After Armstrong Williams read about one of Ben Carson’s most recent messaging brouhahas — the one where he seemed to compare Syrian refugees with rabid dogs — he decided his friend could use some counsel.

“I called him up and said, ‘You have got to use better analogies, you can’t say things like that,’ ” said Williams, a conservative broadcaster who describes himself as the Republican presidential candidate’s business manager. “He needs to have someone in the room that will look at him and say: ‘You cannot say those things. Rabid dogs?’ ”

If Williams thought his message got through, he hasn’t been paying attention.

“I’m just going to continue to say what I would normally say,” Carson told The Washington Post last week. “People keep saying, ‘You said Nazi, you said dog, you said slavery,’ and they are operating on a very immature level. I’m hoping we get to a place where people will be mature enough to think, ‘I didn’t like the analogy, but I like what he’s trying to say.’ ”

In the recent news coverage of Carson’s unlikely campaign, his staff members have been portrayed as trying to get him on track: on the finer points of foreign policy, on how not to alienate large parts of the electorate. Carson appreciates the suggestions and says he will work on these things, but ultimately only one adviser has his ear.

“My philosophy,” Carson said, “is do your best, and God will do the rest.”

The pioneering neurosurgeon and political novice frequently cites God’s intervention in his life. There was the time he hadn’t studied for a chemistry test at Yale University, but God provided him the answers in his sleep. There’s the time a broke Carson prayed for money and then found $10 on the ground. And, of course, there’s the much-debated story of God curing his temper as an adolescent after he tried unsuccessfully to stab a friend with a camping knife — the moment, he said, he redevoted himself to faith.

“You have to realize,” Carson said in a near-whisper, steepling his hands as if in prayer. “When I talk about my faith, I really do feel that what I’m going through right now is something that is part of God’s will. . . . I think the way God communicates with me is by giving me wisdom.”

God, he said, always guided his hands back when he was a surgeon. Now that Carson is running for president, he has God as a campaign manager.

Last week, Carson sat in the front row of an evangelical church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. This was a hip place of worship: Neon purple lights bathed an audience in jeans and flannel while a Christian rock band sang ballads, and a young man performed a monologue from the perspective of David, the Old Testament giant slayer.

The pastor told parishioners that Carson wasn’t going to give a stump speech but rather talk about his personal connection with Jesus. What he didn’t realize is that those two things are not mutually exclusive.

“I love the story of David and Goliath,” Carson began with a knowing smile. His own saga of conquering political giants started, he says, with a call from God. He had planned to retire after a long career as a neurosurgeon. He had books to read and an organ to learn how to play. Instead, he gave a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast that was received so well by conservatives — partly because he took shots at President Obama, sitting just feet away — that fans instantly started calling for him to run.

“I always said, ‘Lord, if you want me to do this, you’ll have to open the doors, because people say it’s impossible for someone like me,’ ” Carson said. “And the doors have been opened.”

Carson is not merely a religious man running for president: He’s running for president on what he considers a mission from above. The world is full of “secular progressive bullies,” he says, and it will take a man such as him to restore the values of the country.

“God uses people as instruments,” Carson said.

His audience was rapt. Carson went on to recall a time when God spared his life after he fell asleep at the wheel. He argued that George Washington was a “very spiritual man” but that modern political correctness keeps people from talking about it. He diagnosed the United States as “schizophrenic” for putting God on its currency while calling for the separation of church and state.

“We have let the secularist progressives tell us that He is not an important part of our lives, or that He doesn’t exist, or that you’re stupid if you believe in Him, or that you should never mention Him in public because somehow that violates the separation of church and state,” he fulminated in his gentle lullaby tones. “There is no separation of church and state in the Constitution.”

And there’s not much separation between politics and religion for Carson on the trail. He has proposed a tax system based on the biblical practice of tithing and an education system that questions the theory of evolution. There was even the strange controversy generated by an old speech where he argued that the pyramids were built by Joseph as grain silos.

After his sermon, Carson set off with his Secret Service detail and half a dozen traveling staff members for the second church of the day. Carson’s potential for victory in Iowa relies heavily on the evangelical vote.

“He’ll probably say a lot of the same stuff at the political events,” said Will Russell, an advance staff member. “The good thing is it doesn’t come across as Ted Cruz preachy.”

The motorcade pulled off the road at what looked like an Iowa postcard — a squat white church in the middle of a snow-covered corn field. “One of the places I’m most comfortable is a church,” Carson told the congregation from the altar.

Carson says that his status as a devout Christian has put a target on his back. He says the media have gone after him more than any other candidate, whether it be doubts cast on tales from his inspirational memoirs (some reporters have questioned whether the stabbing incident really happened), the New York Times interview with a Carson adviser who questioned the candidate’s grasp of foreign policy or the general mockery after his campaign tweeted a map of the United States with several New England states misplaced.

“Like I had anything to do with making that map,” Carson said on the drive through Iowa.

After all, even a campaign that takes its cues from above has people on the ground.

Carson has a brain trust of three longtime GOP operatives focused on his messaging and social-media strategy — communications director Doug Watts, senior strategist Ed Brookover and campaign manager Barry Bennett, who all first made their marks with the Reagan-Bush campaigns.

He has Ryan Rhodes, a former turf-management specialist for golf courses who entered politics via tea party activism and is running his operation in Iowa.

And of course, he has Armstrong Williams, who, despite not technically being part of his staff, has become the most visible part of the campaign operations, as a confidant and a conduit to the media.

There are plenty of benefits, they say, to working for Carson. He never seems to get angry, and he’s very appreciative of the work they do. But at the end of the day, their candidate simply cannot be wrangled or coached on certain issues.

“If I could create the Webster’s dictionary of words Dr. Carson could use in the campaign, there would be some words I’d leave out,” Terry Giles, a Houston lawyer who was Carson’s first campaign chairman, said in an interview this year. “Like ‘Nazi’ or ‘Hitler.’ ”

As recently as a couple of weeks ago, Watts was happy to report that the Carson campaign has “been pretty good lately” about not offending people.

But Carson has faith that his message can prevail without having to change it. There’s an almost eerie calm about Carson, a quality possibly drawn from his years in the operating room. It doesn’t bother him, he says, that his poll numbers in Iowa have been dropping or that his intelligence is being questioned. Like he said, God is the one who provides him with wisdom.