I think we can expect the New York Times op-ed page to continue its high-wire routine for quite some time to come, trying to find the balance between fury, denial and insight when it comes to the pew gap. More on that in a minute.

Meanwhile, some of the reporters are going about their business. In particular, Laurie Goodstein and William Yardley offered up a wide-ranging summary of how the GOP soul train targeted believers in a number of different spiritual camps. Honest, that's what they said. Right there in the Times, under a headline that said, "Bush Benefits From Efforts to Build a Coalition of the Faithful." Here's a sample:

For the past four years, Mr. Bush has been deliberately assembling the building blocks of a formidable faith coalition. Pastor by pastor, rabbi by rabbi, and often face to face, Mr. Bush has built relationships with a  diverse range of religious leaders.

The payoff came on Tuesday. For all the credit claimed by evangelical Christians, Mr. Bush owes his victory to a formula that includes conservative Catholics, mainline Protestants, Hispanics, Jews and Mormons.

The president's strategists set out to improve his showing among not just evangelicals, but also Catholics, Jews, Hispanics and African-Americans by appealing to the social conservatives in each of those groups who felt alienated and disrespected by a popular culture that in their minds trivializes religion. In all of those groups, he won more of them over than he did four years ago, although the increase among African-Americans was negligible.

That last line is certainly true. But some have already dug out the statistics showing that some of those new African-American voters for Bush cast their votes in Ohio, in part drawn to the polls by that state's resolution on the definition of marriage. Location, location, location, as they say. Some of Bush's best Catholic statistics were in Ohio, too.

And so forth and so on. The Hispanic numbers were significant and, in a matter of days, you can expect and entertainment writer or two, perhaps on the front page of the Times art section, to start calling this the "Passion" vote. It could happen. Wouldn't that be Rich?

Goodstein and Yardley also noted a small, but again strategic change, in Jewish voting patterns. Note that this breakthrough took place on the orthodox -- large or small "o" -- side of the religious spectrum.

The Jewish vote is small -- 3 percent of the electorate. But after focusing attention on Jews in swing states like Florida, Ohio, Missouri and, when it looked competitive, New Jersey, the president increased his share of the Jewish vote from 19 percent in 2000 to 25 percent this year. Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, found that more than two-thirds of Orthodox Jews voted for the president.

"What this suggests is that the Bush coalition wasn't just evangelicals," said John C. Green, a professor of political science and director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. "It included a much larger group of more traditional religious people, many of them outside of the evangelical tradition. What they have in common is that all of these groups tend to hold traditional views on sexual behavior."

And there you have it. We're back to the 10 Commandments vote, the Americans who are convinced that there are eternal, transcendent moral truths that unite traditional religious believers in a host of different flocks -- not just those who preach fiery sermons on street corners in backward Alabama towns with snakes draped around their necks.

Numerous GetReligion.org readers have, in recent days, left comments that there is more to biblical morality than centuries of unbroken doctrine on marriage and family. These readers are correct, of course. There are a sizable number of voters out there who are Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, evangelical and even mainline Protestant who do not want to separate questions such as abortion and the definition of marriage from issues of economic justice, the environment, peace and other "progressive" issues. These voters do not see this as an either-or proposition. They would prefer both-and.

It also must be noted that, shortly before the Democratic Convention, Zogby pollsters said that 43 percent of Democrats wanted to see abortion banned, to one degree or another. One of the reasons that the Kerry campaign bailed out of Missouri was the strong turnout of Democratic voters for the marriage amendment during that state's primary.

So this vague "values voter" firestorm is hiding a much more complex story. Right now, I think more attention needs to be given to the religious left and, in particular, the compromises that religious liberals and secularists might be willing to make -- in any -- on these cultural issues.

This will be framed as a matter of the Democratic Party finding "centrists" or "conservatives" to run for president and the senate.

However, I was struck by the headline on the latest column from Nicholas D. Kristof: "Time to Get Religion." Why, we could not have said that better on the mast of this blog. He notes that Democrats are, well, angry at the moment and they will be tempted to lash out.

... (The) risk is that the party will blame others for its failures - or, worse, blame the American people for their stupidity (as London's Daily Mirror screamed in a Page 1 headline this week: "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?").

As moderates from the heartland, like Tom Daschle, are picked off by the Republicans, the party's image risks being defined even more by bicoastal, tree-hugging, gun-banning, French-speaking, Bordeau-sipping, Times-toting liberals, whose solution is to veer left and galvanize the base. But firing up the base means turning off swing voters. Gov. Mike Johanns, a Nebraska Republican, told me that each time Michael Moore spoke up for John Kerry, Mr. Kerry's support in Nebraska took a dive. ...

So Democrats need to give a more prominent voice to Middle American, wheat-hugging, gun-shooting, Spanish-speaking, beer-guzzling, Bible-toting centrists. (They can tote The Times, too, in a plain brown wrapper.)

Kristof even says that it is time to consider some compromises with red-county America. However, he does not even mention the hot-button issues on the moral and cultural right. The people on the op-ed page need to calm down and read some of the copy that is flowing out of their own newsroom.

The Times needs to get religion, too. That means getting liberal religion, centrist religion and orthodox religion. The sane voices are out there, if the Times wants to find them.