Opinion: Conservative Christians Back McCain

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The conservative right has long been considered a very important base for the Republican party. The advent of the McCain lead in the party has led to a hard decision for this important voting bloc. With a great number of the members of this branch of the party having put their support behind Mike Huckabee, many were highly disappointed at his withdrawal from the race, leaving a lack, to the conservative way of thinking, of a viable conservative front runner in the Republican race.

Given the option of either supporting McCain or withholding support in light of the presumed nomination of Barack Obama for the Democratic party, however, the conservative Christian leadership has met and decided to make their stand with McCain.

At a Tuesday meeting in Denver, around 100 leaders met, traveling in from around the country, to discuss and ultimately agree to support John McCain, despite their initial distrust of him as a candidate for the Presidency. With this backing finally achieved, McCain has achieved a much needed support for his bid for the White House, and has significantly improved his chances of winning come November.

"Collectively we feel that he will support and advance those moral values that we hold much greater than Obama, who in our view will decimate moral values," said Mat Staver, the chairman of Liberty Counsel, a legal advocacy group, who previously supported Mike Huckabee's candidacy.

"There are people who came through the primary with very mixed emotions of the candidate," Staver continued, noting that many in the group had been in Denver to attend a separate meeting for pastors. "This event was to put those aside."

The group included leaders like Phyllis Schlafly, the long-time leader of Eagle Forum; Steve Strang, the publisher of Charisma magazine; Phil Burress, a prominent Ohio marriage and anti-pornography activist; David Barton, the founder of WallBuilders and Donald Hodel, a former secretary of the Interior, who previously served on the board of Focus on the Family. Jim Dobson, the head of Focus and an outspoken critic of McCain, did not attend. The McCain campaign was also not directly represented at the meeting.

One attendee of the conference summed up the main reason for the decision to support McCain as being, "None of these people want to meet their maker knowing that they didn't do everything they could to keep Barack Obama from being president. You've got these two people running for president. One of them is going to become president. That's the perspective. That that's the whole discussion." The reason? Despite his claim of Christianity, the conservative Christian movement doesn't see eye - to - eye with Obama on certain key issues such as gay marriage and abortion, and find themselves, especially in recent weeks with McCain making his own stands against these issues, more in line with McCain.

Initially, there was much speculation that the religious right would sit out this election, leading to much speculation and prognosticating as to what their absence would mean both to the Republicans as well as to the Democrats. With the exit of Huckabee, a number of Christian leaders expressed their disillusionment with the Republican party. Faced with the prospect of an Obama Presidency, it seems that the disillusion was quickly replaced with resolve, a situation that bodes well for McCain.