After a Child's Death, a Religious Politician Became a Cultural Warrior Rick Santorum waiting to be interviewed on CNN on Wednesday. His weaving of religion and politics helped him come close to beating Mitt Romney in Iowa. WASHINGTON - As a teenager growing up in Butler, Pa., Rick Santorum spent Sunday mornings as an altar boy, taking wheelchair-bound veterans to Roman Catholic Mass. In the ninth grade, he announced his intention to hold elective office. "I'm going to be governor of Pennsylvania," he declared, according to his brother Dan. Years later, as a married man and a member of Congress, Mr. Santorum wove these two strands of his life - his faith and his political aspirations - into one. Then, in 1996, when he was a freshman senator, his wife, Karen, delivered a child when she was just 20 weeks pregnant. The baby, a boy they named Gabriel, died after two hours. "That's when I noticed a marked difference in Rick," said Robert Traynham, who spent 10 years as a Santorum aide. He became much more philosophical, much more deeply religious. You could tell; he was walking with his faith. That experience helped deepen Mr. Santorum's opposition to abortion, and he went on to become one of Washington's most outspoken cultural warriors. He prodded Congress to outlaw the procedure known as partial-birth abortion, broke with a Republican president, George W. Bush, over embryonic stem cell research and pushed for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, insisting that it is "right for children to have moms and dads." Those views helped put Mr. Santorum within a whisker of beating Mitt Romney in the Iowa caucuses on Tuesday night. Mr. Santorum has spent months waging a low-budget, shoe-leather-intensive quest for the Republican nomination; he visited all 99 counties in Iowa and moved his wife and seven children (including a disabled 3-year-old daughter) there for three weeks before the Ames Straw Poll last summer. Now, suddenly, he is a viable candidate. "People have asked me how I've done this, sitting back at the polls and not getting a whole lot of attention paid to us," Mr. Santorum told supporters in Iowa on Tuesday night. How did you keep going out to Iowa, in 99 counties, and 381 town hall meetings and speeches? "Well," he went on, "every morning when I was getting up in the morning to take on that challenge, I've required a strength from another particular friendship, one that is sacred. I've survived the challenges so far by the daily grace that comes from God. Brash and blunt at 53, Mr. Santorum is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get politician, unapologetic if his views offend, which they often do. He once offhandedly invoked bestiality in arguing that states should have the right to regulate homosexual acts. "That is not to pick on homosexuality," he said. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog. That prompted critics to create a Web site promoting a vulgar definition of his name. He is now feuding with Google, because the site comes up first on a search for him. On the campaign trail, he makes the case that traditional marriage is one prescription for the nation's economic ills. During a swing through South Carolina this fall, he dropped in on a Christian radio station, where the host of the drive-time talk show, Tony Beam, asked Mr. Santorum how social issues would play in an election dominated by the economy. Mr. Santorum did not miss a beat, launching into a long discourse on how single-parent homes spawn poverty and government intervention. "Government gets bigger," he argued, "when families get weaker." Richard John Santorum grew up in working-class Pennsylvania, the son of an Italian immigrant father who eventually became a clinical psychologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Butler. Mr. Santorum's mother was the chief nurse there, and the Santorums - Rick is the middle child of three - lived in a small three-bedroom, one-bathroom brick house on the hospital grounds. Mr. Santorum bunked with his younger brother, Dan. "Growing up, you had to be on your deathbed not to go to church," Dan Santorum said. It was 200 yards from our house to walk to the church. Before Mass, my brother and I would get the patients who were not ambulatory and we wheeled them from their hospital rooms to the services. He served Mass and I would help wheel the patients up for Communion, and when it was over we would wheel them back and go home and have a family breakfast. Dan Santorum said he and his friends laughed at his older brother when Rick declared he would be Pennsylvania's governor one day. But in college, at Pennsylvania State University, Mr. Santorum studied political science and eventually became state chairman of the College Republicans. He went on to earn a business degree from the University of Pittsburgh and a law degree from the Dickinson School of Law. He broke into politics working as an administrative assistant for a state senator.