Six GOP hopefuls court the faithful

Plano church hosts presidential candidates discussing their religion.

A half-dozen Republican candidates for president came to an evangelical megachurch in Plano on Sunday, preaching to the choir about their advocacy for religious liberty, their enmity for Planned Parenthood and their personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

“I’m not willing to surrender, I’m not willing to give up on the Constitution,” U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz said to huge applause from an audience of more than 6,000, referring to his refusal to accept the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage as the last word.

“My goodness, you know how to fire people up; you could be a preacher,” Dr. Jack Graham, pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church, told Cruz, the home state favorite whose candidacy depends on emerging as the top choice of evangelical voters.

“Pastor Graham, it’s worse than that. I’m a PK,” said Cruz, whose father, Rafael Cruz, is a pastor who serves as a campaign surrogate and is writing

a book on the obligation of Christian conservative pastors to be more politically involved.

“Preacher’s kid,” said Graham.

“I’m the shy, soft-spoken one,” Cruz said, explaining that his father’s ministry is to preach to preachers that “if a flock stumbled into a ditch, you don’t blame the sheep, you blame the shepherd.”

The event was not a debate. The Republican National Committee has forbidden the candidates to participate in any debate that is not sanctioned by the party. The candidates — Cruz; former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina; former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush; Dr. Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon; former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania; and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, an ordained Baptist preacher — appeared sequentially, offering remarks and then engaging in conversation with Graham about faith and politics. Some 10,200 people watched online, according to the church.

Graham said all the candidates — Republican and Democratic — were invited and that “the right ones” showed up.

“People of faith make better leaders,” Fiorina said. “I think we need more prayer in public life. Not less. Not because we want to exclude people but because we want to give people the opportunity for contemplation.”

“My faith has been tested,” Fiorina said. “I have battled breast cancer. I have buried a child, and through it all, the love of my family and my personal relationship with Jesus Christ has seen me through. ... I call on that relationship every single day.”

Fiorina surged in the polls after the last Republican debate, at which she denounced Planned Parenthood on the basis of undercover tapes purporting to show that the organization and its affiliates were illegally profiting from the sale of tissue from aborted fetuses.

Planned Parenthood and its defenders contend that those videos are doctored and misleading.

At Prestonwood, she said that her first revulsion at abortion came when, as a young woman, a friend asked her to go with her to a Planned Parenthood clinic for the friend’s abortion and she “watched what that procedure did to her physically, emotionally, spiritually.”

Later, she said, she learned that her husband’s mother had been advised to abort him.

“He was the joy of her life and is the rock of mine,” she said.

“We need a fearless fighter in the White House,” Fiorina said.

Cruz said that he alone among the Republican field had fought to the end to try to defund Planned Parenthood in Congress and that he had devoted his adult life to defending religious liberty and fighting judicial activism.

Huckabee said defunding Planned Parenthood is necessary but insufficient, and that what is needed is an effort to end abortions — “the uncivilized savagery for which we must repent” — under the Constitution’s due process and equal protection provisions.

Carson said that after he criticized President Barack Obama at last year’s National Prayer Breakfast, he was urged to run for president.

His reaction was, “Lord, this is not on my bucket list, but if you want this to happen, you will have to open the doors, and if you open the doors, I will walk through them. And if you don’t, I’ll gladly sit down.”

“He has opened the doors and continues to open the doors,” Carson said.

Bush opened his remarks by recounting how he became a Roman Catholic after losing a 1990 Florida gubernatorial race.

“I’ve learned to pray. I’ve learned to get down on my knees to pray about things before I make big decisions, and in public life today, it is so important to pray and to think about things clearly because the world has been torn asunder,” Bush said.

Graham finished each interview by asking the candidates how they would like the congregation to pray for them.

“Pray that I finish the journey that God intends me to finish,” Fiorina said.

Santorum asked for prayers for his family and the families of all the candidates, who as Christian conservatives, he said, suffer “brutal, horrible and wicked” attacks.

“It doesn’t bother me, but it kills my family,” Santorum said. “I can fight back. They just have to sit there and take it.”

The event was not a debate. The Republican National Committee has forbidden the candidates to participate in any debate that is not sanctioned by the party. The candidates offered remarks and then engaged in conversation with Dr. Jack Graham about faith and politics.