Evangelical leaders back Santorum

Influential evangelical Christian leaders on Saturday endorsed Rick Santorum for the Republican U.S. presidential nomination, in an attempt to strengthen him as the more conservative alternative to front-runner Mitt Romney.

At a weekend meeting at a ranch outside Houston, Texas, the group of 150 conservatives agreed on the third ballot to support the former Pennsylvania senator.

They had not been expected to reach agreement on one candidate since evangelical support was splintered among Santorum, former U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich and Texas Governor Rick Perry.

"What I did not think was possible appears to be possible," said Tony Perkins, leader of the Family Research Council and spokesman for the group.

Perkins described a "vigorous and passionate" discussion about who would make the best president and said eventually people made concessions to their views in order to coalesce around one candidate.

Conservatives are desperate to find a viable alternative to Romney, who won the first two nomination contests in Iowa and New Hampshire and now leads the polls in South Carolina, which holds its Republican primary on January 21.

In the 2008 election, about 60 percent of the voters in South Carolina described themselves as evangelical Christians. Santorum is a Catholic and father of seven who strongly opposes abortion and gay rights.

Despite Romney's front-runner status, many conservatives mistrust him because of his record in relatively liberal Massachusetts, where he once supported abortion rights.

"Not a lot of time was spent on Mitt Romney. It was more about the positive. How to get America back on the right road. How to get America great again," Perkins said.

Perkins said the group debated and prayed over who to pick but in the end chose the person they believed had the best social conservative and economic policies and was most likely to defeat Democratic President Barack Obama in the November 6 election.

Santorum's nearest rival was the twice-divorced Gingrich.

Gingrich's campaign has begun airing TV ads in South Carolina that call Romney "pro-abortion," and say that Romney - who says he now opposes the procedure - cannot be trusted to be reliably anti-abortion. In response, Romney began running a radio ad touting his anti-abortion views.

Perkins said all factors were taken into account at the Texas meeting and said that Romney's Mormon religion "wasn't even discussed."