Washington ? Palm Sunday two years ago was a glorious day for Christian conservatives.

A president who’d proclaimed Jesus his favorite philosopher was racing back from vacation to sign a bill rushed through a compliant Congress – a last-minute gamble to keep alive a severely brain-damaged woman in Florida.

That was the peak of the Christian conservatives’ political power.

Today, their nearly three-decade-long ascendancy in the Republican Party is over. Their loyalties and priorities are in flux, the organizations that gave them political muscle are in disarray, the high-profile preachers who led them to influence are being replaced by a new generation less interested in their agenda and the 2008 Republican presidential nomination is in doubt.

“Less than four years after declarations that the religious Right had taken over the Republican Party, these social conservatives seem almost powerless to influence its nomination process,” said W. James Antle III, an editor at the American Spectator magazine who’s written about religious conservatives. “They have the numbers. They have the capability. What they don’t have is unity or any institutional leverage.”

The religious Right never had absolute power in the Republican Party. It never got the Republican president and Republican Congress to pursue a constitutional amendment banning abortion, for example.

But it did have enormous clout in party politics and a big voice in policy, and it’s lost much of both heading into 2008.

In the presidential campaign, for example, candidate Rudy Giuliani consistently leads national polls of likely Republican voters despite his support for abortion rights and gay rights, not to mention his three marriages.

Fred Thompson boasts of a strong voting record against abortion, yet he admitted recently that he doesn’t go to church regularly and wouldn’t support a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage because he’d rather leave it to the states.

And all of the top Republican candidates felt free to skip a values forum in Florida organized by some of the country’s top social conservatives, including Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation, Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum and Don Wildmon of the American Family Association.

In church, the generation of politically active, high profile evangelists such as Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell is giving way to new preachers such as Joel Osteen and Rick Warren, who are willing to embrace Democrats.

Warren, for example, hosted Democratic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois at his California mega-church. He cites AIDS, poverty and illiteracy as top issues, not gay marriage or abortion.

In elections, the organizations that once gave political focus to Christian conservatives and turned their passions into votes have splintered or disappeared.

In the country, many people have shifted priorities. Even among white evangelical Christians, Iraq and other domestic issues are now more important than social issues, according to a recent poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.