It's the big political story of our day, and The New York Times Magazine told it at necessary length last Sunday.

In November's presidential election, 97 of the country's 100 fastest-growing counties voted Republican, most by a wide margin, and largely for reasons broadly referred to as "moral values."

Some of us living in blue states -- or, as in my case, on blue streets -- have sat around since then sipping pinot noir and expressing shock and horror. Where are these places? Who are these people? The magazine told us.

There are these things called exurbs. They're areas beyond established suburbs and bedroom communities, and they were nearly barren as recently as 25 years ago. But now they're booming as the newest extension of the sprawl of places such as Phoenix and Atlanta.

A typical exurban town might have had a population of 12,000 in 1990. Now the population might be 100,000, and the annual growth rate might be 20 percent. Who's going there? And why?

Blue-collar families are going there, as are other middle-income families, mostly white, and people with little or no college. They are beckoned by cheaper housing, a new lease on life outside the urban or suburban bustle, a reasonable commute or, even better, a new job.

They might have been brought up in a church or they might have given church a try as a young adult. But often the establishment churches couldn't connect with them. These people were chronically fatigued and stressed, by jobs, parenting pressures, budget woes and marriages that had lost fun, whimsy or any overt evidence of romance.

So, along came the exurban church, a nondenominational or interdenominational one, with an engaging chap as its preacher, and with billboards asking, "Isn't it time you smiled again?"

The Times spotlighted one such church, the Radiant Church, and one such place, Surprise, Ariz., an exurb beyond the Phoenix suburbs.

The preacher is a former Microsoft employee who felt the call and got his preaching education by correspondence courses. His church started a few years ago with a congregation of 140 or so. Last Sunday, which was Easter, it was anticipating an assembly of 15,000.

The people come in shorts and jeans. They stop by the window to pick up a latte and another for a Krispy Kreme doughnut. The preacher holds forth in a Hawaiian shirt. His message is an evangelical Christian one. But it's not long or overbearing, and the message is tied to everyday issues. People needn't bring a Bible because a big screen displays the verses as the preacher refers to them.

Congregants enjoy the surround-sound playing of Christian rock songs, research having shown a considerable percentage of these exurban inhabitants to be old rockers.

Sunday is the least of it. The strength of the church is that people keep coming back all week. They bring their kids to the school or day care.

Maybe they like the aerobics class. Maybe it's for marriage counseling.

Maybe it's for the addiction recovery program, be it alcohol or cocaine -- maybe the very kind of program old George W. says saved his marriage and his life.

Churches like this make religion easy on Sunday and relevant the rest of the week.

Exurbs often don't have porches for neighbors to gather, or town squares, or parks, or sidewalks for people to bump into each other. The mega-church, the rock-'n'-roll church, the jeans-and-shorts church, built without a spire to look more like a mall than a temple -- that's the community center of the new America.

It's a new America that Republicans know better than Democrats, and it's one that liked George W. Bush a lot more than it liked John Kerry.

Democrats wondering how to connect ought to beware of transparency and pandering. They might satisfy themselves for now with understanding and simply not alienating it.