The amendment is the kind of wedge social issue that Republicans have exploited profitably in the past, and Rove appears to have made careful political calculations. Although the amendment has infuriated many -- if not most -- of the estimated 1 million gay Republicans who voted for Bush in 2000, the insult is not expected to significantly damage Bush at the polls. Gay Republicans are too scattered geographically to be a factor in the 19 battleground states, and they mostly live in East Coast and West Coast states that are likely to end up in Kerry's column anyway. Moderate Republicans aren't happy with the emphasis on this divisive social issue, but if they abandon Bush, it's more likely to be over the conduct of the Iraq war and record budget deficits.

Whether the amendment will have its intended effect of spurring large numbers of evangelicals to the polls in key swing states is uncertain. The strategy "is smartly developed," political scientist Green says. "But how well it's going remains to be seen. It's just not clear that it's going to come together."

Another wild card is how members of mainline churches and Christians who are not conservative will vote in November. In courting religious conservatives, Bush has chosen not to emphasize the broader Christian values that many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, share.

"Bush has shown an ideological commitment to the literalist Christian tradition at the expense of the broader view of the larger religious community," said the Rev. Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, a mainline Protestant group. "He is the first president not to meet with the leadership of mainline Christian traditions since George Washington. We've been able to talk with the prime minister of Britain and the chancellor of Germany, but not our own president. And we would have had some positive things to say," Edgar said, mentioning Bush's $15 billion international HIV-AIDS prevention and treatment program. "But on moral questions, like the morality of going to war, we felt the president should have listened more carefully."

Evangelical Christians, who are distinguished by their belief that they must widely share their faith in Jesus Christ as savior, are estimated to make up 20 to 25 percent of the U.S. population. Although they are mostly white and conservative, they are not monolithic. Only 69 percent of them call themselves Republicans, according to a March poll by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research Inc. While evangelicals overwhelmingly oppose gay marriage, it's not necessarily a definitive issue: Only 48 percent of white evangelicals in the Greenberg survey said they would never consider voting for a candidate who supports homosexual marriage.

African-American Protestants, who are also sometimes called evangelicals because they share many of the same religious and moral beliefs as white evangelicals, constitute about 8 percent of the population. But they are fallow ground for Bush: 84 percent of religious African-Americans are Democrats, the Greenberg survey found.

Bush's strategy of wooing white religious conservatives in his base and key battleground states explains why Republicans continue to back losing issues like a 1998 law to restrict children's access to pornographic Web sites. Though it declined this week to strike down the law, the Supreme Court ruled for a third time that it violates free speech. The strategy also explains how Bush can wrap himself in the mantle of Ronald Reagan but ignore the pleas of his widow, Nancy, to support the embryonic stem cell research that might have led to treatment for the late president's Alzheimer's disease. Bush knows that evangelicals concerned with the sanctity of human life will not compromise on research that leads to destruction of human embryos.

Even a seemingly clear-cut issue like programs for the poor can become tangled up in the Republican strategy. Last year, the Republican governor of Alabama, Bob Riley, argued that Christians had a duty to support his proposed $1.2 billion tax hike and restructuring. Huge budget deficits threatened programs for the poor, Riley said, while the state's reliance on a regressive sales tax put the heaviest tax burden on the Alabamans with the least money. But staunch opposition from national Republican anti-tax groups and the Alabama Christian Coalition helped kill the proposal. Riley quickly moved to rehabilitate himself, appearing at a ceremony to unveil a plaque depicting the Ten Commandments at the State Capitol 10 days after a granite monument with the Ten Commandments had been removed from the rotunda of the state judicial building by order of the U.S. District Court.

The tax battle in Alabama, however, underscores a long-simmering frustration among many evangelicals over groups like the Christian Coalition taking positions that appear more rooted in the Republican Party platform than in Scripture. The sense that some religious organizations have lost their unique missions and become appendages of the GOP is behind a push by some evangelicals to refocus on the pursuit of biblical principles in public life.

Toward that end, the National Association of Evangelicals, a Washington lobbying group that represents more than 50 denominations and churches, both conservative and liberal, has drafted a document titled "For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility" that urges Christians to reject partisan labels. "Christianized versions of interest group politics during the last two decades of the twentieth century produced access without influence and discouraged many who had become engaged for the first time," said the draft, which will come before the association in October for final approval.

Joe Loconte, an expert on religion and politics at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, calls that language "a clear signal that some forms of political activity in the name of Christian conviction have just been inappropriate or unhelpful." An earlier form of the draft went further, stating that "evangelicals must guard against overidentifying Christian social goals with a single political party" -- an unmistakable reference to the GOP. But after the Los Angeles Times reported that such wording was under consideration, the passage was watered down to a more neutral warning against equating "Christian faith with partisan politics."

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