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"Let me say this loud and clear: I don't think that we can deny that there is a moral and spiritual component to prevention," Obama said at the 2006 conference. "The relationship between men and women, between sexuality and spirituality, has broken down, and needs to be repaired."

On November 30 last year, Clinton spoke about how the Book of James contains her favorite Bible passage.

"For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also," she said. But she also added, "I have concluded that works without faith cannot be sustained."

Will the appearances win either candidate any evangelical votes? And if they do, will it be due to the speeches, or because the candidates were standing in Saddleback Church next to Rick Warren?

Furman University political science professor Jim Guth said that fostering relationships with religious leaders will only go so far.

"Endorsements have lost their impact for most people," he said. "Endorsements from surprising sources at least may cause some religious voters to sit up and reconsider their choices. It is helpful for the Democrats to be seen in dialogue with Rick Warren and [National Association of Evangelicals vice president] Rich Cizik. It certainly does start to work against the widespread perception that the Democrats are hostile to religion and evangelicals."

The candidates will need to find broad appeals as they try to win over not only evangelicals, but also Roman Catholics, as well as African American and Hispanic American Christians.

"Obama sees a lot of potential in the Rick Warren kind of Republican," Guth said. "The candidates don't think they will win a big block of all Sunday Southern Baptist voters. [Evangelicals symbolize] one arrow in a quiver of those who are moderately conservative but may be persuaded."

For the past 25 years, Democrats, more than Republicans, have shied away from religious outreach, said Leah Daughtry, Democratic National Committee Convention CEO. But she added that Democrats have always been religious.

"We just look around the room and say, 'Of course we're people of faith. People don't know that?'" Daughtry told Christianity Today. "We're not a secular party."

Time magazine's nation editor Amy Sullivan thinks the Democrats are to blame for losing evangelical voters. She said that Democrats were hopeless when it came to religious voters.

"It was not just something they felt uncomfortable with. It was [considered] a lost cause," said Sullivan, whose book on the Democrats' recent religious outreach efforts, The Party Faithful, comes out this month from Scribner. "There were Democrats who were frightened that the conversation would start with abortion and never move on."

Now Democrats are hoping that evangelicals have changed their priorities to the Iraq War and the environment. There is some reason for this hope: In a recent survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 65 percent of evangelicals said the war in Iraq was very important to them. Seventy-two percent said that domestic issues like health care, the environment, and the economy are very important, while 56 percent said social issues like abortion and gay marriage were very important.

Democrats' eagerness to actively seek out the religious vote began with John Kerry's presidential campaign, which hired a young Democrat named Mara Vanderslice to focus on religious outreach. The former intern at Jim Wallis's Sojourners organization desperately wanted to see Democrats talking with people of faith.

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February 2008, Vol. 52, No. 2