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Reporting from Washington –

For most of a year, the small-government advocates of the “tea party” movement have stolen the spotlight from the Republican Party’s veteran performers: the Christian conservatives who have long driven voters to the polls for the GOP.

Now the veterans are stealing the tea partyers lines.

In news releases, mission statements and interviews, prominent social conservatives increasingly are using the small-government rhetoric popular with the tea party activists and long used by economic conservatives — but with a religious bent.

Their websites explore the morality of debt and the risks to religious freedom posed by growing government. Like the tea party activists, they reverently invoke the Founding Fathers, but emphasize the role the founders’ faith played in their writings.

The rhetorical shift is evidence of the potency of government growth as the galvanizing issue on the right. While economic and social conservatives have a history of tensions, many conservatives see the unified opposition to President Obama’s healthcare plan and stimulus spending as an opportunity to strengthen the bridge between the two camps before the November elections.

“The reason why social conservatives and economic conservatives can play well together . . . is the guy who wants to go to church all day just wants to be left alone. So does the guy who wants to play with his gun all day, and the guy who wants to make money all day,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. “They don’t agree on how to spend their time, but they do agree on their central issue: They want to be left alone.”

Social conservatives emphasize that the economic message isn’t at the expense of their bread-and-butter issues — opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage and defense of what they describe as family values. They note that the fight over federal funding for abortion continues to bedevil the healthcare overhaul bill.

Still, social issues took a back seat to talk of constitutional principles and government spending at the podium at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual showcase of the right.

Of the two likely Republican presidential contenders who spoke at the event, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney made virtually no mention of social issues, a noted departure from a past CPAC appearance. Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty noted briefly that “God is in charge” while focusing most of his remarks on his work cutting spending in his state.

The movement is reacting to the cycle of issues, driven by current events, leaders of the religious right say.

“There’s an ebb and flow,” said Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition. “After 9/11, abortion wasn’t the big thing to be discussed. We’re in an economic crisis, so we’re going to talk about it. We’ve always believed taxing and spending is a moral issue; how much your son or grandson is going to owe is a moral issue.”

“This is not a replacement strategy,” said Rick Tyler of Renewing American Leadership, a year-old public policy group aimed at fostering the connection between social and economic conservatives.

“We will always have the abortion fight; that should never be given up,” Tyler said. “But when the central issue of the times is jobs and the economy, we can’t just abandon the field. We must provide a Christian message about jobs and economy that is based in faith.”

Renewing American Leadership was co-founded by former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. The group argues that the strength of both American capitalism and government lies in their Judeo-Christian roots.

The alternative, “socialism, and its American cousin, progressivism,” has been “hostile to free enterprise and Judeo-Christian morality,” according to a white paper on the group’s website.

Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, is also talking about economics to religious voters through his new advocacy group, the Faith and Freedom Coalition. The group is trying to boost turnout among evangelicals and already was active in New Jersey and Virginia, where Republicans won governorships last November.

Reed and others are trying to make up for lost ground in 2008, when voter turnout among social conservatives did not keep pace with growth among Democrats’ key constituencies. Democrats further frustrated Republicans by making modest inroads with religious voters in 2008, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

A new generation of leaders on the religious right is shifting attitudes, said Lee Edwards, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation. When the Rev. Jerry Falwell led evangelicals into politics in the late 1970s, economic conservatives were wary of the newcomers, and social conservative leaders were more narrowly focused on what they saw as defending their churches and schools.

“I think you’ve had a long maturation process,” Edwards said. “Some of the old generation of leaders are gone and a new generation of leaders is much more comfortable with compromise, more pragmatic, more opening to working together.”

Today that means embracing the tea party movement and its rhetoric.

Ken Blackwell, a research fellow at the Family Research Council who has also been active in the tea party movement in Ohio, is among those who see tea partyers as the “younger siblings” in the movement.

Social conservatives are happy to embrace the economic message and those carrying it under the tea party banner “as long as they don’t start advocating against traditional marriage or for abortion,” Blackwell said, putting the tea parties in their place.

“The sibling is not now the parent,” he said.

Tea party leaders, too, have drawn their lines in the sand.

“We’ve let things like social issues distract us,” said Jenny Beth Martin, a founder of the online umbrella group Tea Party Patriots. Her group does not wade into the issues of abortion or marriage. “You know what’s the most important social issue today? Putting food on the table.”

khennessey@latimes.com

A Sunni Arab and a former officer in Saddam Hussein’s special forces, Ali fled the capital months before the parliamentary vote in the face of apparent political persecution. Now, if the election results favor the Shiite-led coalition headed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Ali fears that he and other members of the once-dominant minority will continue to be marginalized.

“The future will be dark,” said Ali, 45. “Violence will continue.”

Although millions of Sunni Arabs cast ballots Sunday — in a dramatic departure from national elections in December 2005, when turnout was tepid because of violence and a Sunni boycott — many worry the vote will do little to provide them with more clout or advance their interests.

The result, some American officials say, could be a burst of political violence as the U.S. military draws down the number of troops here to 50,000. Sunnis, who were initially the most ardent rejectionists of the U.S.-backed, Shiite-led government, could even evolve into an exiled opposition movement along with secular Iraqis.

“The Sunnis will feel betrayed by America and realize the only way to get balance in the government is with violence,” said one military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject. “If the elections are free and fair, they’re more likely to work with the results.”

In his own conversations with a Sunni tribal leader, the official said he was told that if the election did not bring change, the “response would be quick, strong and surprisingly lethal.”

Preliminary results from the election show that Maliki’s slate won the majority of votes in two southern provinces, while a secular rival coalition made a strong showing in two northern provinces. Results for most of Iraq, including Baghdad, which controls the largest number of seats in parliament, have not been released. Ali said he is worried and already planning his departure from Iraq.

Even before the vote, the electoral process had been clouded by an uproar over the banning of some 500 candidates because of their alleged loyalties to Hussein’s outlawed Baath Party. Most were replaced with other candidates. Still, in part because the commission in charge of the purge is headed by Shiite candidates, many saw the disbarments — which predominantly targeted Sunni and secular candidates — as an attempt to weed out members of the minority group as well as secular competition.

On the eve of the election, the commission barred 55 others who had been selected to replace some of the previously banned candidates. It remains unclear whether votes cast for those candidates will be counted. On Thursday, the Iraqiya bloc of former prime minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite, accused the electoral commission of fraud.

The United States and its allies here have tried since late 2005 to bring alienated Sunnis into the political fold and broker reconciliation with the Shiite-led government. Tens of thousands of Sunnis, many of them former insurgents, were part of the Sons of Iraq, a group of U.S.-backed militias. The militias’ members were paid by the U.S. military to cleanse their streets of al-Qaeda from mid-2007 through the fall of 2008, before the Iraqi government began to take control from the U.S. military. Many Sons of Iraq leaders say that since coming under government authority, they have been arrested or forced to flee.

Some of the original leaders of the Sons of Iraq are in hiding, in exile or in Iraqi jails. Most feel abandoned by the U.S. military.