Austin, Texas —- They gathered late on a Tuesday night, as they usually do, in a quiet upstairs room in Opal Divine's, a downtown Austin restaurant. The group of mostly 20- and 30-something Christians drank iced tea, red wine and Belgian ale and traded thoughts about the war in Iraq, abortion and immigration reform.

Some of them support Sen. John McCain for president. Some are torn between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. All said their Christian faith informs the decision they will make in the voting booth.

The previous afternoon, about a dozen people had gathered in bright sunshine in front of the Governor's Mansion to say that former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee represented the best choice for Christians. Only Huckabee, they said, could save a country drifting toward socialism and secular humanism, protect the borders from criminals and take a stand for unborn babies. The two gatherings represent what could be a widening divergence among evangelical Christian voters that sets this election apart. Evangelicals mobilized behind President Bush in 2000 and 2004, but some observers say 2008 is revealing a more complex and nuanced picture of traditional Christians.

At the moment, no candidate can lay sole claim to the evangelical vote, said Michael Lindsay, a sociology professor at Rice University in Houston.

"2008 will go down as a real milestone in evangelicals' political activism," said Lindsay, whose book "Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite" portrays evangelicals as far more diverse and sophisticated than the stereotype of the right-wing fundamentalist.

The ideological divide seems to form along generational lines, says evangelical Christian writer Tony Campolo of Pennsylvania.

Evangelicals 40 and older tend to vote for the most socially conservative candidate and rally around issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, he said, but evangelicals under 40 are defining a new set of political priorities, with poverty and the environment at the top of the list. That means even on evangelical college campuses, usually havens for conservative thought, Clinton and Obama are finding support, Campolo said.

But that shift doesn't signify a change of heart on moral concerns, he said. Young evangelicals, he said, "still think abortion is immoral. They still think that homosexual marriage is not within their purview of truth. But they see these as not the overriding issues as older people do."

The Rev. Steve Washburn, senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Pflugerville, Texas, said he isn't conflicted about his choice for president, former governor Huckabee..

Washburn said he's part of a pastors council that includes several African-American clerics who raise concerns about the poor and the lack of adequate health care for many of their constituents.

"We stand with them," he said. But, he added, "those pastors agree, at the top of our list is abortion and family."

But the priority list could be getting shuffled for other conservative Christians, according to recent polls conducted by Faith in Public Life, a nonprofit that promotes religious diversity in the public arena, and the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a liberal Washington think tank.

Frustrated that exit polls queried only Republican primary voters about their religion, Faith in Public Life officials pushed for more data from Democrats and gathered post-election information in Missouri and Tennessee by calling people who had voted in the primaries. According to those polls, majorities of both Democratic and Republican primary voters who identified themselves as evangelical Christians said they supported a broader agenda of issues. They wanted not only to focus on abortion and same-sex marriage but also to address poverty, the environment and HIV/AIDS, according to the polls. The margin of error was 5 percentage points.

Another element that makes this presidential election different from 2000 and 2004 is the efforts Democrats have made to reach out to people of faith, said Lindsay, the Rice professor.

Democrats learned the importance of faith-based voters in the last presidential election, Lindsay said, and responded by hiring religious consultants and reaching out to evangelicals. Clinton turned to Burns Strider, a Mississippi-raised Southern Baptist who could speak the language of Southern Christians.

Last fall, while speaking to reporters, Strider said Democrats have been on a "listening tour" over the past three years to determine how to reach people of faith. They have tried, he said, to engage "religious moderates" and "mainstream evangelicals" on issues such as the federal budget and the environment.

And the left had some catching up to do. Lindsay says the mailing list for Sojourners, a liberal-leaning Christian activist group, is 200,000, while Focus on the Family, one of the religious right's defining organizations, reaches 2 million.

But Lindsay and some evangelical leaders say the latter group's sometimes divisive rhetoric has started turning many young Christians off and led some to rethink their Republican Party affiliation.

All of the candidates' messages are resonating among Christians for different reasons, Lindsay said.

And it shouldn't be surprising, he noted. Evangelicals make up between a quarter and a third of the U.S. population. He sees a populist base that will back Huckabee in the primary. But another segment he calls "cosmopolitan evangelicals" is up for grabs.

"They could just as easily vote for Democrats or Republicans," he said.