In this week's New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh attends Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, which is, of course, Barack Obama's church and the former pastorate of Reverend Jeremiah Wright:

Near the end of Good Friday's service, [Reverend Otis] Moss ordered that the church's video cameras be shut off. What followed wasn't particularly exciting: he plugged a pro-Trinity blog (truthabouttrinity.blogspot.com) and the church's official YouTube channel, inviting church members to flood both with positive comments. "We want you to be our foot soldiers in cyberspace," he said. Then he said, "You can turn the video back on," and the pews erupted.

Sanneh seems dismissive of Moss's preaching on blogs and YouTube, but I think it's remarkable -- and encouraging for liberals of all stripes. For one thing, Democrats might trump Republicans in online organizing and fundraising, but the religious right has long made better use of the Internet than has the religious left has. For another, Moss's approach makes an end run around one of the longstanding challenges of the civil rights movement: getting sustained media attention. One of the reasons why Martin Luther King was front and center in the movement was that the press proved itself more eager to cover him than it was for other leaders. But that was before less palatable figures could reach millions of Americans directly with a free Blogspot blog and a YouTube channel.