St Louis: Barack Obama ended a week's focus on values by giving a conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church a highly personal account of his spiritual journey and a promise that he will make "faith-based" social service "a moral centre of my administration."
The address, to one of the oldest and largest African American denominations, brought the senator from Illinois back to friendlier ground after a week's tour through Appalachian Ohio, conservative Missouri, the conservative stronghold of Colorado Springs, North Dakota and hardscrabble Montana.
"In my own life," he said, "it's been a journey that began decades ago on the South Side of Chicago, when, working as a community organiser, helping to build struggling neighbourhoods, I let Jesus Christ into my life. I learned that my sins could be redeemed and that if I placed my trust in Christ, that he could set me on the path to eternal life when I submitted myself to his will and I dedicated myself to discovering his truth and carrying out his works."
He suggested that he would apply the lessons of his faith to the problems he would face if he became president.
"The challenges we face today - war and poverty, joblessness and homelessness, violent streets and crumbling schools - are not simply technical problems in search of a ten-point plan," he said.
Moral problems
"They are moral problems, rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness, in the imperfections of man. And so the values we believe in - empathy and justice and responsibility to ourselves and our neighbours - these cannot only be expressed in our churches and synagogues, but in our policies and in our laws."
Of the two presumptive nominees for president, Obama has been far more outspoken about his religious beliefs than John McCain.
Evangelical Christian leaders have remained sceptical, however, that Obama's faith comports with their own, especially given his support for gay and abortion rights.
James Dobson, the influential leader of Focus on the Family, last month accused Obama of "deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology."
Last week, some Christian conservatives sharply criticised Obama for unveiling a new campaign symbol for outreach to gay voters and for opposing efforts in California to pass a state constitutional amendment undoing a court ruling that legalised same-sex marriage.
