Four presidential candidates are expected to speak at Friday's Faith Family Forum held on the campus of Bob Jones University in Greenville on the eve of the final GOP presidential debate. Friday, Alan Wilson, South Carolina attorney general, released an expected schedule of when the candidates will appear. Ben Carson will take the stage first inside the 7,000-seat Founders Memorial Amphitorium. He will speak at 12:30 p.m. Jeb Bush is expected at 1:15 p.m., followed by Marco Rubio at 2:25 p.m. and Ted Cruz at 4:45 p.m. Donald Trump will not attend, but Pastor Mark Burns of Easley, who opened and led a prayer at a Trump rally held in Clemson on Wednesday, will speak at 3:15 p.m. The forum is a joint effort by Palmetto Family Alliance and Wilson's Conservative Leadership Project. At least 3,800 tickets were distributed by Friday morning, Wilson posted on twitter. The forum takes place eight days before South Carolina’s “First in the South” primary. All Republican and Democratic presidential candidates were invited to attend the forum, said Oran Smith, President and CEO of Palmetto Family Alliance , the faith-based conservative public policy organization based in Columbia. “In South Carolina, the evangelical voter is a very coveted vote,” Smith said. “That’s the vote that everyone wants. It’s a group of voters that sometimes their issues get lost in the shuffle, so we want to make sure that we took time out before the South Carolina Republican primary to talk about the issues of faith and family and get these candidates on record about what they think about these issues.” The forum will be held the day before GOP candidates gather on stage at The Peace Center for a nationally-televised debate that will air on CBS News. The forum will be held from 12:30 p.m.-5:30 p.m. at the 7,000-seat Founders Memorial Amphitorium on the BJU campus, 1700 Wade Hampton Blvd., Greenville. Most tickets are free. Register at faithfamilyforum.com. Wilson's Conservative Leadership Project, which has held multiple events with individual candidates this election cycle, will be a co-sponsor of the event, Smith said. Wilson and Smith will moderate, asking questions that will be pre-submitted to candidates, as candidates take the stage one at a time. Candidates will be slotted into 20 to 30-minute time frames, he said. The forum has invited other national conservative public-policy groups to take part in the forum, but couldn't confirm attendance yet, he said. Organizers chose Greenville because of the debate here on Saturday made it convenient for candidates and because of the strong history of the evangelical vote in the Upstate, Smith said. Topics at the forum will target faith and social issues, including religious freedom, marriage and pro-life issues as well as energy and foreign policy, Smith said. This will be the fourth campaign event Palmetto Family has hosted in South Carolina, Smith said. Previously it held a presidential primary forum in 2007, a governor’s debate in 2010 and a U.S. Senate forum in 2014. Smith said they chose BJU because of its facilities and as a way to draw interest from the conservative Christian universities students, faculty and staff. The university had famously played host to former President George W. Bush during the 2000 campaign when he and the university were criticized for its policies banning interracial dating before it dropped that policy. It shied away from the political spotlight in the years that followed but has returned as a campaign stop under the leadership of its new president Steve Pettit this election cycle. Both Ted Cruz and Ben Carson have held events at the university, and Smith said he’d heard good reports about those events, which influenced his decision to hold the forum there.

• published: 12 Feb 2016
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