Though liberal critics call it a hate group, the association and Mr. Wildmon are widely revered in conservative circles. Working in the relative isolation of Tupelo, Mississippi and lacking a magnetic television personality, Mr. Wildmon is not as widely known as other titans of the religious right, like Pat Robertson or James C. Dobson

To its admirers on the religious right, the American Family Association is a stalwart leader in a last-ditch fight to save America’s Christian culture and the values of traditional families. To its liberal critics, it is a shrill, even hateful voice of intolerance, out to censor the arts, declare Muslims unfit for public office and deny equality to gay men and lesbians because they engage in sinful “aberrant sexual behavior.”

Broadcast on its 192 talk-radio stations, streamed over the Internet and e-mailed in “action alerts” to 2.3 million potential voters, the American Family Association’s pronouncements have flowed forth daily from its sleek offices here in the Deep South.

But now it is doing more than preaching to the choir. This summer, the association has thrust itself into presidential politics by paying for and organizing a day of prayer to save “a nation in crisis” that Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is convening this Saturday.

Several Republican presidential aspirants, including Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Tim Pawlenty, have appeared on a radio program on the group’s American Family network.

The rally, at a stadium in Houston, is expected to draw dozens of the country’s most conservative evangelical groups and leaders, and could burnish Mr. Perry’s national profile and his appeal to religious conservatives as he considers entering the 2012 presidential race.

Mr. Perry invited his fellow governors but only one, Sam Brownback of Kansas, also a Republican, accepted the invitation to the explicitly Christian rally, and in recent days even his attendance appeared uncertain, with his staff stressing that if Mr. Brownback went, it would be in a private, not an official, capacity.

Some legal groups have accused Mr. Perry of breaching the separation of church and state by holding the rally, even though the governor’s aides say no tax dollars are being used.

A federal judge in Houston last week dismissed a lawsuit brought by a group of atheists against Mr. Perry’s participation.

“It’s a plea to God to help our country,” Donald E. Wildmon, the family association’s founder and chairman emeritus, said of the rally, which he, like Mr. Perry, calls a nonpolitical appeal to God.

“We’re at a crossroads,” Mr. Wildmon added in an interview in the association’s headquarters here about his decades in the culture wars, which he acknowledges have not always gone his way. “Either we’re going to maintain a society based on Judeo-Christian values, or we’ll have one based on whatever is popular at the moment.”

In speeches and books, Mr. Wildmon has voiced a sense of siege that is widely shared among evangelicals, one he first expressed 34 years ago as sex and violence crept into television.

But the association has sharpened its edge over the years, moving from its well-known crusades for public “decency” to harshly opposing what it calls an anti-Christian “homosexual agenda” — not only same-sex marriage and the acceptance of gay troops in the military, but any suggestion that homosexual “behavior is normal.”

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