PLYMOUTH, N.H. — In a dimly lit bar covered in Red Sox memorabilia, a bundled-up, beer-drinking crowd jostled to get a glimpse of Ted Cruz.

“Scripture tells us there’s nothing new under the sun,” said Cruz, standing on a stool.


“Amen!” a woman shouted back.

In New Hampshire, the second-most secular state in the country following only nearby Vermont, Cruz is leaning hard into his evangelical persona. He isn’t roaring like a preacher here the way he does in Iowa and South Carolina, but the religious rhetoric is virtually the same — and it plays well with a small but increasingly committed group of Christian conservative voters who appreciate the emphasis on faith, or at a minimum aren’t bothered by it.

“Absolutely, it’s a plus,” said Colleen Garrity, 55, of Cruz’s openness with his faith. Garrity is torn between Cruz and Chris Christie, while her husband, Tom, was won over by Cruz after seeing him speak at a diner earlier in the day in Tilton, New Hampshire. “Faith is very important to us. We’re both Christians, we’re very involved in church, we make decisions based on, ‘What would Jesus do?’”

That’s a common thread among Iowa and South Carolina voters, but in flinty New Hampshire, voters and politicians alike are far less likely to wear their faith on their sleeves.

Not Cruz, who at stop after stop on his four-day swing through New Hampshire this week routinely asked voters to pray, railed against what he characterized as an assault on religious liberty and promised that members of the military would be able to pray unimpeded. He noted that his dad is a “pastor who travels the country preaching the Gospel.” And he dished out Bible references, chapter and verse.

At many of the stops, Cruz would ask voters ”that you commit, each and every day between now and Election Day just to lift this country up in prayer,” he said. Closing his eyes, he often continued: “Just one minute a day … saying ‘Father God, please continue this. Continue this revival across this country that we can pull back from this abyss.’ We’re here standing on the promises of Second Chronicles 7:14,” he says, and goes on to quote the Scripture.

It’s all part of Cruz’s effort to emerge as the conservative standard-bearer in the Republican race, in New Hampshire and nationally. In New Hampshire, he is also focused on engaging tea party and libertarian support, but the thinking is that if he can unify evangelicals and other religious Christians — even if that’s a relatively small constituency — that puts him one step ahead of the many other candidates duking it out in New Hampshire’s particularly fractious field. Exit polls from 2012 showed that about 22 percent of those who voted in the GOP primary identified as evangelical or born-again Christians.

“The hope is two things: to have it be unified, and to have them come out,” said former New Hampshire House Speaker Bill O’Brien, a Cruz backer and his state co-chairman here. “Over the past several years, they’ve not been coming out to the degree that they should. This will help motivate them to do that. If all of the evangelicals come out and vote for Cruz, he’s got this primary won.”

Still, virtually no one expects Cruz to win outright in New Hampshire, a state where Donald Trump is routinely notching double-digit leads. But his campaign’s belief is that this cycle, in contrast to others, there is no obvious choice for the establishment pick, meaning that Jeb Bush, Christie, John Kasich and Marco Rubio are all duking it out for similar pools of voters — and that there is space, fueled by evangelical and other conservative support, for Cruz to make a stronger-than-expected finish, beating expectations and generating momentum.

And there were signs during his New Hampshire swing that Cruz — who is currently between second and fourth in polls here, along with the other more centrist-leaning candidates — was sparking interest, and increasingly, commitments, from voters who stem from the most conservative wing of the party. In his first 12 stops on the trip, he often, though not always, spoke to full rooms.

Certainly, there were plenty of undecided voters who asked questions about Common Core, health care and paid family leave, and some Democrats who showed up out of curiosity. But there was also a steady flow of people who described themselves as conservative, including on social issues, and many said they had decided, or close to it, on Cruz.

“I’m pretty much settled on Cruz,” said Sandy Boyce of Hill, New Hampshire. “He’s a conservative; I like the direction he wants to take the country … and I like his family values. That’s very important.”

Trump draws support from a variety of GOP constituencies, including from evangelicals, but a day after a flap at Liberty University, in which he referred to an important Bible verse as “Two Corinthians” rather than “Second Corinthians,” an undecided voter in North Conway, New Hampshire, who declined to give her name, said approvingly of Cruz: “He knows it’s not Two Corinthians. That is a plus.”

By seeking to shore up that small slice of the party, however, there is the risk that Cruz lowers his ceiling in the state, turning off other voters who may be conservative on fiscal issues and even social issues but who are uncomfortable with too much overt discussion of religion. His more faith-minded lines here were rarely the biggest applause moments, as they are in Iowa and South Carolina. And sometimes points that bring crowds in those other early states to their feet — for example, that the Catholic charity Little Sisters of the Poor would find a contraception mandate-related case against them dismissed in a Cruz administration — were met with silence.

“We are Yankees first, evangelicals second,” said Fergus Cullen, the former chairman of the New Hampshire GOP. “We do have people who think faith is important, but we tend to be Yankees about it, more taciturn about it, you’re not going to necessarily know someone is a serious Christian because they won’t tell you about it.”

Roger Dugre, 51, showed up at the Tilton diner to hear Cruz, undecided between him and Rubio. But he had reservations, before Cruz spoke, about the degree to which Cruz would emphasize religion. As the senator’s speech and subsequent question-and-answer session got underway, Dugre grew increasingly turned off.

“I was giving him a chance, but I’m not hearing a lot of political views, I’m hearing a lot of religious views,” he said, shaking his head part way during Cruz’s diner bull session. “That concerns me.”

The Texas senator brought up religious references and social conservatism on his own, as part of his routine stump speech (though he was not always buttoned up — his standard answer to questions about border security and ending sanctuary cities is “Yes, yes and hell yes”). But it also came up at the prompting of voters, another indication that Cruz is getting evangelicals and other religious Christians to turn out. In Tilton, for example, he was asked about his personal relationship with God, a question that was repeated again the following day in another city.

“Nobody wants a puritanical scold,” Cruz said in Tilton, appearing to be aware of focusing too heavily on religious language. “I’m not running to be preacher-in-chief. But Scripture tells us, ‘If you are embarrassed of me, I will be embarrassed of you.’ We should speak the truth and acknowledge our faith with a smile."