SAN ANTONIO (AP) — Folded into the Rev. Frank Page’s wallet is a yellow scrap of paper with the date and time he is to speak with a Republican candidate for the White House.
He already has visited one Republican front-runner over breakfast at a country club and met another at the headquarters of a car dealership in his home state.
The South Carolina pastor seems taken aback by the attention, but he shouldn’t be: He leads a large congregation in a state with an early primary and is president of the 16.3-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, perhaps the largest single bloc of evangelical voters and a must-have Republican constituency.
Mr. Page, in an interview at his denomination’s annual meeting last week, said he offers his thoughts about salvation to candidates but never an endorsement. He talks to Democrats, too. He sees the political courtship as a duty: The nation’s leaders need to hear a Christian viewpoint, he said.
Some Southern Baptists would rather stay out of politics altogether. A small but vocal number of pastors think the denomination is too cozy with Republicans and too political in general.
The debate is likely to become even more magnified in coming months because no candidate has captured the conservative evangelical imagination — and all of them are trying.
Southern Baptists have been solidly Republican since the emergence of the pro-life movement, the denomination’s “conservative resurgence” of the late 1970s and Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, and there is no indication of this wavering.
“There is a long history of dissent among Southern Baptists, so the discordant voices about politics are not necessarily a harbinger of change,” said John Green, a senior fellow with the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
Mr. Page, however, has sympathy for Southern Baptists worried about closeness to Republicans.
“They are valid concerns, but I think those valid concerns could be mitigated if there is responsible dialogue with these [candidates], not an acquiesce to everything they say,” he said.
Mr. Page met Sen. John McCain of Arizona at a Spartanburg, S.C., auto business. He also has met and traded e-mails with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
What might surprise some evangelicals is that Mr. Page also chatted over breakfast at a country club with Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor vilified by many social conservatives for his support of abortion rights and for his messy second divorce.
The Southern Baptist leader said the two discussed everything from the Roman Catholic Mass to evangelical beliefs about accepting Christ.
The phone number in Mr. Page’s back pocket: It belongs to a representative of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who is making a strong push to court evangelicals.
Mr. Page and others talk about keeping lines open to Democrats. But that is fraying over an initiative led by former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton to unite Baptists from various denominations across racial lines to counter conservative SBC influence. Like evangelicals as a whole, Baptists remain divided on which candidate to support, though the focus is heavily on Republicans.
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