This whole episode shows the power of Internet media in politics nowadays - a relatively new phenomenon. Thank you, Michael, for the reminder about why the larger corporations express any given opinion. I always thought the Hobby Lobby decision was "full of **it" due to the obvious dominance of Chinese-made goods in the store, and as most people should know, birth control is not optional in mainland China. BTW, the five SCOTUS justices did not "invent" corporate personhood, they expanded the existing legal fiction.
The timing of the current crop (2014-2015) of state RFRA laws should be a hint as to their purpose. It has taken a decade for states to decide that a state RFRA is a good idea. Why not earlier? I see no other stimulus other than the recent reversal of one or more aspects of the anti-gay-marriage laws by the SCOTUS and by appellate courts, including an appellate case decided against Wisconsin and Indiana in September 2014 that was sent up to SCOTUS, who declined to review the case in October. The first legislative action on the Indiana RFRA bill SB101 was in early January 2015. See this link for the official timeline:
https://iga.in.gov/legislative/2015/bills/senate/101# Other states' RFRA bills also followed court cases in progress or decided against the state.
Putting it simply, current conservative politicians need "social conservative" Christian manpower to get out the vote, and keeping these people engaged in the political process is essential to the politician's continued career success. The "country club Republicans" (traditional business base of party) are fine with the process even though a large fraction don't care about the social conservative issues (trust me, I know, I am from a country club Republican family). So, politicians and wanna-be-kingmaker pundits and pastors are hot to stir up the "social conservative" base of ordinary pew-sitters and ordinary pastors. Many ordinary pastors take the bait and start emphasizing the gay issue more than in the past - face it, congregations usually prefer hearing about OTHER people's sins rather than their own. Pastors get swayed by the leading opinion makers in their field - a process no different from those in other professions.
Politicians intentionally write the bills to preserve some plausible deniability, as Gov. Pence demonstrated in his unwillingness to answer questions on whether the bill is intended to support discrimination against gays. One of the problems with vagueness in bills is that it is easy to apply the law to a variety of situations. This bill has a lot of leeway to discriminate against women and non-Christians in employment matters, and the Hobby Lobby SCOTUS decision has opened the possibility of the SCOTUS (with addition of one or two more conservative Justices) considering such emplyment discrimination perfectly valid in ordinary for profit employment. Legislation not only changes existing law but changes perceptions and trends. In general a large percentage of people will behave badly if such behavior is given the social seal of approval. Laws can be symbolic.