CORRECTION

An article Saturday on Page 1B incorrectly identified the occupation of U.S. Rep. David Price's father. He was a school principal.

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When the state Republican Party asked North Carolina churches last month to give them copies of their directories, the request rested on an assumption: Although God may not be a Republican, a majority of his most faithful adherents are.

Or as the GOP memo put it, "people who regularly attend church usually vote Republican when they vote."

The memo reopened questions about whether one political party has an advantage in appealing to the faithful.

Which is one reason why several hundred people attended a forum Friday in Duke Chapel to discuss how they can recast the political debate so it is not so dominated by religious conservatives.

"It is a conversation we undertake with a new urgency," said Rep. David Price of Chapel Hill, who is co-chairman of a House Democratic caucus on religion. Price has a Yale divinity degree and is the son of a Baptist lay preacher.

"We see the religious banner being co-opted by people whose religion and politics, we think, falls short of the kind of public witness we ought to make," Price said Friday on WUNC's State of Things program.

One reason for the Democrats' urgency is that conservative evangelicals have become political shock troops for the Republican Party in the South. It is the same role that organized labor has played for northern Democrats, according to Mark Silk, an expert on religion and politics at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.

Silk said that because evangelical conservatives tend to be more committed voters, their importance is heightened in mid-term elections such as this year's, when there is traditionally a lower turnout.

A gap emerges

The religion voting gap between Democrats and Republicans first became noticeable in 1972. But it didn't become pronounced until the 1990s, when there was a marked reaction to Bill Clinton's infidelities, Silk said. Exit polls now show that 60 percent of people who say they go to church at least once a week vote Republican.

The lines seem to be polarizing. Last year, a Haywood County Baptist church caused a national stir when it voted to expel Democrats. And shortly after President Bush was re-elected, entertainer Garrison Keillor said jokingly that he would support "a constitutional amendment to take the right to vote away from born-again Christians."

North Carolina has had a critical role in the courtship between the Republican Party and conservative Christians.

Former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms and his political lieutenants helped create what came to be known as the religious right in the late 1970s and 1980s by attracting white Christian conservatives to his cause. Helms stressed issues that religious conservatives considered a threat to traditional values -- abortion, pornography, homosexuality and limits on school prayer.

Carter Wrenn, a veteran Helms strategist, said there was a deliberate effort to broaden the Republican Party beyond business conservatives to include cultural conservatives, many of whom had been politically uninvolved.

In more recent years, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole was elected in 2002 with a strong evangelical appeal, asking supporters to be her "prayer warriors."

Appealing to religion

Other Republicans, most notably U.S. Rep. Walter Jones of Farmville, have made religious appeals central to their message. Jones is a particular favorite of religious conservatives. He champions legislation that would protect the tax-exempt status of churches engaged in politics and presses the Pentagon to allow chaplains to pray in the name of Jesus Christ, rather than more generic prayers.

Democrats tend to talk about religion most often in African-American churches, which remain strongly Democratic in their voting patterns. Some successful Democrats, such as former four-term Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt, frequently injected religious appeals into his speeches.

James Guth, an expert on religion and politics at Furman University, said it is simpler for Republicans to attract religious voters because much of their base is conservative -- whether they be evangelical Protestants, conservative Catholics or Mormons.

"The Democratic Party has always been a party of religious minorities," Guth said. "When talking about religion, it is pretty hard to find a common denominator because so many religions are involved. And the Democratic Party has increasingly become dependent on secular voters."

The risk for Democrats was evident Friday during the WUNC program. Several callers, apparently secular Democrats, objected to discussing public policy issues in religious terms.

A shift toward GOP

Wrenn, the Republican strategist, said Democrats have a difficult time talking about such issues as religious diversity or separation of church and state without appearing hostile to religious conservatives. Unless Democrats support voluntary school prayer in the public schools, Wrenn said, they have little hope of winning back religious voters.

The Rev. Coy Privette of Kannapolis has seen working people move from the Democratic column to the Republicans during his four decades as a legislator, gubernatorial candidate and now Cabarrus County commissioner.

"The Democratic Party is on the wrong side of the biblical issues, like right to life, and issues on same-sex marriage," Privette said. "That has made all the difference in the world."

But Jim Wallis, an evangelical minister, says that is too narrow a view of religion. He says, for example, that the Bible contains 2,000 verses about fighting poverty that at times seem to be overlooked.

Wallis, the founder of Sojourners Magazine and author of "God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It," told the Duke Chapel audience that the debate among Christians has been broadening to include not only such hot-button issues as abortion and homosexuality, but also poverty, AIDs and the suffering in Darfur.

"The worst mistake progressives have made is conceding the area of religion and values to the political right," Wallis said.