Rudy Giuliani didn't score many points with social conservatives last week when he issued this impassioned endorsement of the Supreme Court's decision to uphold a federal ban on "partial-birth" abortion: "I agree with it." He certainly didn't win over Richard Land, who has said he would never vote for Mr. Giuliani. . . "If he'll lie to two wives, what makes you think he wouldn't lie to you?" . . . we have Rudy Giuliani, a twice divorced, pro-choice, supporter of civil unions.
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But it seems there is just about nothing Rudy Giuliani could do to change Mr. Land's mind about his candidacy. "Three is one too many spouses for most evangelicals," he says. . . What bothers Mr. Land is the "circumstances of [Mr. Giuliani's] divorce and the fact that there is more than one of them." It's not exactly a distinction the Bible makes, as Mr. Land no doubt knows, but he may be right about how much spouse-hopping evangelicals will tolerate.

Mr. Land might, on the other hand, vote for Mitt Romney. He says that evangelical voters may be able to get over their problems with a Mormon. "Charitably speaking," Mr. Land says, "they would call [Mormonism] the fourth Abrahamic religion. When they're less charitable, they would call it a cult." And they might even let him off the hook for his flip-flops on the social issues. "A lot of people in this country who are pro-life didn't used to be."

Mr. Land says that reporters have misunderstood what it means that Mr. Romney has changed his mind. "Why does the liberal media call it a flip-flop? Because they believe in the moral correctness of their pro-choice position. The only reason someone would move from the morally correct position, as they perceive it, to the morally incorrect position is because of political expediency. But religious conservatives believe that their position is the morally correct position. So they don't see this as a flip-flop. They see this as a journey . . . as growth."

Richard Land is a man waiting to be courted, and on behalf of religious conservatives he is playing hard to get. He wants "to make certain that we never become as taken for granted by the Republican Party as African-Americans have been taken for granted by the Democratic Party." . . . With a bachelor's degree from Princeton and a doctorate of philosophy from Oxford, he has often been credited with providing the intellectual heft behind the religious right's political strategy.

John McCain, who voted against the gay marriage amendment and who crafted the campaign finance laws that have done much to damage the anti-abortion efforts of religious conservatives;

. . . or perhaps Fred Thompson, who supported McCain-Feingold and says that gay marriage is a state issue. Mr. Land remains oddly upbeat, particularly about Mr. Thompson, the possibility of whose candidacy he finds "tantalizing."

But he acknowledges the reality of his constituency's situation: "Evangelicals would be very happy if Mike Huckabee or Sam Brownback or Duncan Hunter were the nominee, but the problem with those three guys is they don't give any indication they can win." And he adds, "With Hillary Clinton looming on the horizon, electability is a very important issue." . . . At the very least, the evangelical influence in the Republican primary will be diluted, with some religious conservatives thinking ahead to the general election and others going for the purest representative of their values. It is noteworthy that even among the unelectable candidates, evangelicals can't make up their minds between a free-trade, open-immigration candidate like Sen. Brownback and a closed-borders protectionist like Rep. Hunter.

Mitt Romney is still a good possibility, but Mr. Land is waiting to see if the former Massachusetts governor will take his advice and give a major address on the way his faith influences his politics (à la JFK's 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on his Catholicism).

. . . Mr. Land wouldn't vote for Newt Gingrich: "I am not a big enough hypocrite to have made character an issue with Bill Clinton and turn around and vote for men who broke their oaths to their wives." Having been in his current position since 1988, Mr. Land has had more than enough opportunity to see Mr. Gingrich up close, and he has not been impressed: "When he was speaker, when they went into conference to negotiate, it was always our issues that got negotiated away and his economic issues that didn't." . . . Mr. Land suggests that Mr. Gingrich was good at paying lip service to evangelicals: "He always understood how important social conservatives were to the coalition." But Mr. Land believes that many of them have learned their lesson: "I think most evangelicals still don't trust him."

If Mr. Giuliani does somehow win the nomination, Mr. Land predicts that "you will see a drop in evangelical participation in the presidential election and in races below that." Sounding more like a preacher warning of a coming plague, Mr. Land says, "even if the alternative is Hillary," a lot of evangelicals will stay home.