WASHINGTON – In a nationwide broadcast last night, conservative Christian leaders urged religious Americans to press the Senate to confirm President Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge John Roberts Jr.

“We need to defend his nomination,” James Dobson, the founder of a conservative Colorado-based ministry, Focus on the Family, said during the 90-minute satellite broadcast transmitted to churches around the country. “Pray urgently that God’s perfect will be done.”

While the program was billed as a clarion call on behalf of Judge Roberts, some participants sounded less than ecstatic about the nomination and were more strident when they railed against liberal forces who are opposing Mr. Bush’s pick.

“It looks like Judge Roberts is, and we believe so, a strict constructionist,” Mr. Dobson, a psychologist who has a popular radio program, said. “Only time will reveal his judicial philosophy and how it relates to the issues we care most about. … For now, at least, he looks good.”

Mr. Dobson and the other speakers during “Justice Sunday II: God Save This Honorable Court” devoted more time to a broad critique of the judiciary as a branch that regularly exceeds its constitutional bounds.

Several participants in the broadcast decried a recent Supreme Court decision against the display of the Ten Commandments in public buildings. A ruling upholding the use of eminent domain powers to promote economic development was also denounced.

“There just seems to be no limit to where the majority on this court is going to take us,” Mr. Dobson, who was traveling in France yesterday and spoke via videotape, said. “More and more frequently now they’re drawing their inspiration from leftist influences in Western Europe.”

One of the most emphatic speakers, the president of the New York-based Catholic League, William Donohue, urged viewers to embrace profound changes to the judiciary.

“I think Judge Roberts, good man, that’s fine,” said Mr. Donohue. “We need to go beyond Roberts.”

Mr. Donohue proposed a constitutional amendment that would boost the power of elected officials by requiring that the Supreme Court vote unanimously in order to overturn an act of Congress.

“The courts are trying to take the heart and soul of our culture,” Mr. Donohue warned.

Noting that he is a Catholic, Mr. Donohue said he felt far more at home with the largely evangelical audience than he does with liberals. “I don’t have anything in common with them. I have something in common with you,” he said.

Mr. Donohue said it is time for religious conservatives of all stripes to band together. “The left is getting nervous,” he said. “It’s time that we moved to the front of the bus and that we took command of the wheel.”

Only one politician was a featured speaker during last night’s program, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

“All wisdom does not reside in nine persons in robes, black robes,” Mr. DeLay said. He called Judge Roberts “as uncontroversial as one could imagine.”

A similar broadcast in April included Senate Majority Leader Frist, but he did not appear in last night’s program. Dr. Frist recently irked some social conservatives by calling for greater federally sponsored stem cell research.

Hours before the conservative broadcast, liberal ministers staged a competing event at an African-American church in Nashville.

“The people across the river tonight are not going to be speaking for all of Christianity,” one speaker at the liberal religious service, Reverend Barry Lynn of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, said in an interview. He said the suggestion that the government was attacking Christians was absurd.

“We are not an oppressed group here. There’s not some war against us,” he said. “If we’re not doing our job raising our children, it’s our problem, not the government’s problem.”

While Rev. Lynn’s group is opposing Judge Roberts, not all of those who spoke at the liberal ministers’ event had taken a position on the nomination. “I don’t think people speak with one voice, but that’s of course part of the point, that people of faith have different views on what constitutes justice,” he said.

Nomination hearings for Judge Roberts are set to begin September 6, but the debate over the nomination may intensify again today as the Reagan Library in California is scheduled to release more than 5,000 pages of records Judge Roberts compiled as an attorney in the White House counsel’s office from 1982 to 1986. About 40,000 pages of similar records are expected to be released in the next week.

The White House and Democratic senators remain at odds over papers Judge Roberts produced while he served as a lawyer in the solicitor general’s office under President George H.W. Bush. The Senate Democrats have called for the release of at least some of those records, but the White House has rejected that request.

During last night’s 90-minute broadcast, no mention was made of some of Judge Roberts’s work that has proven controversial with conservatives. While a partner in a Washington law firm, he helped lawyers prepare challenges against a Colorado voter initiative that restricted the rights of homosexuals and against a federal law aimed at restricting children’s access to sexually explicit programs.

Under pressure from the White House, most large conservative groups have continued to back Judge Roberts, though some fringe organizations have come out against the nominee.