"Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry threw his Stetson into the already very crowded race for the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday (June 4). Here are five faith facts about the man.
4. Perry organized a prayer rally over America's "moral crisis."
"The prayer event created a major political opportunity for Perry," Dan Gilgoff wrote for CNN in 2011. "Intense media coverage allowed him to broadcast his Christian commitment to a national audience just one week before formally launching his presidential campaign."
1. Perry grew up attending Baptist and Methodist churches.
Perry grew up in Paint Creek, a pinhole-size Texas town with two churches — a Southern Baptist and a Methodist church. Perry's family was active in both in the 1950s and 1960s but maintained membership in the United Methodist Church, the nation's largest mainline Protestant denomination2. But now he's joined the nondenominational crowd.
When Perry and his wife, Anita, moved to Austin in the 1980s, they attended Tarrytown United Methodist Church — the same church George W. Bush and his family attended when Bush was the Texas governor. The Perrys served Communion there, taught confirmation classes and entered their children in confirmation classes. But in 2007, the Perrys moved to Lake Hills Church, an Austin megachurch with an evangelical message.3. In the 2012 election, Perry was perhaps the most overtly Christian in his rhetoric.
"America is going to be guided by some set of values — the question is going to be whose values," he said in a 2011 speech at Virginia's Liberty University, founded by the late evangelical power broker Jerry Falwell. "I would suggest ... it is those Christian values that this country was based upon."4. Perry organized a prayer rally over America's "moral crisis."
"The prayer event created a major political opportunity for Perry," Dan Gilgoff wrote for CNN in 2011. "Intense media coverage allowed him to broadcast his Christian commitment to a national audience just one week before formally launching his presidential campaign."
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