Leah Daughtry is the woman leading the Democratic Party’s new mission to make religious believers — particularly ardent Christians — view Democrats as the ones receptive to, if not driving, issues of faith.

Daughtry, a black part-time preacher in Washington, DC, serves as chief of staff to Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean. She was appointed chief executive of the party’s convention in August last spring, and is collaborating with Barack Obama’s team to orchestrate the Denver event. An August 24 interfaith service will open the convention — a first for the party.

Daughtry welcomes the chance to correct the idea that Democrats are hostile to religion. "For thousands of people of faith who have always been part of the party, that label became more than we could bear," she said in a recent interview. "Most of us are in the Democratic Party because we see the values of our faith mirrored in it."

The New York Times Magazine’s profile of Daughtry says even though she is a full-time operative in this respect, on many Sundays, the 44-year-old is a Pentecostal preacher. She usually preaches to her own congregation of about 20 in Southwest Washington, but she sometimes speaks at the church headed by her father, Herbert Daughtry, a prison convert whose ministry combines consuming spirituality with black liberation theology — the theology Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright has invoked — and zealous political activism.

Leah Daughtry sparked the crusade to transform the Democratic Party’s image as predominantly secular and to take enough votes from the Republicans to win this year’s presidential election. Daughtry, who worked as chief of staff to Dean’s predecessor, Terry McAuliffe, approached Dean in early 2005 with a poll showing she commissioned to try to understand the reasons why George W. Bush beat John Kerry for another presidential term in 2004. That poll found that nearly half of the electorate polled in eight battleground states "place as much or more weight on their religious faith as they do other conventional issue considerations when deciding how to vote." By a margin of 78 percent to 22 percent, white evangelicals, who comprise at least 80 percent of the country’s evangelical populace, chose Bush over Kerry.

"She held the missing piece of the puzzle," Dean said of Daughtry. And about the religious outreach she envisioned, he said, "she had a way to connect with people’s inner core."

He asked her to stay on as chief of staff and backed her plan to hire a team, to be known as Faith in Action (FIA), to help the party to hear, and to be heard by, voters of deep religious conviction. The FIA group meets weekly at the DNC headquarters in Washington: three evangelicals, a Catholic, a Muslim and a Jew, all with backgrounds blending work in religion and politics.

There has been an uneasiness among many high-profile Democrats, even in religious candidates and officeholders, about talking in terms of faith or moral values. But Obama is defying this tendency and declaims his Christianity.

"We Democrats tend to be too cerebral," Daughtry said.

"As a pastor," she said, "I think it’s wonderful" that Obama is so vocal about his religion. "And as a voter, I want to know what makes the candidate tick; this is a core part of his understanding."