The Pew Forum has an interesting transcript up, featuring Charmaine Yoest of the Family Research Council and Eric Sapp of Common Good Strategies, which worked on religious outreach for a number of campaigns (about which more here.
I find many of Sapps comments quite interesting--especially when he discusses a strategy involving just listening to religious voters. Democratic outreach to these voters is in some ways the mirror image of Republican efforts to reach African-Americans (successful enough, perhaps, in 2004 to give Ohio, and hence the presidency, to GWB). In other words, Republicans ought to regard this as a serious threat.
Charmaine Yoest is, I think, rightly suspicious of whether the Democratic gestures are any more than that. Well see, and, as Ive suggested before, the fate of the competing abortion reduction bills is a good place to begin looking.
But Id add that the Democratic strategy of increasing the number of religiously-tinged issues (which I think is on some level right, but has to go against the grain of the secularists in the party) demands a response. Yoest talks about how religiously-inspired moral values dont require statist responses, and about how the best "antipoverty program" is marriage, but Sapp is right when he responds that youre kind of hard-pressed to find the proverbial concern with widows and orphans in the foreground of conservative religious messages. My advice: lets talk more about the whole range of questions about which religions offer their opinions, but lets also remind all the participants that prudence and social science can (and ought to) inform our discussions.
There is a large population of evangelicals who tend to vote Republican but are not committed to the party -- either because its not socially conservative enough OR because they arent. I suspect some of the hard-line social conservatives dont vote third-party or stay home, but actually vote Democratic, for economic reasons. And the evangelicals who are only vaguely socially conservative will settle for equally vague professions of respect, alternative definitions of Christian values, etc., from clever Democratic candidates. Then, there are the ignoramuses who dont know how socially liberal most Democratic candidates are, or dont understand how parties and Congress work. All in all, a huge headache and a huge mess for the Republicans. It doesnt help that pastors, from what Ive read, tend to shy away from any and all forms of political leadership among their flocks.