THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO RALPH

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Despite its increasing sophistication and secularization, the movement remains insular, distrustful and eager to impose what it sees as a Bible-backed morality on the American public at large. Reed was brought up short by his own people when he agreed not to press for a school-prayer amendment earlier this year in the House and instead backed the Contract with such fervor. To keep peace, he gave what is now called his "litmus-test" speech, in which he warned that a presidential candidate who did not oppose abortions would not be acceptable to conservative Christians. Meanwhile, a fund-raising letter in March stated in unusually harsh terms that the Coalition was committed to saying "NO to condom distribution in the schools, NO to taxpayer funding of abortion, NO to sex-education classes in the public schools that promote promiscuity [and] NO to homosexual adoptions and government-sanctioned gay marriages." Some of its officials insist that solely the Coalition knows the way, the truth and the right. During a training session in Oklahoma City this spring, Fred Sellers, the state chairman, said, "Only we can restore this nation. Only the people here today, and people like us, can turn this around ... only Christian believers doing the work ... in the thick of battle."

Still, Reed is actively trying to cast a "wider net." After the litmus-test speech, he tacked back a bit and said he had issued no ultimatums. And he wants to attract both blacks and Jews to the fold, which is almost entirely made up of white evangelical Protestants and traditionalist Catholics. He is even toying with the idea of starting a Jewish auxiliary, an idea that has a long way to go.

Robertson is the founder and guiding spirit of the Coalition. But he has ceded operational control to his young protaga. "I am, if I can use that exalted term, moving more into the elder statesman's role," the 65-year-old Robertson told Time. That transition began when Reed and Robertson sat next to each other at a dinner honoring George Bush's Inauguration. At first, Reed wondered whether the broadcasting tycoon seriously wanted a brass-knuckled politician like himself to run the operation. Reed, then a doctoral candidate in American history at the University of Georgia, was a veteran of Republican headquarters in Washington and the rough-and-tumble campaigns of Jack Kemp and Jesse Helms. But Robertson, the son of a Virginia politician, readily allowed Reed to suffuse the Coalition with a new professionalism. Reed continues to work unstintingly to plane the rougher edges off Robertson's image. In the meantime, his own book, Politically Incorrect, is considered the manifesto of the movement. With Robertson's approval, he is working on a second.

Ralph Reed Jr. was born in 1961, the son of a Navy physician from Portsmouth, Virginia. Nicknamed ''Buddy,'' Reed displayed his nature from the beginning. Asked what her son always aspired to be, his mother Marcy told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "In charge." Raised a Methodist, Reed was an indifferent Christian-though an avid Republican-through his early college years. He wrote a rabid column while at the University of Georgia, taking hawkish positions on gun control and the nuclear freeze. (He resigned from the paper after a reader charged him with plagiarism.) As a student, he ran school campaigns and gained a reputation as a player of dirty tricks.

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