Rally Raises Anew Question of the Boundaries of Perry’s Faith

By MANNY FERNANDEZ

AUSTIN, Tex. — In April, as Texas reeled from wildfires and a drought, Gov. Rick Perry sought assistance from the federal government, but also from a higher power. He asked the state to pray for rain, issuing an official proclamation that “I, Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas.”

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Gov. Rick Perry’s video invitation to the Houston prayer rally he created.

One Sunday in 2005, Mr. Perry signed legislation requiring that women under the age of 18 get parental consent before having an abortion. The signing took place during a ceremony at a Fort Worth school run by an evangelical Christian church.

Five weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Perry bowed his head and said “amen” as a Baptist pastor led a prayer in the name of Jesus Christ. The prayer was noteworthy not for what it said, but for where it was said: at a student assembly in a public middle school in East Texas. Afterward, Mr. Perry said he had no problem ignoring the Supreme Court’s landmark 1962 ruling that barred organized prayer in public schools.

On Saturday in Houston, thousands of people are expected to gather at Reliant Stadium for a Christian-themed prayer service that Mr. Perry created and promoted. Though Mr. Perry has been criticized for spearheading an event that burnishes his conservative Christian credentials as he considers running for president, the prayer rally is only the latest instance — albeit the highest profile one — of the governor of the nation’s second-largest state emphasizing his Christian beliefs and blurring the line between church and state.

“The scale of this event is new, but the essence of this is familiar to anyone who has followed him,” said James Henson, a longtime political observer and the director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. “He’s never hesitated to invoke faith in public and for public purposes.”

Few political figures in America have so consistently and so unabashedly intermingled their personal faith and their public persona, peppering speeches with quotations from Scripture, speaking from the pulpit at churches, regularly meeting and strategizing with evangelical Christians and even, in one recent speech, equating public office with the ministry.

He is known for forwarding Christian-themed e-mails to friends and slipping notecards to aides upon which he has scribbled Bible verses. Two months before the primary last year, Mr. Perry spoke during Sunday services at the nondenominational Elevate Life Church in Frisco and walked away with a distinctive gift from the pastor: a long silver sword, given to the governor as a symbol of the word of God.

The Christian focus of his political career and the attention that the rally has drawn have given Mr. Perry a distinct advantage should he try to position himself as a favored candidate among religious conservatives. But the rally and his outspoken Christianity could also provide opponents an opening to cast him as an extremist. Should he enter the race, he would find himself battling Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who has also stressed her long commitment to conservative Christian values, for the support of that voting bloc — especially in key early contests like the Iowa caucuses and the South Carolina primary, where those voters can be decisive.

Last month, when asked if he intended to mount a White House bid, Mr. Perry told a reporter for The Des Moines Register that he was “getting more and more comfortable every day that this is what I’ve been called to do. This is what America needs.” But to reporters in Austin, Mr. Perry denied there was a purely religious connotation to his remark, saying: “There’s a lot of different ways to be called. My mother may call me for dinner.”

To many political observers and to his critics, it sounded like backpedaling. “You saw the politician and not the man of faith,” Mr. Henson said.