Prayer in the service of politics

For more than two weeks, Missy Huff has spent her days in a darkened church classroom, praying all day and into the night and subsisting on a pastel-colored regimen of VitaminWater and Jamba Juice smoothies.

But she does not yearn for food.

She is too committed, she says, to the cause of traditional marriage.

"God, we are asking for an awakening," she prayed one recent morning, standing before a group of young people who had come together to ask for divine intervention in California's upcoming election.

Next to her, another woman, whose blunt black hair and fashionable clothing would not have been out of place at a Silver Lake club, added her own prayer: "I am asking for rains of revival to open up over California."

Huff and about three dozen others in their 20s and early 30s have spent every waking minute since Sept. 24 at a San Diego County megachurch praying for the passage of Proposition 8, which would amend the California Constitution to define marriage as only between a man and a woman.

They are the fervent, ecstatic center of a statewide prayer vigil and fast that religious leaders say includes thousands of people asking for God's help in passing the measure.

But what distinguishes Huff and many of the young people she prays with at Skyline Church here is that after the election, they will not return to normal life.

Praying and fasting are their job.

They have forsaken traditional lives to live in communal homes -- supported by donations --and pray. All day, every day.

This year, the focus of their prayers is ending gay marriage.

"We believe we pray and God answers," Huff said. And her prayer is simple: "To heal California and establish righteousness."

The prayer and fasting have discomfited some religious leaders who oppose Proposition 8.

"I am a person of prayer," said the Rev. Susan Russell, a lesbian and an Episcopal priest at All Saints Church in Pasadena. But she said she does not believe prayer is "a weapon to be used to influence the political process." That, she said, "takes us down a slippery slope from democracy to theocracy."

The communal home Huff shares with 10 others is on Haight Street in San Francisco, next door to Amoeba Records and a few steps from Golden Gate Park. The Justice House of Prayer San Francisco was established in 2005 by followers of the Rev. Lou Engle.

Huff has been there almost from the beginning.