Earmarks have also helped finance new buildings on religious college campuses, including a fitness center at Malone College, a small evangelical Christian liberal arts college in Canton, Ohio.

The $1 million that helped build the center came from an earmark by Representative Ralph S. Regula, whose district includes the college, according to Suzanne Thomas, director of communications for the college. Another earmark helped pay for a new school of nursing, she said.

In seeking the earmarks, the college hired a Washington lobbyist “to help us with a ‘boots on the ground’ program of meeting with various Congressional and Senate leaders,” Ms. Thomas said, noting that many private colleges are enlisting similar lobbying help.

Several scholars who wrote books about religious advocacy work in Washington in the 1980s and early 1990s say the push for earmarks identified in The Times analysis represents a sharp departure from the lobbying strategies traditionally associated with religious groups. One of them, Allen D. Hertzke, a professor at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, said, “I never heard religious lobbyists talk about earmarks.” That view was echoed by Daniel J. B. Hofrenning, a professor at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn.: “Getting heavily into the pork-barrel politics of earmarks — that is a distinctive change.”

It is a shift that some religious advocates find worrisome.

“Earmarks are bad public policy,” said Maureen Shea, director of the Episcopal Office of Government Relations in Washington. “If earmarks are not in the public interest, I would wonder why the faith community would be involved in them. It would hurt our credibility.”

James E. Winkler, who has represented the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society since 2000, says he fears that the pursuit of earmarks could muffle religion’s moral voice. “For example, we’ve opposed the war since day one,” he said. “But what if an earmark benefiting us — money for a Methodist seminary, perhaps — is attached to the supplemental appropriation for the war? You can see how very serious moral conflicts could arise.”

The Rev. Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs at the National Association of Evangelicals, said that while religious organizations should be able to compete for federal money, such groups “shouldn’t do that through earmarks.” He explained, “As good stewards of the public trust, we have to be transparent and above board — and earmarks are not transparent or above board.”