THE film producer Stephen K. Bannon isn't just on a crusade. He's on a roll.

''Look at Feb. 25, 2004 -- a watershed week for the Hollywood right,'' he said in his Santa Monica office while scribbling a circle around the word ''Lord'' on his whiteboard. ''On Ash Wednesday, 'The Passion of the Christ' is released theatrically, and on Sunday, 'Lord of the Rings' -- a great Christian allegory -- wins 11 Academy Awards. So here you have Sodom and Gomorrah bowing to the great Christian God, and did you guys notice? No, because 99 per cent of the content in the media's sewage pipes is the culture of death, not life.''

He next circled the word ''Evil,'' part of the title of a 2004 political documentary for which he was director, co-author and co-producer. ''If the last election showed one thing, it's that culture drives politics. I want to take the form that is now owned by the left -- the documentary -- and use it to help drive an overall political agenda that supports the culture of life.''

Though heavier than most on messianic zeal, Mr. Bannon -- Roman Catholic filmmaker, conservative-film financier, Washington networker and Hollywood deal-chaser -- is emblematic of a new wave in Hollywood, a group that intends to clean those media pipes with pictures that promote godliness, Pax Americana and its own view of family values. Some of these filmmakers, armed with camcorders and Web sites, are pushing overtly political projects in the blogosphere and at conservative festivals, including last year's Liberty Film Festival in West Hollywood, at which Mr. Bannon's ''In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed'' won an award.

Others have enlisted major studios as their collaborators. In December, for instance, Walt Disney Studios and Walden Media, owned by the evangelical financier Philip Anschutz, are to release their $150 million ''Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,'' the first in a projected movie franchise based on C.S. Lewis's Christianity-inspired Narnia novels. Walden is also developing its political thriller, ''Amazing Grace,'' about the British evangelical abolitionist William Wilberforce, and Sony Pictures is hoping that the next installment of the apocalyptic ''Left Behind'' series, ''Left Behind: World War III,'' will usher in its own religiously inspired franchise.

What joins these independent and studio filmmakers, says the conservative author James Hirsen, is a shared sense of being political outsiders in a town in which the term ''Hollywood conservative'' can sometimes seem an oxymoron. ''A lot of them,'' Mr. Hirsen says, ''are feeling left out on the Left Coast.''

That sense also binds conservatives who have had long careers in mainstream Hollywood and, like the newer activists, cut a broad political and religious swath, from ''right-to-life'' Christians and foreign-policy hawks to more middle-of-the-road ''family-values'' advocates. They include strongly identified Catholics like Mel Gibson and the manager-producer Doug Urbanski (''The Contender''), and evangelicals like Ralph Winter, who produced ''X-Men'' and ''Fantastic Four.'' One of...