WASHINGTON – Stunned by conservative backlash over President Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, the White House yesterday stepped up its efforts at convincing critics that the former Dallas attorney and White House counsel is a trustworthy pick by focusing on her professional accomplishments and religious faith.

But a number of prominent conservatives said that White House efforts on behalf of Ms. Miers are falling short. They said that neither her qualifications nor her religious faith provide clues as to how she would rule as a judge, and they blanched at the suggestion by some Bush administration officials that concerns about Ms. Miers are motivated by elitism, sexism, or both.

One day after President Bush devoted most of a rare press conference defending his pick of a close confidant with no apparent record on important social issues to replace Justice O’Connor, White House surrogates worked the phones and fanned out across the Beltway armed with Ms. Miers’s resume. Former colleagues of the nominee from her Dallas days were deputized to speak on her behalf.

The president’s chief adviser, Karl Rove, convinced two Evangelical icons, the founder and president of Focus on the Family, Dr. James Dobson, and the chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, Jay Sekulow, that Ms. Miers was a trustworthy choice the day before Mr. Bush announced her as his nominee. Both men issued widely distributed statements in support of Ms. Miers the following day.

Yet other groups with a strong Evangelical following remain unconvinced. The president of the Family Research Council, Tony Perkins, said his organization is taking a “wait and see” approach because it knows too little about her approach to the law. Mr. Perkins described grassroots sentiment on Ms. Miers as ranging from “what does she believe” to “outright outrage that the president has nominated someone who we even have to ask questions about.”

A conservative Texas Supreme Court justice and longtime friend of Ms. Miers, Nathan Hecht, has been telling reporters all week that Ms. Miers is widely respected as one of that state’s finest female lawyers and that she is a woman of deep religious faith. Mr. Perkins and others said assurances that the nominee is deeply religious are not sufficient grounds to embrace her.

“Is that an issue that is important to us? Yes,” Mr. Perkins said. “But is that alone enough of a reason to say she is a qualified nominee. No, it’s not. The fact that she attends an Evangelical church and that she’s a professed Christian is not enough to tell us what her judicial philosophy is and where she’s coming from on the issues.”

A spokesman for the White House, Jim Dyke, said it is confident that once conservative critics of Ms. Miers know more about her, they’ll agree that she is a good pick. “Maybe what was surprising was the speed with which some who responded to this seemed to do so without knowing all that much about her,” Mr. Dyke said.

The director of government relations for Concerned Women for America, Lanier Swann, said that organization is also taking a wait-and-see approach to Ms. Miers because of her thin record on constitutional issues. She said a nominee’s religious faith does not play a role in their evaluation.

“Her personal faith and the stories of her relationship to Mr. Hecht are all well and good,” Ms. Swann said, “but we’re interested in her judicial background. We’re interested in how she would display judicial restraint. We’re encouraged by the candor with which her friends speak about her and her church, but what we need is information that will paint a picture of who she will be sitting on the Supreme Court.”