IF JESUS were voting in next month’s presidential election, Pastor Jim Henry frequently tells his congregation of 11,000 evangelicals, the Son of God would back the candidate most supportive of family values and the Bible.

“And George Bush cares about those issues and that’s why he’s energised the evangelical base,” Pastor Henry told The Times yesterday inside his sleek, modern office at Orlando’s vast First Baptist Church. “And I’ve preached from the pulpit. I’ve told them that if they don’t go out and vote, they should be ashamed.”

For Karl Rove, Mr Bush’s chief political adviser, those words will be electoral manna. Mr Rove is a fervent believer in the power of America’s Religious Right to decide the election. It is now an article of faith inside the White House that if white born-again and evangelical Christians turn out in big numbers, Mr Bush cannot lose.

In the four years since the disputed 2000 election, Mr Rove has been obsessed by his conviction that up to four million evangelical Christians who should have voted for Mr Bush stayed at home, partly because of last-minute revelations about Mr Bush’s 1976 arrest for drink-driving.

Since then, Mr Bush has done everything possible to boost turnout among all religious voters, but has been particularly assiduous in his efforts to energise the predominately white, evangelical Christian Right.

Born a high-church Episcopalian, before turning to evangelical Methodism when he gave up drinking in 1986, Mr Bush laces all his speeches with religious rhetoric, has outlawed partial birth abortion, called for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, opposed stem-cell research and talks often about the power of Jesus Christ in his life — the essence of evangelical faith.

It is easy to see why. The Religious Right in America is a massive, largely Republican, “army of God”, with huge numbers in critical swing states such as Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Iowa. If it marches to the polling stations on November 2, Mr Bush’s faith is likely to be handsomely rewarded.

White Protestants in America who describe themselves as either born-again or evangelical account for a quarter of the electorate, a bigger voting bloc than blacks and Hispanics combined.

A recent poll by the National Annenberg Election Survey estimated that born-agains and evangelicals account for 36 per cent of registered voters in Missouri, 27 per cent in Ohio, 30 per cent in Iowa and 22 per cent in Pennsylvania. Recent polls show that up to 80 per cent of those voters prefer Mr Bush. Another survey found that 54 per cent of born-agains plan to vote for Mr Bush, while a massive 90 per cent of evangelicals plan to do so.

Calling for a constitutional ban on gay marriage, for example, was Machiavellian in its political calculation. Almost certain to die in Congress, the move forced Mr Kerry to oppose it. James Dobson, of the group Focus on the Family, now calls the fight against gay marriage “our D-Day or Gettysburg or Stalingrad.”

In Florida, the biggest prize among the battleground states, a third of voters describe themselves as evangelical. The state has more than 2,000 Baptist churches and a Baptist membership of nearly 1.1 million. Pastor Henry has been registering voters at his services since June. He does not tell them who to vote for, but it is clear that Mr Kerry, a practising Roman Catholic who backs abortion rights, is not the evangelicals’ favourite.

Another poll by the Barna Group found that Mr Bush also has a 63 per cent to 36 per cent lead among Catholic voters. If these voters need any more encouragement not to vote for Mr Kerry, the Republican National Committee directs them to a website: www.kerrywrongforevangelicals.com.

The party also sent a mass mailing to voters in West Virginia and Arkansas last month telling them that if Mr Kerry won, Bible-reading might be banned.

“George Bush is a man of principle,” Pastor Henry said. “Senator Kerry has taken the opposite stance on the values issues, right down the line. His wife says that she wants to push the gay rights agenda. To push a wrong lifestyle contradicts the Bible’s standards. I’ll think you’ll find that after this election, the evangelical vote has picked up a lot.”

In the last of the presidential debates, Mr Kerry tried to blunt Republican appeal among evangelicals by reminding them that Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, has a lesbian daughter. Nearly 70 per cent of voters, secular and religious, believed he was wrong to do it.

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