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Suzanne Brownlow shivers on the Oregon highway overpass as a cutting wind whips her sign: "Honk to End the War." Her weekly demonstration is the latest turn in a fractious journey that has taken the evangelical Christian mother from protesting abortion clinics to protesting the war in Iraq.

"I feel like at least we are doing something," Suzanne Brownlow says, waving with her husband, Dave, and two youngest children just outside Portland.

No polling data conclusively demonstrate that opinion has shifted among conservative evangelicals. But some prominent national evangelical leaders say that debate about — and, in some cases, outright opposition to — the war is breaking out among Christian conservatives.

For those evangelicals, they say, frustration with Republicans' failure to overturn abortion rights has fueled their skepticism. Others decry the war's human toll and financial cost, and they're concerned about any use of torture.

"This war has challenged their confidence in the party," says Tony Campolo, an evangelical Baptist minister who lectures across the country on social issues.

"Add to that that they feel the Republicans have betrayed them on the abortion issue," says the author and frequent talk-show guest, "and you are beginning to see signs of a rebellion."

The National Association of Evangelicals, which says it represents 45,000 evangelical churches, recently endorsed an anti-torture statement saying the United States has crossed "boundaries of what is legally and morally permissible" in its treatment of detainees and war prisoners in the fight against terror.

The Brownlows voted for Bush in 2000 because of his more conservative views. But a month before the 2003 invasion, the Damascus, Ore., couple began campaigning against his Iraq policies. Dave Brownlow ran for Congress three times, twice on an anti-war ticket for the Constitution Party. Since November, the couple have lobbied lawmakers to bring the troops home.

Last month, they founded Believers Against the War to influence other evangelical Christians.

On a recent Saturday, a motorcyclist, sleek in black leather, spotted the Brownlows' banners, raised his gloved fist and flipped an obscene gesture. The Brownlows smiled, because many others were honking their support. Then a woman driver slowed and screamed, "Get over it."

Suzanne Brownlow's serenity finally broke.

"How can I get over it?" she said. "My son is in Iraq."

To be sure, many mainline Christian churches and several dozen prominent evangelicals opposed the war from the beginning. Others were ambivalent.

But since 2003, polls have shown that a higher rate of conservative Christians than other Americans favored military action. The National Association of Evangelicals, the same group that condemned torture tactics, even linked evangelical "prayer warriors" to the successful killing of Saddam Hussein's sons.

Daniel Heimbach, professor of Christian ethics at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., supported the war and Bush's recent troop surge. Heimbach said that while pacifists believe war is never moral, and crusaders believe it is the ultimate means to bring about God's kingdom on Earth, the dominant view among some Christians for centuries has been that war can be justified under certain conditions.

Now the debate has shifted to whether the United States should stay. Heimbach says he is not convinced the situation is hopeless or that the cost of remaining is too high.

Daniel R. Lockwood, president of Multnomah Bible College and Biblical Seminary in Portland, Ore., says he has seen a "sea change" among his students, who are looking beyond traditional conservative issues such as abortion and homosexuality to the environment, children with HIV/AIDS and the poor.

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March (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51