The spat over what Sen. Barack Obama meant when he said rural Pennsylvanians are "bitter" about job losses spilled over into a forum on faith and politics Sunday evening at Messiah College.

During a fundraiser in San Francisco last week, the Democratic presidential hopeful said that in response to a struggling economy many Pennsylvanians "cling" to guns, religion and hardened views of people who are different from themselves.

Obama lashed out Sunday at his critics, including his chief rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton, for calling him an elitist.

"You know, I am a devout Christian, that I started my work working with churches in the shadow of steel plants that had closed on the south side of Chicago," Obama said, "(and) nobody in a presidential campaign on the Democratic side in recent memory has done more to reach out to the church and talk about what are our obligations religiously, in terms of doing good works, and how does that inform our politics" than he has.

Earlier in the forum, Clinton had said Obama's comments are similar to those of past Democratic presidential candidates such as Al Gore and John Kerry, who lost to Republicans because they were perceived as condescending and out of touch with ordinary Americans.

She said his comments seemed "elitist, out of touch and, frankly, patronizing."

"We had two very good men and men of faith run for president in 2000 and 2004," Clinton said. "But large segments of the electorate concluded that they did not really understand or relate to or frankly respect their ways of life."

Clinton and Obama appeared separately at the forum, which was sponsored by the Washington-based group Faith in Public Life and hosted by Messiah College. The forum, which lasted a little more than 90 minutes, was shown live on CNN and hosted by CNN anchor Campbell Brown and Newsweek editor Jon Meacham.

The two senators, who have become increasingly aggressive in their campaign attacks on one another, met briefly and coolly on stage and shook hands, but did not speak much.

Both senators addressed the question of when life begins. Neither answered definitively.

Clinton said the "potential for life" begins at conception, but added that making abortion illegal would be government intrusion in the personal lives of Americans. She said she was basing her answer on what she's seen in countries like Romania and China.

"But for me, it is also not only about a potential life; it is about the other lives involved," Clinton said. "And, therefore, I have concluded, after great, you know, concern and searching my own mind and heart over many years, that our task should be in this pluralistic, diverse life of ours in this nation that individuals must be entrusted to make this profound decision, because the alternative would be such an intrusion of government authority that it would be very difficult to sustain in our kind of open society."

Obama bluntly said he did not know when life began.

"Is it when a cell separates?" Obama said. "Is it when the soul stirs?

"So I don't presume to know the answer to that question. What I know, as I've said before, is that there is something extraordinarily powerful about potential life and that that has a moral weight to it that we take into consideration when we're having these debates."

Obama went on to say that sex education, especially in relation to preventing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy, should be a joining of abstinence lessons and information about contraception.

"And we want to make sure that, even as we are teaching responsible sexuality and we are teaching abstinence to children, that we are also making sure that they've got, you know, enough understanding about contraception that they don't end up having much more severe problems because of a dumb mistake," Obama said.

On evolution, Obama said evolution and creation, science and religion, were not incompatible.

"There are those who suggest that if you have a scientific bent of mind, then somehow you should reject religion, and I fundamentally disagree with that," Obama said. "In fact, the more I learn about the world, the more I know about science, the more I'm amazed about the mystery of this planet and this universe. And it strengthens my faith as opposed to weakens it."

As expected, the issue of Obama's now-retired pastor in Chicago, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, came up, and Obama said that while he repudiated the controversial comments made by Wright recently highlighted by the media, there was more to the pastor and his church, the Trinity United Church of Christ.

He credited Wright with helping him in his spiritual search.

"I visited that church and found the ministries that they were doing on HIV/AIDS, on prison ministries, there were a whole host of wonderful ministries that they were engaged in," Obama said. "And Reverend Wright's sermons spoke directly to the social gospel, the need to act and not just to sit in the pews.

"And so I found that very attractive and ended up joining the church when I got out of law school."

Clinton, in response to a question about why she thinks God allows innocent people to suffer, said she didn't know but that she saw suffering as a call to action.

"You know, in my Judeo-Christian faith tradition, in both the Old and the New Testament, the incredible demands that God places on us and that the prophets ask of us and that Christ called us to respond to on behalf of the poor are unavoidable," Clinton said. "And it's always been curious to me how our debate about religion in America too often misses that."

Clinton said her favorite passage in the Bible is the story of Esther, a Persian queen from the Old Testament who thwarted a massacre of Jews.

It's her current favorite because "there weren't too many models of women who had the opportunity to make a decision, to take a chance, a risk that, you know, was very courageous."

When asked if she thought God wanted her to be president, she said: "I believe, you know, Abraham Lincoln was right in admonishing us not to act as though we knew God was on our side. In fact, our mission should be on God's side. And I have tried to take my beliefs, my faith and put it to work my entire life."

E-mail: dpidgeon@lnpnews.com