THE CARRIE Prejean show has gone far enough. If it had concluded with her brief, inarticulate expression of solidarity with the traditional definition of marriage, and maybe some natural follow-up interviews, I would have nothing to say about her. I’d even give her props for having the courage to say something unpopular—particularly to a loathsome bully like Perez Hilton—with little idea that it would boost her career the way it has. Opposing gay marriage doesn’t make one a contemptible bigot. But her subsequent rise to evangelical superstardom? This is going nowhere and helps absolutely no one except Carrie Prejean.

In its ever-eager search for sympathetic pop icons and cultural martyrs, the Christian world reacted predictably to Prejean’s rambly gay marriage answer: with a showy open-winged embrace. No cosmetically enhanced pageant star has previously been thought deserving of a place on the stage at the Dove Awards, the biggest Christian music event of the year. (In fact, it’s not difficult to imagine a walking cleavage exhibit like Miss California being avoided as altogether inappropriate.) But because she had, a mere matter of days before, accidentally expressed political solidarity with the Christian right—a fact that has nothing to do with Christian pop music—she found a red carpet unrolled at her feet, leading all the way to that glittery stage in Nashville. Her presence at that and other Christian gatherings was met with a hero’s welcome.

Not that one should ever expect theological or political seriousness from the Christian culture industry, but it’s impossible to measure how damaging spectacles like this are to serious Christian efforts to have a voice on cultural issues, whether it be improving relationships with the gay community or politely insisting that our nation’s legal definition of marriage is not something to be altered lightly. Evangelicals’ overnight construction of a pedestal on which to display Miss California immediately invoked comparisons to Anita Bryant, the Christian singer who vigorously campaigned for legal discrimination against homosexuals in the 1970s, and was widely credited with galvanizing support for Harvey Milk. In other words: besides being a public-relations disaster, it’s as much a Pyrrhic "victory" as Proposition 8 and Proposition 6 before it.

Gay activists found Bryant particularly infuriating because she came across as a beautiful, upwardly-mobile woman who flippantly dismissed people whose lives were in many cases characterized by rejection, isolation and violence. Prejean is an equally maddening figure—a blonde hand-waver who has little of substance to contribute to the issue she’s now championing. She’s fueling her fame machine with culture-war gasoline, and beside her sleek vehicle stands the evangelical community, dutifully taking charge of the pumping. Compassion, redemption, grace, and reconciliation are nowhere to be found in her entourage, only more political bludgeoning. It’s bad enough when the church itself speaks stupidly on sexual issues, a thousand times worse when it hires a beauty pageant contestant—a species famous for its political vapidity—to do the talking.

I don’t question the Christian love for Prejean on the basis of her supposedly questionable character; I don’t care about her boob job or nude photos, except perhaps to make lazy jokes about them. But the entire ordeal reeks of “persecution baiting,” which takes forms ranging from imagining persecution where none exists to antagonizing the opposition until a sufficiently hostile response—“persecution”—is elicited. It also continues a disheartening trend of starstruck evangelicals marching along as useful idiots in political parades that frustrate, if not actively undermine, their attempts to be cultural “salt and light.” And if some of us thought the Republican Party and its latest polarizing woman has been bad for us, this is worse: at least Sarah Palin comes with a little bit of gubernatorial experience.

Thankfully, at least someone in the Christian fold dared to question the collective state of arousal over Miss California. Randy Thomas, the executive vice president of Exodus International, complained that he “really [doesn’t] get some of my fellow Christians trying to turn her into some modern day Mother Teresa.” He’s right, as is the director of the Miss California, who ranted that Christian groups are “taking this young woman and exploiting her to further [their] own agenda.” There’s enough blame for everybody: Christians for so thoughtlessly championing the Carrie show, and Carrie for letting them. Maybe she's just a pretty girl going where her fame takes her, but this is how the conversation stays in the gutter, and what keeps the culture-war soldiers in the trenches. And I don't think that's the point of being either a Christian or a pretty pageant contestant.