Ted Cruz is running for president, unless he's engaged in a method-acting experiment to prepare for a movie role – as a senator who's running for president by channeling his preacher father.

At the Iowa Freedom Summit, the Texas Republican senator boomed a Reaganesque sermon complete with G-rated jokes, scripture references – 'You shall know them by their fruits – and an altar call of sorts.

'Text the word "Constitution",' he implored, to a specific number. It was an Obama-like organizing stroke that no one else at the Saturday conservative cattle call thought of.

But then no one else shouted with with consistency that occasional moments of normal volume were packed with whisper-like drama.

Love him or hate him, Ted Cruz is a powerful communicator. The Princeton graduate has a debating award named for him there. He worked without notes and hired hands followed his departure from the stage by re-erecting the omnipresent teleprompter.

He was one of only a few speakers who asked for it to be moved out of the way.

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FIRE AND BRIMSTONE: Sen. Ted Cruz could be mistaken for a revival-tent preacher on Saturday in Iowa as he quoted scripture, shared his father's Christian conversion story and insisted America is a 'blessed' nation

Cruz hammered President Obama for his foreign policy in a speech that's likely to be a preview of an aggressive campaign to inherit his Oval Office desk

The thousand-plus tea party sympathizers attracted by the promise of hearing – maybe – the next president, exploded at the first mention of his name by emcee David Bossie.

'God bless the great state of Iowa!' Cruz practically exploded back once his applause calmed.

Iowa Rep. Steve King brought two dozen speakers to Des Moines for the one-day event, including firebrands Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, and outsiders Ben Carson and John Bolton, and perennial candidates Mike Huckabee and Rick Perry.

'Steve and I spent all week in Washington, D.C.,' Cruz said of his Iowa host. 'So it's great to be back in America.'

It's an old joke, one that Cruz has told for more than a year at public gatherings. But it was new to this audience.

Just like his constantly recycled story about what to do with the hated Internal Revenue Service.

'There are 110,000 employees at the IRS,' he said Saturday. 'We need to padlock that building and put every one of those 110,000 on our southern border.'

HALLELUJAH: Sen. Ted Cruz played religious fervor to the hilt in Des Moines on Saturday, peppering his speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit with G-rated jokes

The idea, he said, was to put illegal immigrants face to face with the thing Americans fear most – an army of IRS agents – and send them screaming back to Mexico.

The senator knows his crowd, and he held them like a practiced sermonizer and let his Christianity hang out.

At the mention of Jesus three-quarters of them applauded.

'From the beginning of this country,' Cruz said, 'God's providential bessings have been on the United States of America.'

He credited the almighty for beating the British, sewing America back together after a bloody Civil War and defeating Naziism.

''When we stood up with Winston Churchill ... it was only with God's blessings that we saved freedom,' he said,

He torched the White House for suing the Little Sisters of the Poor over their anti-Obamacare civil disobedience.

'If you're litigating against nuns, as the Obama administration is, you're probably doing something wrong,' Cruz snarked.

And at the end of a story about how he helped organize 50 Houston pastors to stand with five others whose sermon notes were subpoenaed by the city government, Cruz was a trumpet on legs.

'Caesar has no jurisdiction over the pulpit,' he preached. 'When you subpoena one pastor, you subpoena every pastor.'

His biggest applause line – one that brought the crowd to its feet en masse, was a call to strip U.S. citizenship from Americans who 'take up arms with ISIS,' the Middle Eastern terror army.

But most of his stump material was in the vernacular of the church-going.

His own redemption story involves his father, who abandoned him and his mother in Calgary and moved to Houston alone.

Cruz the elder later found God and then returned to raise his son and regain his marriage. He's now a pastor.

He might also be the senator's greatest political liability – his Jeremiah Wright – catnip for the political left.

HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM: Paster Rafael Cruz (left), the senator's father, has made statements in the past that could come back to haunt his son's presidential ambitions

The Iowa event brought together two dozen big conservative names including Chris Christie, Rick Perry, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin and Donald Trump (pictured)

'Socialism requires that government becomes your god,' Pastor Rafael Cruz said in 2013 at a family summit. 'That’s why they have to destroy the concept of God. They have to destroy all loyalties except loyalty to the government. That’s what’s behind homosexual marriage.'

In 2012 he told a tea party meeting in north Texas that President Barack Obama should be sent 'back to Kenya, back to Indonesia.'

'We have to unmask this man,' Cruz's father continued. 'This is a man that seeks to destroy all concept of God. And I will tell you what, this is classical Marxist philosophy. Karl Marx very clearly said Marxism requires that we destroy God because government must become God.'

The senator's flavor of this rhetoric is less blunt, more constitutional.

'Our rights, they don't come from government,' he said Saturday. 'They come from God almighty.'

That's his segue to 'abolish the IRS' and reduce tax filings to 'a postcard.'

And to tense foreign affairs.

'You cannot fight and win a war on radical Islamic terrorism if you're unwilling to utter the words "radical Islamic terrorism",' he said.

And those 9/11 hijackers?