[NYT] WAUKEE, Iowa — Nine declared or likely Republican candidates descended on a large church in Iowa on Saturday to court evangelical Christians, the voters who played the starring role in the state’s two most recent caucuses.
They included the winners of those two contests (Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee), newcomers whose biographies lend themselves to evangelical support (Ted Cruz and Scott Walker), and candidates who would like to win some support from the Christian right but are eyeing broad coalitions (Rand Paul and Marco Rubio).
The nine-candidate lineup in the worship hall ofPoint of Grace Church in Waukee, a Des Moines suburb, was proof of evangelical power in Iowa, but also a warning that the script may be rewritten in 2016, with so many candidates competing for social conservatives that their votes splinter.
“The problem for Christian conservative candidates is they’re all running in the same lane,” said Kedron Bardwell, a political scientist at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, who studies religion and politics.
The speakers wooed the crowd, several hundred who were seated in steeply banked rows, with stories about the role of faith in their personal lives and pledges to support issues important to social conservatives, not only abortion and same-sex marriage but also a newly rising interest in security threats in the Middle East.
Many portrayed Christians as an increasingly persecuted community, seeking to appeal to the evangelical audience with vows to protect what they described as religious liberty for people of faith.
There were glimpses of personal biographies that are not the usual staples of stump speeches. Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, told of moving back into his childhood bedroom after a career in the Air Force, when he felt lost, until he had an epiphany that “I was going to spend the rest of my life doing God’s work.”
“I just really never realized how large the pulpit was going to be that he was going to make available to me 30 years later as the governor of Texas,” he said.
arly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, talked about how after losing a daughter to addiction, “it was my husband Frank’s and my personal relationship with Jesus Christ that saved us from a desperate sadness.”
And Bobby Jindal, the Louisiana governor, said the most important moment in his life was not his wedding day or when he held his first child, but “the moment I found Jesus Christ.”
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