How does Barack Obama plan to woo voters of faith?

David Gibson found out:

Obama’s two top lieutenants in faith outreach came out to address dozens of reporters at the annual Religion Newswriters Association conference in Washington late this afternoon to pitch the campaign’s new Faith, Family and Values Tour, which will launch next week with aides and representatives for the campaign (including pro-life Catholic Doug Kmiec) doing grass-roots evangelizing for Obama in community centers (neutral sites–no houses of worship) and homes. The Tour will continue for weeks in most of the key battleground states.

The briefing with Josh DuBois, Obama’s National Director of Religious Affairs, and Shaun Casey, the Wesley Theological Seminary prof and leader of Obama’s evangelical outreach, was notable in itself, in that many of the journalists in the room had been trying for months to reach DuBois and others with no success. The Obama campaign has had an extraordinary grass-roots outreach effort, but has not made communicating that a priority, and that may have begun to sink in. DuBois also wanted to directly refute a report from Time magazine correspondent Amy Sullivan, who told the gathering a day earlier that the Obama campaign was cutting resources to religious outreach because they felt it was not paying dividends. “That is just absolutely not true. It is actually 180 degrees the other way,” DuBois said.

There’s much more at Gibson’s Beliefnet blog, Pontifications.