“Don’t let Congress sink the Endangered Species Act,” is the plea in a new ad campaign launched last month. Below those words, there’s an ark — Noah’s Ark — adrift after the deluge.

The Republican-led House is out to rewrite that law in ways that have angered environmental advocates, and a casual viewer might assume the ads are the work of one of the usual suspects: the Sierra Club or the Natural Resources Defense Council.

But it’s the handiwork of a religious alliance that includes a group calling itself the Academy of Evangelical Scientists and Ethicists. And that reference to the biblical flood is more than a slogan to its members: For them, this fight is a religious issue, a call like Noah’s to save God’s creatures and be “faithful stewards” of the Earth.

Evangelical Attitudes

And there was no doubt about the bona fides of the activists involved: They include faculty from well-known evangelical colleges and universities — places such as Wheaton College in Illinois, Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma and Cornerstone University in Michigan. Their leader is an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Calvin B. DeWitt, who quotes scripture to underline humanity’s obligations to the planet, including this sobering passage from the Book of Revelation: “The time has come . . . for destroying those who destroy the Earth.”

Such sentiments are increasingly common in the world of evangelical activism today — pundits call it the “greening of the evangelicals” — and it’s significant in itself. But it’s also a sign of something bigger and deeper at work inside one of America’s largest and most vibrant religious traditions.

GLOBAL REACH: Fellow believers in other parts of the globe have stirred the consciences of U.S. evangelicals, bringing them into the fight against AIDS, for example. The disease has orphaned tens of thousands of African children. (GETTY IMAGES / GRAEME ROBERTSON)

After a generation as a mainstay of the Republican Party’s conservative base, American evangelicals are increasingly pushing beyond the cultural and moral issues, such as abortion, that first brought so many to politics and into the GOP coalition. They are moving into a strikingly wider sphere of action, using their faith to broaden their political commitments in ways that can't be neatly predicted — or controlled.

Anyone with a stake in the growing list of issues now getting sustained evangelical attention — the environment, global trade and poverty, human rights, and foreign policy — should be heeding this emerging shift in evangelical sensibilities.

“We are a movement in transition,” says Richard Cizik, the vice president for governmental relations for the conservative National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), which claims to represent about 30 million believers. “From a domestic vision to a global vision, from a narrowly sectarian to a comprehensive vision, from exclusive to inclusive.”

As evangelical leaders take in a wider sweep of the policy landscape, they are also strongly signaling that no politician, Republican or otherwise, can take their support for granted — or win them over with simplistic appeals. President Bush has tried to marshal support for his controversial nomination of his former White House counsel Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court by citing her strong evangelical faith as a key component of her worldview. But many evangelical leaders aren’t sitting still for such broad reassurances. Jan LaRue, chief counsel for the group Concerned Women for America, recently issued a statement blasting administration efforts to tie Miers’ faith to her court qualifications as “patronizing and hypocritical.”

Instead, evangelicals say they are intent on charting their own course in public life. “Evangelicals have been used by presidents and politicians for wedge-driven politics for decades,” says Cizik, one of the leading advocates for this broader engagement. “Not all of us think we ought to be at the whim of someone’s secular strategy. We ought to be listening to God’s vision.”

Evangelical leaders have been refining this vision in the way leaders in all kinds of political movements do: by drafting accords and position statements. Last year, 29 representatives of evangelical groups across a wide spectrum of political opinion endorsed an important environmental accord called the “Sandy Cove Covenant,” named for the Maryland conference center in which they convened. The document laid out key principles of “creation care” — envangelicals’ term for environmental stewardship — and called on “brothers and sisters in Christ” to join the fight against global warming and species extinction.

Signatories included representatives of the NAE and the enormously influential right-leaning Southern Baptist Convention — the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. The signers are also considering a companion statement demanding tough action on global warming.

The NAE also endorsed a document spelling out a wide range of social concerns last October. The position paper was called “For the Health of the Nation” and urged evangelicals to use their growing influence to fight for environmental quality and the poor, as well as the sanctity of life and traditional families. The document announced evangelicals’ interest in U.S. policy on trade relations and foreign affairs, with the world’s poor as their central concern. The drafters said it was a milestone in the emergence of evangelicals as a force in public life, a “call to civic responsibility.”

Ronald J. Sider, founder of a group called Evangelicals for Social Action, sees enormous “ferment” in evangelical thinking about how their faith should inform their political life — a bubbling debate in churches and on campuses about the relationship between faith and politics on a broader range of issues than ever.

Other thinkers and scholars see it, too. “There are many, many signs of what I would call the maturing of the evangelical movement on domestic and foreign issues,” says Mark Noll of Wheaton College, one of the nation’s leading scholars of evangelical history and thought. “And it’s going to make life very interesting politically.”

Evangelicals are finding themselves propelled in new political directions not merely by their concern for the stewardship of the planet, but also by the global reach of their faith. The explosive growth of Christianity in the “Global South” — Africa, Latin America and Asia — is broadening the perspective of many evangelical activists. They have always had strong missionary and charitable impulses, with a worldwide view of their faith, but globalization is drawing them even closer to their fellow believers overseas and raising their awareness of human rights abuses, of AIDS, poverty and other humanitarian issues.

The very act of engaging with the political process and working with new partners also is driving them forward into new issues.

What makes such developments so significant is the unusual clout evangelicals wield in the electoral arena. White evangelicals alone, the largest single religious group, make up more than a quarter of the electorate, and they are a highly motivated constituency.

“The question now is which issues will be most salient and which party makes the best argument,” says Amy E. Black, a political scientist at Wheaton College. “So far, Republicans have had success with moral issues.” But “those are not at all the only issues” on the radar for evangelicals, she cautions.

At the moment, the environment is the leading edge of this shift, with Cizik and other evangelical leaders working in an increasingly prominent way to define their own brand of environmentalism — which they say will be rooted in their faith in a divine creator, driven by their concern for the health of families and children, and tempered by the traditional evangelical skepticism of liberal, big-government solutions.

But evangelicals are on the move along other important fronts as well, trying to determine the best way to act on the principles laid out in the NAE’s statement from last fall, “For the Health of the Nation.” In January of this year — just three months after that statement — 78 leaders of evangelical ministries, churches, seminaries and colleges signed a letter demanding that President Bush put more emphasis on fighting hunger and poverty. They said they wrote out of their “commitment to moral values,” including the sanctity of life.

On foreign policy, evangelical leaders have been deeply engaged for some time, working with partners from across the religious and ideological spectrum to galvanize what University of Oklahoma political scientist Allen Hertzke calls the most important human rights coalition since the campaign to end apartheid in South Africa. Since the mid-1990s, they have led fights against religious persecution in China and elsewhere, genocide in Sudan and the international trafficking in women and girls for the sex trade.

Evangelical activists also have been among the most prominent voices calling for the United States to commit more money to the global campaign against AIDS and urging the world community to cancel the debt of its poorest nations. The evangelical aid and development organization World Relief is an advocate for debt relief. In 2003, World Relief, World Vision and other groups also organized a statement calling for tough action on AIDS worldwide, which was signed by more than 100 evangelical leaders.

The NAE, the Southern Baptist Convention and others are pressing now for a tough response to alleged human rights abuses in North Korea, potentially complicating the delicate, multinational nuclear arms talks there.

And evangelical leaders are putting a new emphasis on global poverty. Significantly, after decades of charitable work overseas, some at least are urging an examination of the root causes of poverty. They are considering where a Christian ought to stand on questions of trade policy and the development of the global economy, with an eye toward addressing inequities that hurt the poor in the developing world. World Vision, a relief and development organization with deep roots in the evangelical tradition, is among those leading the way on that shift.

Even more traditionally wonky issues such as global trade are drawing increased evangelical interest. In “For the Health of the Nation,” the NAE wrote: “We should try to persuade our leaders to change patterns of trade that harm the poor and to make reduction of global poverty a central concern of American foreign policy.”

Religious leaders from a range of denominations and traditions gathered to discuss those issues this past summer in London, just before the G-8 summit of the world’s wealthiest industrialized nations. Among them was Cizik. He joined the others in a statement to G-8 leaders expressing concern for the moral dimensions of trade, urging, for example, the revision of trade rules that benefit rich nations at the expense of the poorest.

It’s still too early to tell how these preliminary forays into broader policy questions might play out over time. No one can say with certainty what an evangelical trade or environmental agenda might look like. What’s more, there’s a great deal of internal debate in the evangelical world about which issues to engage with and what positions to take. Many evangelicals are wary of traditional environmental groups, for example, and suspicious of governmental solutions to problems such as poverty.

That also points up another source of uncertainty in the evangelical movement’s coming-of-global-age: Will rank-and-file believers follow where their leaders want to go? Or will they regard all this high-flown talk about human rights and the planet’s future as a big distraction from the domestic crusades that brought evangelicals into the forefront of the conservative movement more than 30 years ago?

Cizik has already taken some heat from fellow evangelical leaders for jumping into the debate over one such divisive issue, global warming. Neither he nor any other evangelical leader is suggesting that the environment or other issues will, or should, supplant “culture war” issues such as abortion or the fight over the courts. But Cizik says that if evangelicals don’t bring their political might to bear on the environment and other issues, they will “squander the opportunity God has given us.”

“There are bound to be new alliances and new frictions,” Cizik says. “But evangelicals are addressing worldwide, ‘Who is my neighbor?’ That’s a biblical question. And it’s not just the business Rotarian down on Main Street. It may well be an African farmer trying to sell his cotton on the world market — who may himself be an evangelical.”

The term “evangelical” can be slippery, although most evangelicals do share some general characteristics: They believe that Jesus is the only way to salvation and that people must make a personal decision to accept him as their “lord and savior” — what is often called being “born again.” They hold that the Bible is the authoritative word of God and that it is imperative that they share the “good news” of the Gospel.

What’s more, the recent growing pains of the movement’s thrust into a new moral world order are not all that new. Evangelical Protestants have in fact played pivotal roles in agitation over all manner of humanitarian issues throughout U.S. political history, from abolitionism and women’s suffrage in the mid 19th century down through the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. In looking out toward equivalent latter-day crusades in creation care and human rights policies, they are reclaiming a birthright as much as they are engaging a wider world of globally minded issues and secular alliances.

Beyond that, there is more diversity in the evangelical family than outside observers often assume. Evangelicals can be found across a variety of denominations, including some of those typically thought of as “mainline Protestant.” Not all are white. About two-thirds of Hispanic Protestants, representing a bit less than 2 percent of the adult population, describe themselves as evangelical, according to surveys by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Most African-American churches are evangelical by doctrine, although only a few actually describe themselves as evangelical, since that term has long been associated with white churches.

Not all are conservatives. Liberal activist Jim Wallis, author of a recent bestseller, “God’s Politics,” which has been a big hit in Democratic circles, is an evangelical.

But most evangelicals are conservative, and for more than a generation, the overwhelmingly majority have aligned themselves with the Republican Party. Last year, nearly eight out of 10 white evangelicals voted for Bush.

The bargain that brought evangelical activists into the Republican Party was this: They would support the low-tax, small- government agenda of fiscal conservatives, who had long been the bedrock of the GOP, and fiscal conservatives would support evangelicals on the cultural and social issues that mattered most to them. There’s lots of interplay and overlap between the two camps, but at its most basic, what they had in common was that the Democratic Party was not addressing their agendas, says University of Texas at Austin political historian Lewis L. Gould, author of “Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans.” That arrangement made the GOP the majority party. But nothing is forever in politics. “Times change, issues change,” says Gould.

And that’s a big reason why the gradual shift in the debate under way among evangelicals is potentially significant, even disconcerting, for politicians: Evangelicals are thinking beyond their traditional set of issues, and it’s not clear where it will lead them.

Of course, just because evangelical leaders are talking more about poverty and the environment doesn’t mean they are moving into the Democratic camp or becoming liberals. One persistent source of tension between them and older-line progressives is that evangelicals tend to be entrepreneurial and business friendly. They are by cultural and theological disposition free-traders, with a focus on individual responsibility.

That view is deeply rooted in Protestant faith, as many students of what Max Weber famously called “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” have noted. Many evangelical Christians believe that changes in society begin with personal salvation, with an emphasis on taking personal responsibility for sin. Democrats often see the world the other way around, with an emphasis on governmental solutions, not individual responsibility, Cizik and others say.

“We are preternaturally free-market oriented,” Cizik says. “The backbone of the local church is the local businessman.”

Indeed, there is still a great deal of debate inside the evangelical community, even among the drafters of such trail-blazing policy statements as “For the Health of the Nation,” about how that document ought to be applied and what role government should play in addressing the issues that concern evangelicals.

“Evangelicals and liberals may agree that poverty is a problem, but they may disagree on the solutions,” says Hertzke of the University of Oklahoma. “And that’s everything.”

Members of the NAE gathered last March in Washington to discuss the political implications of the “Health of the Nation” statement, and the internal tensions were obvious. Tom Minnery, a vice president of Focus on the Family, stood up to warn Cizik and others that issues such as abortion and the defense of traditional marriage, not global warming, define evangelicals. And that’s where the group ought to keep its focus, Minnery said.

Other evangelical leaders reject traditional government solutions to poverty and pollution. Supporting free markets and economic stimulus are often a better way lift up the poor, they say.

“Nobody is pro-poverty, but there is a significant difference of opinion about what works,” says Richard Land, another leader of the Southern Baptist Convention and a prominent Bush supporter.

Many evangelicals feel close to Bush, who is a Christian, conversant in their faith. They also say they are not looking for conflict.

Still, a broader evangelical social ethic could pose great complications for Republicans and the Bush administration. Over the longer term, it could do lasting damage to the increasingly fractious modern GOP coalition: the alliance of evangelical culture warriors, neoconservative foreign policy hands and pro-business advocates of small government.

On climate change especially, evangelical leaders are wandering pretty far afield of established GOP orthodoxy. Oklahoma Republican James M. Inhofe, who as chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has legislative jurisdiction over the issue, has called global warming a “hoax” — although the position of the party, the Bush administration and business on that issue does show signs of softening.

“When you talk about something like global warming, that implies to me a good deal of governmental involvement,” says Gould, the University of Texas political historian. “Which is not something certainly that rings the bell of economic conservatives.”

What Cizik and others advocate is a “cap and trade” approach to reducing the gases blamed for global warming — including mandatory curbs on carbon dioxide, a prime suspect in climate change that legislation backed by Bush and many industry leaders would not cover. Supporters of cap and trade say it’s a free-market approach that would allow industries to trade emissions allowances, as long as the overall emissions go down.

Such a proposal is in legislation by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joseph I. Lieberman, D-Conn., which calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 2000 levels by 2010 and establishing a system in which emissions allowances could be bought and sold. A leading evangelical magazine, “Christianity Today,” has called the McCain-Lieberman bill “an excellent starting point.” Cizik has not endorsed the bill. The NAE has taken no position in the debate.

Cizik and others also are casting the environment as a poverty issue. After Hurricane Katrina, Cizik pointed out that it was the poorest African-American neighborhoods in New Orleans that suffered the most. It was a reminder, he said, that environmental disasters disproportionately hurt the poor and the marginalized — an argument he said he hopes will encourage black and Hispanic evangelicals to sign on to the statement on global warming.

“Put that into the political calculation for 2006 or 2008,” Cizik says. “That’s a far different picture than if you perceive evangelicals to be one color — and only interested in abortion, homosexuality or judges.”

Evangelicals are not enthusiastic proponents of government regulation, but voluntary responses to global warming are not enough, Cizik says. And there’s evidence that a sizable portion of the evangelical world may be with him: In polling by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life last year, 52 percent of white evangelicals said they would support strict rules to protect the environment even if it cost jobs or resulted in higher prices. That was not much different from the majority holding such views in the overall electorate.

“I’ve tried to avoid saying thus far that we’re heading toward a traffic collision, because I like to say that we are pro-business and pro-environment,” Cizik says. “But do you have two parts of the Republican base who could be at loggerheads? Absolutely.”

On foreign policy, evangelicals’ focus on global human rights will make it more difficult to subordinate such concerns to strategic or economic considerations — a complication for practitioners of Realpolitik on the right.

On North Korea, evangelicals and other groups are urging the administration to address that country’s alleged abuse of Christians, political dissidents and others. Some observers worry that their activism may slow or derail the multinational talks aimed at getting North Korea to end its nuclear weapons program. It could become particularly complicated if the administration has to come back to Congress, where evangelicals have the ear of influential members, to appropriate money or other aid for North Korea to seal a deal.

No one is suggesting that human rights are not a serious concern or that North Korea does not need to clean up its act, says Jim Walsh, who directs Harvard University’s Managing the Atom Project and has traveled to that country. But, says Walsh, “I’m concerned that a single-issue focus and the desire for perfection will actually undermine real progress in Korean-American relations.”

Global trade is yet another potential trouble spot for GOP strategists hoping that evangelical believers will remain firmly in line with administration initiatives. Evangelicals are generally pro-free trade, and Cizik and other movement leaders stress that any aid to poor countries must be tied to guarantees that governments there clean up corruption and strengthen the rule of law.

But scholars and some evangelical thinkers say it’s not a long leap from evangelical concerns about global poverty and human trafficking and exploitation to calling for attaching human rights conditions or labor standards to trade agreements — something business and economic conservatives certainly would oppose.

“It’s really the natural progression if you follow the message of the Gospel to its natural conclusion,” says Rep. Christopher H. Smith of New Jersey, a pro-labor Republican and long-time legislative partner of evangelicals. “The Gospel is so clear about caring for the least, the suffering, the disenfranchised.”

The fight against sex trafficking has been broadened to include cases of forced labor. Among the movement’s leaders is an evangelical and former Justice Department lawyer named Gary Haugen, founder of International Justice Mission. Some observers are calling this global initiative the “new abolitionist movement.”

Already, some evangelicals have edged toward connecting the cause of human rights to trade in debates over the status of China as a U.S. trading partner. As they agitated against the persecution of Christians, political dissidents and others in China, evangelicals formed a key part of a coalition that tried to block Congress from granting that country permanent most-favored-nation trade status in 2000.

Now, evangelicals and others also are accusing China, a key partner in the Korean arms talks, of being an active accomplice in North Korean abuses, and they are circulating draft legislation that would direct the president to slap trade sanctions on China if it didn’t agree to clean up its act.

And earlier this year, World Vision United States came out in support of those campaigning against the Central American Free Trade Agreement — after hearing from World Vision representatives in Central America that the deal did too little to protect the rights and livelihoods of poor workers and farmers.

Evangelical groups also have joined those urging the United States to cut agricultural subsidies that they say hurt poor farmers in Africa and elsewhere, by allowing U.S. farmers to flood world markets with artificially cheap produce. That’s something the Bush administration is now negotiating with other nations in delicate international trade talks.

“It’s going to get more interesting, not less interesting,” says economist J. David Richardson of Syracuse University, an expert on international trade who is studying how religious groups engage with the globalizing economy. “This is not a flash in the pan.”

As they continue to organize beyond their familiar domestic base, evangelicals are getting used to moving into new territory, both politically and denominationally. Their deepest engagement with global politics, over human-rights issues, shows how they can adapt with each new step into the wider policy world.

The present evangelical human-rights campaign grew out of a narrower struggle to protect Christian missionaries and converts abroad. In Sudan, for example, evangelical activists pushed for better protection for Christians persecuted by Muslims. But from there, they have branched out to address other humanitarian concerns such as sex trafficking and the campaign against AIDS.

This more ecumenical approach to human rights found its first important expression in the fight to enact what became the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act. The law’s aim was to curb religious persecution overseas; among other things, it authorized the president to impose diplomatic and economic sanctions against countries that consistently permit or endorse attacks against religious believers. Its supporters eventually included not just evangelicals, but Jews, Tibetan Buddhists and B’Hais.

That success encouraged evangelicals to move on to pressing Congress successfully to act for human rights in the Sudan and North Korea, as well as pass legislation aimed at cracking down on international sex trafficking, says Hertzke, who has documented the phenomenon in the book “Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights.”

The evangelical movement’s most enduring partners have been Jews — led on the left by liberal Jewish leader David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, and on the right by Michael Horowitz of the Hudson Institute’s Washington office. Horowitz gets a great deal of the credit for galvanizing the coalition, Hertzke and others say. He’s a leading force still on North Korea and other issues.

Evangelicals also have worked with feminists and liberal human rights advocates in pursuit of their goals. They have worked with both Republicans and Democrats. Republican Reps. Smith and Frank R. Wolf of Virginia have been prominent partners on the religious liberty act and other issues. Likewise, Democratic members of the Congressional Black Caucus on the Sudan and the late Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, a liberal icon, have teamed with Protestant activists on the anti-trafficking campaign.

And as evangelicals engage with humanitarian issues, the alliances they are building with liberal Jews, feminists and others also hold the potential of changing them, as well as their partners — opening doors to further partnerships on other issues.

“The very fact that they are working together with these groups also holds the potential to change or at least nuance their political positions,” says Luis E. Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. “It’s hard to be in the trenches with someone for a considerable period of time and not get to know them and understand them.”

Jessica Neuwirth, founder of the feminist group Equality Now and one of the partners pushing for legislation against human trafficking in 2000, says many women’s groups came to the table leery of Smith because of his aggressive opposition to abortion rights. But Neuwirth says she found him, on the issue of sex trafficking, to be an effective and sincere partner — and would be willing to partner with him again.

“If we can collaborate and work together to make a difference, why not?” she says.

Hertzke calls the human rights alliance a “genuinely strange-bedfellows coalition.”

“These people will tell you that they meet in the morning to talk about human rights in North Korea and then they break in the afternoon to talk about how they are going to beat each other on school prayer and gay marriage,” he says.

Protestant activists can handle that sort of cognitive dissonance with domestic allies in part because they’re fixing more of their attention on the global stage. Evangelical congregations in Africa and elsewhere, connected to the United States through a network of aid and missionary organizations, have helped to prick the conscience of U.S. evangelicals on AIDS and other humanitarian issues, Hertzke says. U.S. evangelicals are traveling regularly on short-term mission trips to places where their fellow believers face shocking violence, exploitation and privation.

“They are in touch with people on the ground in some of the harshest places on Earth, some of the poorest places,” Hertzke says.

Still, hot-button cultural issues — abortion and gay marriage chief among them — remain vitally important to many rank-and-file believers in America, and key recruiting themes for the GOP. And the broader appeal of the evangelical movement’s new global agenda seems likely, too, to cut across culture-war lines: Issues such as sex trafficking or persecution of Christians overseas are pretty close to the moral issues at the traditional heart of the evangelical political agenda, says James Skillen, president of the Center for Public Justice, a progressive Christian public policy institute in Annapolis, Md. Trade and the environment are not, he says.

The divisive debates over gay marriage and Bush’s judicial nominations, which put new fire into the culture wars last year, also have consumed a great deal of evangelical energy that might have gone into those other issues, Hertzke notes.

Lugo, at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, wonders whether evangelical leaders such as Cizik aren’t getting too far in front of the rank-and-file believers by pushing into issues such as global warming.

Cizik is clearly aware of that risk. He and other evangelical leaders are beginning to pull in the same direction as the traditional environmental movement, but they have consciously kept their distance. Many evangelicals view groups such as the Sierra Club as liberal, big-government New Agers who put trees ahead of people. They sometimes associate environmentalism, too, with the population control movement — which in evangelical circles is all but synonymous with abortion rights.

“We have to deal with the perception that the environment is just a liberal issue,” says Jim Ball, executive director of the Evangelical Environmental Network.

That’s not to say that “bridges won’t be built and walked across,” Cizik says. But he says evangelicals will have their own voice on the environment and other issues, and they believe they are uniquely positioned to bring business interests and other non-traditional partners along.

“I happen to think that many young people are fed up with the way corporate leaders and environmental leaders have gone after each other hammer and tong,” Cizik says. “They want us to work together. Why can’t we build a coalition of business and environmentalists?”

And that’s one of the most interesting possibilities of the evolution in the evangelical agenda: that they will bring new life and ideas to debates that have become locked into old battle lines and tired talking points.

They’ve done it before. The issue of global sex trafficking had been mired for some time in a debate about whether prostitution was always sexual exploitation. It was evangelicals, working with U.S. feminist leaders, who cut through the muddle and got Congress focused on the women and children being forced into the sex trade, Hertzke says. The result was a law that created legal protections for victimized girls, stiffened penalties for traffickers and required the president, in some circumstances, to withhold non-humanitarian foreign aid to countries judged to be soft on trafficking — for the sex trade, domestic servitude or other forms of forced labor.

“We as evangelicals must lead,” Cizik says. “And we must form coalitions with our erstwhile opponents on other issues. That’s our challenge.”

Miers nomination, pp. 2780, 2750; Democrats and religion, CQ Weekly, p. 562; Religious conservatives’ agenda, 2004 CQ Weekly, 2684.