Ted Cruz, with his wife Heidi Cruz, at a night rally in Des Moines, Iowa, Feb. 1. Photo: Reuters

DES MOINES, Iowa — Relishing victory in the first Republican nominating contest of the U.S. presidential election, Sen. Ted Cruz called his defeat of Donald Trump in the Iowa caucuses a win for “Judeo-Christian values.”

Cruz also said the result from Monday’s contest was a rebuke to what he called President Obama’s liberal agenda .

“This is the power of the conservative grass roots,” the senator from Texas told CNN on Tuesday. “One of the greatest lies that gets told on the airwaves over and over again is that this country has somehow embraced Barack Obama’s big government. That’s not true. This is a center-right country. This is a country built on Judeo-Christian values.”

Cruz won the Republican Iowa caucuses with 28 percent of the vote compared with 24 percent for businessman Trump, whose aggressive and unorthodox campaign has been marked by controversies ranging from his calls to ban Muslims temporarily from entering the United States to his pledge to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border.

Cruz, 45, was buoyed by evangelical support at the launch of the nominating process to pick the parties’ candidates for the Nov. 8 election. His strong get-out-the-vote effort helped counter the enthusiasm from large crowds that have shown up for Trump’s boisterous rallies.

A first-term senator and fiscal conservative from the Tea Party movement that emerged on the right of the Republican Party six years ago, Cruz has presented himself as a strong foreign policy hawk. He vowed to “carpet bomb” the militant group ISIS into oblivion in a speech in December in which said, “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark but we are going to find out.”

On the Democratic side, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won by a razor-thin margin against Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the closest in Iowa Democratic caucus history.

Clinton, 68, prevailed by only four delegates, according to party figures. Sanders, 74, a self-described democratic socialist who has strongly attacked Clinton’s campaign from the left, declared the result a virtual tie after he had trailed the former first lady in opinion polls for months.

“I think the significance is for folks who did not think Bernie Sanders could win, that we could compete against Hillary Clinton, I hope that thought is now gone,” Sanders told CNN.