On Friday night, seven Republican presidential hopefuls gathered around a fake Thanksgiving table in Des Moines, Iowa, for a “Presidential Family Forum” hosted by The Family Leader, an influential Religious Right organization headed by Bob Vander Plaats.

Moderator Frank Luntz promised the event would be an “adult conversation” about the issues important to the conservative Christian activists in the audience and the candidates bent over backwards to appeal to these voters, with Carly Fiorina declaring at one point that all the people on stage, as well as all the people in the audience, “are people of faith who love our God” and that is important because “people of faith make better leaders.”

“I do think it’s worth saying,” Fiorina declared, “that people of faith make better leaders because faith gives us humility, faith teaches us that no one of us is greater than any other one of us, that each of us are gifted by God. Faith gives us empathy; we know that all of us can fall and every one of us can be redeemed. And faith gives us optimism, it gives us the belief that there is something better, that there is someone bigger than all of us. And so I think it’s important that we elect a leader of faith and that we elect a leader, as well, who knows that more prayer, not less, is necessary in public life and in all our lives.”

Luntz then followed up on Fiorina’s statement by declaring that “I can back that up statistically,” asserting that “every single positive factor that you can describe is directly correlated to someone’s relationship with faith, with God, and all the pathologies that you would criticize are directly related to a rejection of God.”