Ted believes in the military as a public service and backs preemptive war. “My fear,” he tells Harper’s, “is that my children will grow up in an Islamic state.”