Obama Making Christian Push

Despite the concerted push, Obama faces a tough task in trying to loosen the GOP's hold on a majority of white churchgoers. A recent poll by Calvin College found McCain leading Obama 57 percent to 25 percent among evangelicals and 43 percent to 35 percent among Catholics.

"Right now there's really more continuity than change" among religious voters, said John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. "But we're at the beginning of the campaign, and what campaigns try to do is change people's minds."

Obama may have done some of that at the Chicago meeting, which one adviser described as a "Nixon goes to China" moment.

Abortion and gay marriage -- issues on which he openly disagreed with many of the evangelical leaders in the room -- dominated the discussion, according to participants.

Still, Strang wrote in a blog, Obama "won over the loyalties of many."

"He came across as thoughtful and much more of a 'centrist' than I would have expected," Strang wrote, adding that he hopes McCain will host a similar gathering.

Mansfield said he sees similar political acumen in the Joshua Generation program. Often used as a "mobilizing phrase" among evangelical church youth groups, the name refers to the biblical story of Joshua, who did what Moses could not: lead his people into the Promised Land.

"The impressive thing about Obama is that he knows this," Mansfield said. "This is language you expect to hear at a youth rally, not from the presidential campaign of the most liberal member of the Senate."

The Matthew 25 Project, named after the biblical passage in which Jesus promises eternal life for those who care for the least and the lost, will be led by Mara Vanderslice, a young evangelical who briefly led faith outreach for the 2004 campaign of Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and later founded a respected political consulting firm.

About 40 people turned up for a $1,000-a-head Washington fundraiser this month to hear about the group's plans for targeting Catholics, moderate evangelicals, Hispanic Catholics and Protestants, Vanderslice said.

The PAC is just one "piece of the faith outreach puzzle," said Mike McCurry, a former press secretary for President Bill Clinton who is advising the project.

"For evangelicals, obviously this is an uphill battle. No one is proposing that we go and win a majority of them," McCurry said. But there are significant numbers of moderate Christians "and we need to reach them."