Senator John McCain, speaking in New Orleans in April, is reaching out to conservative Christians. He has alienated them in the past.

By MICHAEL LUO

Lori Viars, an evangelical activist in Warren County, Ohio, essentially put her life on hold in the fall of 2004 to run a telephone campaign office for President Bush. Her efforts helped the president’s ambitious push to turn out evangelicals and win that critical swing state in a close election.
But Ms. Viars, who is among a cluster of socially conservative activists in Ohio being courted by Senator John McCain’s campaign , is taking a wait-and-see attitude toward Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee.
“I think a lot of us are in a holding pattern,” said Ms. Viars, who added that she wanted to see whom Mr. McCain picked as his vice-presidential candidate.
Ms. Viars’s hesitation illustrates what remains one of Mr. McCain’s biggest challenges as he faces a general election contest with Senator Barack Obama: a continued wariness toward him among evangelicals and other Christian conservatives, a critical voting bloc for Republicans that could stay home in the fall or at least be unenthusiastic in their efforts to get out the vote.
To address this, Mr. McCain’s campaign has been building up its outreach to evangelicals over the last month, preparing a budget and a strategic plan for getting them out to vote in 18 states that will be competitive this fall.
The campaign has been sending regular e-mail messages to over 600 socially conservative grass-roots and national leaders - highlighting, for example, Mr. McCain’s statement criticizing a May 15 decision by the California Supreme Court overturning the state’s ban on same-sex marriage . Charlie Black, one of Mr. McCain’s senior advisers, recently sat down with a dozen prominent evangelical leaders in Washington, where he emphasized, among other things, Mr. McCain’s consistent anti-abortion voting record.
Mr. McCain’s outreach to Christian conservatives has been a quiet courting, reflecting a balancing act: his election hopes rely on drawing in the political middleand Democrats who might be turned off should he woo the religious right too heavily by, for instance, highlighting his anti-abortion position more on the campaign trail.
“If McCain tried Bush’s strategy of just mobilizing the base, he would almost certainly fall short,” said John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. “Because the Republican brand name is less popular and the conservative base is restive, McCain has special needs to reach out to independent and moderate voters, but, of course, he can’t completely neglect the evangelical and conservative base.”
The instrumental role of evangelicals in Mr. Bush’s victory in 2004 over Senator John Kerry is an often-repeated lesson from that election. Mr. Bush’s openness about his personal faith and stances on social issues earned him a following among evangelicals, who represented about a quarter of the electorate in 2004. Exit polls in the 2004 election found that 78 percent of white “born again” or evangelical Protestants had voted for Mr. Bush.
In contrast, Mr. McCain’s relationship with evangelicals has long been troubled. In 2000, when he was running against Mr. Bush for the Republican nomination, Mr. McCain castigated the conservative ministers Pat Robertson and the Reverend Jerry Falwell as “agents of intolerance.”
In a sign of the lingering distrust, Mr. McCain finished last out of nine Republican candidates in a straw poll last year at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, a gathering for socially conservative activists.
James C. Dobson, the influential founder of the evangelical group Focus on the Family, released a statement in February affirming that he would not vote for Mr. McCain . Dr. Dobson later softened his stance and said he would vote but has remained critical of Mr. McCain.
“For John McCain to be competitive, he has to connect with the base to the point that they’re intense enough that they’re contagious,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, another conservative evangelical group. “Right now they’re not even coughing.”
Unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. McCain rarely talks about religion on the campaign trail. He grew up Episcopalian and shifted to a Baptist church after marrying his second wife, Cindy, but has not been baptized into the denomination.
When asked about his personal faith at town hall forums, he often relates a familiar story. When Mr. McCain was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, a guard who had once loosened his bonds while he was being tortured sidled up to him on Christmas Day and drew a cross on the dirt in front of them. But some evangelical leaders say the account says more about the guard’s faith than Mr. McCain’s.
Mr. Obama, who speaks comfortably about his own Christian faith, was once seen as the kind of candidate who could help Democrats close the gap with Republicans among weekly churchgoers. But those efforts have been complicated by the incendiary remarks by Mr. Obama’s former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and the comments by Mr. Obama at a fund-raiser in the San Francisco area about people in rural America clinging to guns and religion.
Nevertheless, the Obama campaign plans to add a full-time evangelical-focused staff member to its existing religious outreach team and is rolling out an effort over the summer to organize over a thousand house parties built around an hour-and-a-half-long curriculum on faith and politics. With the broadening of the evangelical agenda to include issues like poverty, global warming and AIDS, Mr. Obama’s advisers hope to attract more moderate evangelical voters.
Mr. McCain’s supporters, however, contend that if they simply outline Mr. McCain’s policy stances on issues that matter to social conservatives and make clear where Mr. Obama stands, the choice will be obvious.
Marlys Popma, a prominent socially conservative leader in Iowa who is Mr. McCain’s national coordinator for evangelical and social conservative outreach, said, “It’s my job to make sure the people out there in the leadership and the grass roots get a chance to know John McCain for what he really is.”