The New Christian Right

The two dozen pastors gathered in a dreary room adorned with balloons and needlepoint texts from Scripture, deep within the cavernous Greenwell Springs Baptist Church. They had come from as far as Texas and Colorado to this red-brick building on the outskirts of Baton Rouge, La., at the behest of Tony Perkins, one of America’s most influential evangelical Christian leaders. And their host made clear that the evening’s guest of honor had his blessing. “I wouldn’t invite just anybody to my church,” Perkins said as he introduced Rick Santorum.

It was the Sunday before the Louisiana primary on March 24. The pastors, wearing hand-printed name tags, listened as the Republican presidential candidate delivered his pitch. “If this is about management of the economy, we’re going to lose,” he said. “What we need to do in this country is to rebuild that culture of life and rebuild that culture of marriage and families.”

Few politicians would argue that managing the economy isn’t the election’s signal issue. But Santorum’s message at private conclaves like the gathering at Greenwell Springs has been essential to his success. Although he emerged as Mitt Romney’s chief rival, the former Pennsylvania Senator still has no pollster, a meager bank account and a paid staff that would fill just a handful of church pews. His hopes of winning the nomination may be dwindling, but his ramshackle campaign has mounted the party’s strongest insurgent challenge since Ronald Reagan nearly toppled Gerald Ford in 1976.

The force propelling Santorum to these victories is his devout and driven network of social conservatives. Religious leaders, antiabortion activists, homeschooling advocates and Christian businessmen have rallied to his cause with a passion that Romney’s followers can’t match. Guided by the likes of Perkins–who prodded the pastors at Greenwell Springs to urge their flocks to vote–they have staged living-room phone banks, hired tour buses, launched Facebook campaigns and tuned in to an upstart online radio show, We Pick Rick, that broadcasts three nights a week. “It is a true grassroots campaign, where the office is a kitchen table,” says Phil Burress, an evangelical activist in Ohio. Shelley Ahlersmeyer, who oversees Santorum’s grassroots coalitions from her home in rural Indiana, attributes much of his success to this zeal. “We are the campaign,” she says.

The results kept surprising the political world. Santorum won contests in Colorado and Mississippi without ever leading in a public poll, and he trailed in seven consecutive Alabama polls before taking the state by 5 points. One likely explanation: Santorum’s voters are more fired up than Romney’s and thus more likely to vote on primary day.

Their enthusiasm surely reflects Santorum’s passion for conservative Christian causes, from banning abortion to opposing gay marriage. It may also reflect distrust of Romney’s Mormon faith among evangelical Christians. And it has enabled Santorum to unite a coterie of religious leaders whose influence has been muted in recent years as fiscal issues and foreign affairs have dominated the national agenda. When roused, it’s a powerful coalition, one that ensured George W. Bush’s 2000 nomination and provided a foundation for his 2004 re-election before minting a political star in Mike Huckabee four years later. “I am actually seeing an even stronger intensity and enthusiasm than I did in 2004,” says Perkins, who is supportive of Santorum but whose organization, the Family Research Council, does not endorse presidential candidates.

It helps that Santorum casts his campaign as a divine mission. “One of the great blessings I’ve had in every political campaign is people underestimate me. People underestimate what God can do,” he said in Louisiana. Many politicians will make a show of praying before the cameras; Santorum is more likely to ask for others’ prayers. And while most focus on economic malaise, Santorum calls spiritual and moral decay just as grave a threat to America.

The result isn’t just a small army of Christian soldiers with campaign signs and call sheets. It’s also cash. Foster Friess, Santorum’s biggest donor, says the candidate’s moral message was partly what opened his wallet. A recent closed-door meeting of a couple hundred social-conservative leaders at a Houston hotel netted Santorum and his allied super PAC $1.78 million in pledged contributions. Eager to emphasize other facets of his platform that can attract more secular voters, Santorum tells Time that “clearly pastors are a very important part of the Republican primary” but that he has “a strong message that appeals across the board.” Yet it’s increasingly apparent that religious leaders and their parishioners offer Santorum the hope of political salvation. “It looks like God is just trying to bless this man,” says the Rev. Gene Mills of the Louisiana Family Forum.

The religious right’s unity is a departure from the previous presidential campaign. Back then, a cadre of conservative Christian leaders and businessmen, most of whom met regularly through two secretive organizations, the Arlington Group and the Council for National Policy, screened the Republican candidates but couldn’t agree on a favorite. Some supported Huckabee, a Baptist preacher and former governor of Arkansas. Others preferred John McCain. Pat Robertson baffled many by endorsing the pro-choice Rudy Giuliani. The split translated to limited influence.

Last year, the same groups tried again. In private meetings across the country, as many as 200 leaders met with Texas Governor Rick Perry, then in Washington with Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann and Santorum and finally with Newt Gingrich. All of them were grilled about their views on everything from marriage and abortion to support for Israel. “We really thoroughly vetted them,” says Robert Fischer, a South Dakota furniture retailer and key organizer of the gatherings. Perry emerged as an early favorite, but after he flopped in the Iowa caucuses, a January meeting was called at a ranch outside Brenham, Texas. About 150 religious leaders voted, by a ratio of 3 to 1, to support Santorum, with Gingrich coming in second. In the following weeks, influential conservatives activated their networks. Phyllis Schlafly used her venerable Eagle Forum to organize phone banks. The pro-life Susan B. Anthony List and the Culture War Victory Fund drove a rented tour bus plastered with Santorum’s face on a cross-country tour through primary states. Their collective efforts have boosted him to victory in five of the seven states where born-again Republicans exceeded 50% of the vote.

The depth of Protestant support for Santorum, a Catholic, is striking given the historic suspicions between some elements of each denomination. Evangelical Protestants have so far accounted for roughly half the Republican turnout in early voting states. “I can’t imagine this happening before the 1980s and even beyond that,” says Randall Balmer, a professor of religious history at Barnard University. But Santorum speaks the language of the Bible Belt–which seems to be what matters. According to a recent Pew poll, 35% of white evangelical Republican voters nationwide believed Santorum to be a fellow evangelical, more than the percentage that correctly identified him as Catholic. Even more curiously, Santorum has struggled to win over fellow Catholics, who have leaned toward Romney. Santorum recently suggested that might be because evangelical Protestants “practice their religion more ardently” than Catholics.

Other religious divisions may also be at work. At Greenwell Springs, skittishness about Romney’s faith wasn’t far from the surface. “I have a problem with Romney because of his Mormon beliefs,” says Sam Raney, a former pastor at the church. “It’s a huge thing.”

That dovetailed with the evening’s theme, which was the fight to revive the nation’s Christian heritage. After the pastor’s briefing upstairs, more than 1,000 parishioners crammed into the sanctuary in Greenwell Springs to hear the church’s pastor, Dennis Terry, deliver a stem-winder of a sermon. “This nation was founded as a Christian nation,” he thundered. “If you don’t like the way we do things, I’ve got one thing to say: Get out! We don’t worship Buddha. We don’t worship Muhammad. We don’t worship Allah. We worship God. We worship God’s son Jesus Christ.”

Santorum might argue that such events form only a small part of a campaign that also stresses issues like health care reform, Iran and manufacturing. But his real power comes from the pulpits and pews. In some ways, he seems to have faith that he can win on faith alone. His lone field office in Louisiana consists of a few rented rooms in an auto-insurance shop wedged between a Popeyes and a hair salon on a seedy drag in a New Orleans suburb. On a Monday afternoon five days before the Bayou State primary, the office was empty save for a sole staffer on loan from Republican Senator David Vitter. A cluttered conference table strewn with phones and papers offered the only evidence of campaign activity.

While his odds of overtaking Romney are slim–Romney padded his delegate lead with a decisive win in Illinois on March 20–Santorum has become a standard bearer for a resurgent Christian right looking to reassert its role within the GOP. “Reagan came up short in 1976,” says Ralph Reed, a former executive director of the Christian Coalition. “But we also know that Reagan signaled a change in the direction of the party.”

Speaking to the crowd in Greenwell Springs, Santorum drew roaring ovations and shouts of “Amen!” When he was finished, the pastors laid hands on his back, an invocation of the Holy Spirit. Santorum closed his eyes and bowed his head, and the crowd lifted their hands to the heavens.