Obama targets religious voters in America

DALLAS (Reuters) - Barack Obama is targeting voters, particularly young people, whose political decision-making is influenced by their religious beliefs as his presidential campaign seeks to shatter the myth of "Godless Democrats," a senior advisor on religious affairs said on Friday.

"The campaign is reaching out to a number of faith communities. It's not just targeting one or two. They have a staff of six or seven people doing various kinds of outreach, and if you were to add it all up, it would cover most American faiths," advisor Shaun Casey said.

"This is ... an expansive and inclusive religious outreach strategy," Casey told Reuters in a telephone interview from Nashville, Tennessee, where he is attending a conference of Christian scholars at Lipscomb University.

In the United States, many people regularly attend religious services and most Americans surveyed say they believe in God. A majority of the population is Christian.

To connect with religious voters, politicians often visit church congregations, pepper their speeches with Biblical references and discuss ways their faith has shaped their views and actions.

In recent election cycles, the Republican Party has galvanized white conservative evangelicals by playing up candidates' positions on social issues like abortion.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for the November presidential election, is regarded with suspicion by this base for a number of reasons, including his past criticism of conservative evangelical leaders.

Obama's support for abortion rights and his voting record in the U.S. Senate means the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee will likely make few in-roads with conservative evangelicals who have begun to attack him.

But analysts have said Obama, who would be the first black president, can woo more centrist evangelicals and Catholics, whom polls suggest have been moving from the Republican camp into the growing independent ranks.

Young religious voters are a group that the Obama campaign will target with a grassroots project.

"That is a tool the campaign will use to reach young, religiously motivated voters ... He (Obama) has energized that under-30 generation and a lot of those folks are in fact religious themselves," Casey said.

MUSLIM SNUB 'OVERBLOWN'

One faith group that has complained that they have been overlooked by the Obama campaign is U.S. Muslims.

In a widely publicized incident, two Muslim women wearing headscarves said they were barred from seats at an Obama rally so they would not be visible in the crowd behind the candidate. Obama last week apologized to the women.

The Obama campaign has struggled to dispel rumors that he is a Muslim, a faith that his Kenyan father was raised in.

"I think that the 'Muslim snub' is maybe a little overblown ... He did knock that down (the rumors) and at the same time he said, not that there is anything wrong with being a Muslim," Casey said.

"That last phrase didn't get picked up in a lot of media accounts and I think some Islamic groups thought, my goodness, is he throwing us under the bus. But he has made it clear that he is not throwing the Muslim community under the bus."

Casey said Obama, who seems at ease talking about his own Christian faith, was aiming to break public perceptions of a "Republican monopoly" on faith.

"There is a caricature out there that the Republican Party has sold very effectively. It's that the Democratic Party is a secular party, it's the anti-God party," he said.

"This campaign is showing not that they want to transform the Democratic Party into the party of faithful people, but what they are acknowledging is the Democratic Party is already full of faithful people and they want to be inclusive."

He said that would include reaching out to "people of no faith and those of ambiguous faith."

The recently released results of a nationwide survey of close to 36,000 U.S. adults last year by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 34 percent of self-described evangelicals identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party, while 50 percent tilted Republicans.

Almost half of adult Catholics surveyed were in the Democratic camp. Among America's atheists and agnostics, over 60 percent were Democratic.