THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO RALPH

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Now it's payback time. With the backing of prominent Republicans, the Coalition next week will unveil its Contract with the American Family. Its centerpiece, TIME has learned, will be a proposed constitutional amendment to protect "religious expression" -- including a voluntary moment of silence in schools, the use of religious symbols in public places and religious invocations at public ceremonies. The bill would also expend $30 million to fund an experiment in "school choice" in low-income regions; it would end federal funding for such allegedly liberal efforts as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Department of Education. In addition, the bill would probably include a federal ban on D&C abortion procedures, which are used primarily in late-term abortions.

That the religious right could virtually dictate an important part of the congressional agenda was unimaginable when the modern movement began in 1979. Back then, such conservatives as Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie helped Falwell set up the Moral Majority. Their idea was to mobilize white Evangelicals in the South and border states-many of whom had once supported former President Jimmy Carter-against Washington's perceived intrusiveness. The Moral Majority gained legitimacy, along with White House access, during the Reagan years, but Falwell neglected to build real foundations at the grass roots. So other groups were formed to fill the void, including Pat Robertson's Freedom Councils. After Robertson ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination for President in 1988, he converted his huge mailing lists into the Christian Coalition and turned its operations over to Reed, then 27. Reed sought to build the organization from the bottom up, making it largely community-based, with activists much more involved in local issues. The strategy has paid off. A survey by Campaigns & Elections magazine reported last year that the Christian right exercised considerable control of Republican parties in 13 states and completely dominated 18 others.

"The future of America is not [shaped] by who sits in the Oval Office but by who sits in the principal's office," Reed told a group of activists in New Hampshire last week. If the Coalition grows large enough, he advised, "then everyone running for President will be pro-family; they'll have to come to us." And so they have. The latest closed-door meeting of Coalition state directors held in Washington in January drew both Dole and Gramm. Furthermore, Coalition lobbyists sat among the select group of outsiders who met regularly in House Speaker Newt Gingrich's suite to coordinate the campaign to pass the Contract with America.

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