Space was limited to 210 attendees, but Christian Exodus hasn't had to turn anyone away for its fall conference this weekend in Greenville despite national attention the group has drawn.

About 100 people, more than half of them South Carolina residents, are expected for the event, said organizer Cory Burnell.

It was designed to entice people to move here from across the nation, to help push the state toward a "constitutionally limited government founded upon Christian principles."

Booths will be set up offering information on real estate, schools and jobs.

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Speakers -- including a psychiatrist who researches terrorism and plans to run for president in 2008, and a GOP candidate for governor of Texas in 2006 -- are on the agenda.

The group has chosen South Carolina, already an overwhelmingly conservative state, as a place to try to concentrate the political power of Christian conservatives, which it says is too diluted across the nation to have significant impact.

It still has a vast wilderness to cross if it is to come anywhere close to its promised land.

Its initial goal is to move 2,500 members here by Sept. 30, 2006. So far, five families -- a total of about a dozen people -- have come, Burnell said in a telephone interview from the San Francisco airport as he prepared to depart for Greenville.

Charles Lewis, who moved his family to the Upstate from Washington, D.C., to help the Christian Exodus cause, said he joined out of frustration over what he saw as the failure of the Republican-controlled Congress and president to advance the conservative agenda.

"We're not radicals. We're not reactionaries. We're not kooks," he said. "We're just everyday people who believe that the Republican Party is not getting it done."

Lewis, who was principal of a charter school in Washington before moving here six months ago, plans to use his writing skills -- he said he's written several books and worked on CDs -- to disseminate Christian Exodus information and recruit members.

Despite the seemingly slow start, Burrell, who lives in California, said his organization is gathering momentum.

The group last month passed the 1,000-member mark, he said. About 400 of those have indicated on the Christian Exodus Web site that they are committed to moving to South Carolina during the first phase, which runs through the end of 2008, he said.

Beginning with control of city and county councils, the group hopes to "overwhelmingly impact the statewide elections of 2014."

It then would "institute constitutional reforms returning proper autonomy to the state by 2016 regardless of illegal edicts from Washington, D.C.," according to a plan laid out on its Web site.

The Web site, Burnell said, got 2.3 million hits during the month of July, and major newspapers and TV networks across the country have covered the story.

He's still not saying which counties his group has picked as the first areas for settlement, but the Upstate is in his sights.

"If you just look at the most conservative counties in the state, those are the ones Christian Exodus will select," he said.

Meanwhile, the "state coordinator" for the group and first settler, Frank Janoski, has met with local religious and political groups to try to clear a path for the thousands he hopes will follow him.

He is surprised at how receptive people are to Christian Exodus.

"We're finding a very strong support arm in the Upstate that we didn't really realize was going to be in place," he said.

Janoski, who moved to Greer from Bethlehem, Pa., with his wife and four children, has spoken at a number of churches and with members of such groups as the Greenville County Taxpayers Association, the Constitution Party, the Tyranny Response Network and the Patriot Network, among others.

Butch Taylor, president of the Taxpayers Association, said he doesn't know much about Christian Exodus but doesn't disagree with what they're doing.

"I think they're trying to turn our political system back to the basics on which it was founded," he said.

Rather than attend the Christian Exodus conference, though, Taylor, a member of the Constitution Party, said he plans to go hear Tom Tancredo, a Republican congressman from Colorado, at Greenville Technical College on Saturday.

Tancredo vehemently opposes illegal immigration and has hinted at a presidential bid in 2008 as a way to promote his agenda, The Associated Press reports.

Bruce Ransom, a political science professor at Clemson University, said Christian Exodus is fighting an uphill battle if it hopes to dislodge evangelical Christians from the Republican Party.

"Right now I don't see any unrest in that segment of the Republican base," he said.

That's not the way Dr. Robert Clarkson of Anderson sees it. He's the executive director of the Patriot Network, a group with at least 2,000 members, mostly in the Southeast, that advocates, among other things, abolishing the Internal Revenue Service.

All it will take is "a determined minority" -- about 5 percent -- to get things moving, he said.

"It doesn't take that many to change political opinion," he said.

He expects Christian Exodus-backed candidates to be influential in a couple of counties soon, and believes other counties will follow once they see them rolling back "unconstitutional" laws.

Rick Hahnenberg, president of the Upstate chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said Christian Exodus seems to be "the extreme of the extremes" and doesn't appear likely to gain a majority even in a conservative state like South Carolina.

The group is trying to gather political strength in South Carolina by starting with people who don't necessarily agree with everything it espouses. One such individual is Dr. John Corbin of Greenville, a scheduled speaker for this weekend's conference.

Corbin, a financial planner and Christian talk show host, will speak on "how perverse economic incentives lead to permanent government failure and why private property rights were the choice of the founders for protection of liberty."

He supports the Christian Exodus movement but differs with it on such issues as how to deal with immigration and on the role of government in such things as homosexuality. Christian Exodus believes homosexual acts should be illegal, and Corbin advocates "adhering to biblical norms for proper social perspective but rarely looking to the state for solutions to social problems."

His radio show is broadcast locally and over the Internet on the Tyranny Response Network, which he said airs the views of constitutionalists, pro-life Libertarians, League of the South members and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, among others.

"I would love to see us be able to secede from the union," Corbin said. "Whether or not it will ever be able to be pulled off in our lifetime is very doubtful."