GOP Loyalty Not a Given For Young Evangelicals

He has also been watching from afar as Obama's camp has continued to try to pull along the willing in other ways. Saturday, the campaign will roll out a "Believers for Barack" Web site to blog about Obama and for visitors to volunteer for service projects.

McCain's campaign is quietly fighting back. Staffers are visiting churches and telling people that though Obama speaks freely about his faith, he "takes extreme positions on certain issues that are not in sync with the evangelical population," said Marlys Popma, who oversees evangelical outreach for McCain. She acknowledged that a lot of evangelicals are undecided because of Obama's extensive faith outreach, but she said that when they hear McCain's message and understand Obama's liberal views, they will support the Republican.

This week, Popma's team will add pages to McCain's Web site targeting evangelicals, emphasizing his desire to see the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling overturned, his conservative views on same-sex marriage, and his plan to appoint conservative justices. An interactive section on the site targeting young evangelicals will outline McCain's plans to address climate change and world poverty.

Merritt has not been in touch with the McCain campaign, and he said it seems that the senator from Arizona is uncomfortable talking about his faith and is seeking endorsements from the evangelical old guard. He calls McCain's acceptance, then repudiation, of the Rev. John Hagee's endorsement "strange." Hagee angered church leaders by making controversial comments about Catholicism.

"McCain has really used the old-school tactics of trying to snag some of those big evangelical leaders who oftentimes don't represent young evangelicals," Merritt said.

A Page From the Bible

The environment was the first issue that Merritt cared about passionately that did not fit his traditional Republican mind-set. He remembers sitting in a class on systematic theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina last year and his professor saying: "When we destroy God's creation, we are destroying God's revelation. It's similar to tearing a page out of the Bible."

For a Southern Baptist, the Bible is the infallible, literal word of God, and that stuck with Merritt.

"I could feel God making my heart sensitive," he recalls.

Merritt worries about the state of the country in a two-war, declining-dollar, post-Sept. 11 world. He has heard from Baptist missionaries who are having a hard time sharing the Gospel overseas, where opinions of the United States are so low. He is concerned about the loss of life in Iraq and the toll it is taking on families, and he is rethinking his support of the war. He recently persuaded his mom to start recycling, and he carries canvas shopping bags in his trunk so he will not add to landfills by using plastic ones.

Donnie McDaniel, a friend of Merritt's who is studying theology and the environment in a doctoral program at Southeastern, voted for Bush four years ago but said that neither of this year's candidates is a perfect fit. He is 32, grew up attending a Wesleyan holiness church in South Carolina and became a Southern Baptist when he married the daughter of a missionary.

"It's probably going to be a decision I won't make until I walk into the booth that day," he said of his choice of candidates. "There's no doubt that Barack Obama uses Christian language. He's getting attention, but for the most part, I'm theologically conservative and . . . conservative on social issues," McDaniel said. "But I look at John McCain, and he doesn't really represent me either. I have a theological commitment to nonviolence, too. Truly, if you are an evangelical Christian, no political party should be able to fully represent you because you are doing something counter-cultural."

Merritt has also been exposed to leaders of the "emerging church," a youth-driven Christian movement that has grown through an online network and encourages small meetings in homes, bars and coffee shops. Merritt attended an event recently and found enlightening what one organizer called an "ironic hipster revival and book reading." Its leaders tend to be politically liberal, and Merritt was provoked by questions they posed, such as "How did the Gospel become married to the American political system?"