Which means he SHOULD NOT DO WELL HERE!
Ron Paul!
"In N.H. churches, candidates find a different breed of evangelical" by Lisa Wangsness, Globe Staff | December 21, 2007
NASHUA - In the dimly lit sanctuary of a large brick church at the north end of Main Street, more than 100 people move to light Christian rock music. Children, recently resettled refugees from Burundi, are splayed out on the floor with coloring books. A man in jeans and a sweater stands nearby, swaying and holding his palms heavenward.
"What can wash away my sins," the group sings. "Nothing but the blood of Jesus."
Grace Fellowship in Nashua is part of a growing movement of evangelical Christians in New Hampshire, a group that includes nearly 1 in 5 Republican primary voters and that could play an important role in the state's Jan. 8 election. Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and an ordained Baptist minister, has preached in four New Hampshire churches, and is hoping to connect with religious conservatives.
Yet those who worship at Grace Fellowship and other New Hampshire churches point to many ways in which they differ from evangelicals outside New England, particularly in the South and Southwest, who are the backbone of the religious right in America and, in Iowa and South Carolina, provide a base of support for Huckabee.
Outside New England, evangelical megachurches are commonplace, attracting thousands or even tens of thousands. In New Hampshire, evangelical churches tend to be smaller - and more independent.
Evangelicals outside New England have created a large network of faith-based political organizations, such as Focus on the Family, dedicated to socially conservative causes such as outlawing abortion and same-sex marriage. In New Hampshire, only a few organizations mix faith and politics, and they tend to be very small, low-budget grass-roots groups that hold little political power at the state level. That makes the community more difficult for political campaigns to organize.
And while evangelicals in New Hampshire are more conservative than other Christian groups in the state, they tend to be more socially moderate than their Southern counterparts, suggesting Huckabee or any other social conservative who seeks their support might have to contour the message in a different way.
"It kind of makes me laugh sometimes when they lump evangelicals all in one group," said the Rev. Bruce Boria, pastor of Bethany Church in Greenland, the state's largest evangelical church and one of the most politically diverse, which attracts about 2,000 people each Sunday.
"At my church, there have been people who have opened their homes to Barack Obama" and a variety of other candidates from both parties, said Boria. He said he is a former New Yorker and finds much to like in Rudy Giuliani. In his congregation, Boria said, "I find, especially among the younger ones, a greater openness of dialogue instead of a hard-line position in one camp."
Combined postelection survey data from 1992 to 2000 by National Surveys of Religion and Politics indicate that 45 percent of New England evangelical Protestants who attended church more than once a week considered themselves "pro-gay rights," compared with 29 percent in the South.
John Green, a senior fellow with the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life who conducted the research, sees two possible reasons: First, many more Northeastern evangelicals are affiliated with denominations that are more politically moderate than Southern Baptists and Pentecostals, the groups that dominate the Southern evangelical landscape. Second, he said, evangelicals in New England live in a more culturally liberal climate.
"They're not from an evangelical Protestant culture, they're from a New England culture," added Andrew Walsh, associate director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford. "They haven't been marinated for generations in the religious and political culture of the South, or even Iowa."
John Prince, 24, who grew up an evangelical Christian in Berlin, N.H., and is now an investment consultant, is a Republican who opposes gay marriage and abortion, and his favorite candidate is Huckabee, whose views on those issues align with his. But when asked about his top issues in the presidential election, he talks about energy independence, building stronger alliances with countries around the world, and healing the country's partisan divide.
"In light of things like war, for instance, and dependence on foreign oil, I think gay marriage sort of takes a back seat, even though I don't think it's necessarily unimportant," he said.
At 18 percent, evangelicals are a smaller portion of Republican primary voters in New Hampshire than in Iowa, where they make up 38 percent, and South Carolina, where they represent 53 percent, according to a poll released this month by the Pew Research Center and the Associated Press. Yet it is a large enough group of voters to have an impact in a competitive, multicandidate election.
So far, only Huckabee has tried to pursue this group. Political analysts say that may be because it is risky in New Hampshire: The larger Republican electorate might look askance at an openly religious candidate.
"In New England in general, and in New Hampshire in particular, people are very skeptical about religious candidates," said Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center.
And many conservative Christians in New Hampshire are as squeamish about bringing politics into church as their secular neighbors are about bringing religion into politics.
"Political buttons, they stay outside the door," said Chris Tidwell, the pastor of Deerfield Bible Church, a rural congregation of about 50 people.
"I don't express my political views at church," said the Rev. Frank Accardy, pastor of the Evangelical Baptist Church of Laconia. All "Christians don't see things the same way, and there's no point in introducing division."
In line with that viewpoint, Huckabee has won some fans among New Hampshire evangelicals by scrupulously keeping faith and politics separated. When Huckabee met with a group of evangelical ministers in Manchester last week at a conference headlined by well-known national evangelical leaders, the event was not on his public schedule, and organizers declined to allow a reporter to attend.
Rev. Kenneth J. Bosse of New Life Assembly of God in Raymond called it "a huge leap of faith on my part" to open his pulpit to a presidential candidate last spring, but he was won over by Huckabee's sermon on "the sin of being good," which he said had absolutely nothing to do with the campaign.
"He so honored those boundaries," Bosse said.
Fifty years ago, there were almost no evangelical churches in New Hampshire, Walsh said.
That changed as Southern evangelicals moved north - the first evangelical churches in modern New England, Walsh said, sprang up outside military bases. In the 1970s, evangelical churches began appearing in suburbs, part of a national reemergence of interest in evangelical Christianity.
The flexibility of Pentecostal and independent evangelical churches - pastors don't always have to be ordained, and can hold other jobs - has helped new congregations flourish in down-on-their-luck small towns and among communities of new immigrants.
Many of the new churches are seeing "exponential growth," said the Rev. Paul Berube, pastor of Grace Fellowship. Berube, 55, grew up Catholic in Nashua and can recall a time when "you'd have a real hard time having a group of 50, and now there is an incredible evangelical presence all over the state." His church now has more than 1,000 members and is host to Chinese, Brazilian, Indian, and Brazilian congregations.
"It's almost like the South or the Bible Belt is in its third or fourth generation, where we're the first," he said. "So there's more enthusiasm and excitement and first-generation commitment."
