Sandy Usher is three things just now: Christian, Republican and on the fence about Sen. John McCain.

"As a Christian I see everything through a Christian lens, because I see that lens as clear-eyed. And everything else is foggy," said Mrs. Usher, of Oakmont, a former Allegheny County GOP official.

Mrs. Usher is emblematic of a group of conservative Christian voters Mr. McCain has been slowly winning over. The question is whether he can win them fully by Nov. 4.

With Mrs. Usher, at least, he made some progress last week.

"I'd say I moved a lot just to get to the fence," she said in a telephone interview the day after Mr. McCain gave his acceptance speech.

Some leaders on the Christian right have vowed never to forgive Mr. McCain his stands on embryonic stem cell research, or the McCain-Feingold bill that tried to limit their ability to intervene in political contests. Even his stand on global warming dismays many of them -- one of the crossover issues that appeals to the conservative part of the Christian conservative equation.

Now, even though some of them doubt the globe is warming, Christian conservatives are warming to Mr. McCain.

Mrs. Usher entered the week impressed with Mr. McCain's choice of evangelical Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as a running mate but still troubled by many of his stands that she sees as unacceptable compromises on core values.

Initially she had leaned toward Chuck Baldwin, the nominee of the hard-right Constitution Party, but she said she was impressed with Mr. McCain's reference in his acceptance speech to changing what he characterized as the "selfish life" of his youth.

The speech, she said, "reached out not only to people of faith but also to people who have gained a little maturity in their life."

Winning over conservatives such as Mrs. Usher could spell the difference in Mr. McCain's support in crucial states like Pennsylvania, home to a large contingent of evangelical Protestants and anti-abortion Catholics.

The tepidness toward Mr. McCain has been steadily receding, say evangelical leaders, but some worry that even if it vanishes altogether, the long wait might have damaged the nominee's chances.

"He's not someone that related well. He didn't play very well in the sandbox with religious conservatives. There was a lot of suspicion," said former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who built much of his political base within the religious right.

Mr. McCain's conservative credentials would have seemed relatively solid. He opposes abortion. His hawkish foreign policy dovetails with that of most conservatives. His religious beliefs are evangelical, having left the Episcopalian church for the Baptists.

But all the while, he has avoided the kind of rhetoric to which evangelical voters are attuned.

"He voted pretty much the right way," said Mr. Santorum, "but he would not come out and speak to those issues."

Richard Land, who heads the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, said religious conservatives began softening their position as the two major party candidates became clear.

"Up until about three weeks ago what I had a lot of evangelicals saying to me was a variation of this: 'He wasn't my first choice, he wasn't my second choice, but I'd rather have a third-class fireman than a first-class arsonist,' " Mr. Land said. "They looked at Sen. Obama as a first-class arsonist."

The enthusiasm, say evangelical leaders, followed Mr. McCain's performance in a televised presidential forum from Saddleback Church in California, moderated by Rick Warren, a prominent evangelical pastor. It was there that Mr. McCain publicly discussed his religious beliefs in detail and strengthened his standing among opponents of legalized abortion.

He followed that appearance with the selection of Ms. Palin, an abortion foe who opted to give birth to a child with Down syndrome. Conservative Christian voters were swayed.

"One Catholic woman e-mailed me and said, 'I can't tell you what it means to me that we're going to have an attractive mother of five who's going to be making the case now that the pro-life position is the pro-woman position,' " said Mr. Land.

There is, in all of this, the question of identity politics coming into play as well, note some observers. Rose Ann Gaetano, an anti-abortion Catholic conservative from Lackawanna County, noted that she appreciated Mr. McCain's stand on abortion, but had supported former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who favors both legalized abortion and gun control, issues diametrically at odds with her ideology.

"A lot of it was him being Italian, I'm not going to lie to you," she said. As Mrs. Gaetano sees it, Christian evangelicals might have been less warm to Mr. McCain than to former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, whose Christian bona fides were reinforced by his status as an ordained minister. It remained for Mr. McCain to do likewise by heartfelt answers at Saddleback, such as his unequivocal answer to questions about his greatest personal failing, in this case, the collapse of his first marriage.

Dave Dumeyer, Republican chairman in Lancaster County, saw the post-Saddleback, post-Palin shift among the core of religious voters in central county, the heart of Pennsylvania's Bible Belt.

"I think McCain was probably going to pick up their votes but I don't know that it was with the same level of enthusiasm that he now has with them," he said.

Mr. McCain began reaching out to his party's conservative and religious wings -- often interchangeable entities -- from the same lectern in Washington from which Mitt Romney abandoned his campaign. The setting was the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, whose members were vivid in their disapproval of the putative candidate.

The transformation came in a one-two punch, evangelical observers said.

His appearance at Saddleback provided both a stark contrast with Mr. Obama, who has been a longtime supporter of abortion rights and whose former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, became the focus of widespread criticism over remarks from the pulpit.

Asked by the Rev. Warren when life begins, Mr. Obama hedged. Mr. McCain directly answered that it starts at conception. This unambiguous contrast on a signal issue within the evangelical community allowed its adherents to etch a clear line between the two men, said Tom Minnery, vice president for public policy at Focus on the Family, the Colorado-based group led by evangelist James Dobson.

Mr. Dobson had been bitterly critical of Mr. McCain throughout the primary season; his arrival in the McCain camp was seen as the watershed it needed to solidify his base with religious voters.

"He told me 20 ways to Sunday he wasn't going to vote for John McCain and now he is. That's a big shift," said Mr. Santorum.

Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania's senior senator, said he thinks that Mr. Dobson's switch to Mr. McCain's side will be followed by some of the less enthusiastic voters, such as Mrs. Usher.

"I think there'll probably end up being only a few and I think among those that take that position now as you get closer to the election and more concerned about Obama they'll find McCain less unattractive," he said.

Whether evangelicals still find politics attractive is a larger question hovering over the 2008 elections. At one time, religious leaders such as the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of The Moral Majority, eschewed political activity as an ungodly level of involvement in the world.

That changed in 1976 with the arrival of Jimmy Carter, a self-professed born-again Christian. Within four years, conservatives had begun locking up that vote on the appeal of Ronald Reagan.

Mr. Land wonders not whether evangelicals will stay interested in politics, but as ready adherents to the Republican cause.

"I think that they certainly are, let's say, more leery of the Republican Party and less trusting and determined they're not going to be taken for granted by the Republican Party," he said. "If McCain had picked a pro-choice running mate, millions of them would have stayed home," he said. "Evidently, he believed them."