FORBES GETS HIS CALLING

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Those close to Steve Forbes know only this about his spiritual life: he's an Episcopalian and attends St. John on the Mountain in Bernardsville, N.J. Perhaps you'd be circumspect about your faith too if your father had made you wear a kilt to Sunday services as a kid. "He hadn't given an awful lot of thought to these kinds of issues until he started running for President last year," says Forbes supporter Gordon Humphrey. Nor had Forbes spent much time communing with the more demonstrative branches of Protestantism. "As an Episcopalian, he never rubbed shoulders too much with Baptists and those who fall into the category of religious conservatives."

But as Forbes tries a second time for the Republican Party's presidential nomination, he is rubbing a lot of those shoulders. After he settled into a black Chevrolet Suburban last June for a drive with the Rev. Louis Sheldon, the ultraconservative founder of the Traditional Values Coalition, Forbes endured an hour-long grilling. The preacher asked for Forbes' view about abortion (against), school choice (for), and the "homosexual-rights agenda" (against, but no harassment, please). "I was a doubter," says Sheldon. "The stereotype from the 1996 campaign was that Steve Forbes was clearly pro-choice and clearly libertarian." Sheldon emerged a believer. "By the time we got there," he recalls, "we were chatting away like two old cousins."

Since withdrawing from the presidential race 19 months ago, Forbes has been attempting to sell himself as a social conservative to religious leaders like Sheldon. That's no mean feat for a patrician publisher, but there are signs that the crusade is working. So adroitly hasForbes courted the religious right since last year's election that G.O.P. elders who once treated him as an amusing sideshow now talk of him as a comer to watch in the early stages of the 2000 campaign. "No one is laughing now," says Republican Congressman Bill Paxon.

Forbes' wooing of religious conservatives is, above all, a reaction to the failure of his last campaign. After an early spurt in last year's Republican primaries, Forbes was forced out of the race in part because he was indifferent to the party's powerful Christian Coalition wing. At one point, remembered by campaign chairman Malcolm Wallop as "that big catastrophe in Iowa," Forbes took off after the organization for falsely painting him as pro-abortion rights. "The Christian Coalition does not speak for most Christians," he said.

To avoid such costly confrontations, Forbes is recasting himself more to the Christian Coalition's liking while insisting he is not undergoing a makeover. "This is where Steve has always been," says Bill Dal Col, former campaign manager and president of the Forbes think tank. Forbes' pastor at St. John on the Mountain says Forbes has a track record of talking thoughtfully about religious subjects in the confines of his own church. In May 1994 "he gave really a remarkable speech on the subject of religion, ethics and spirituality on the one hand and corporate life and free enterprise on the other," says the Rev. Al Niese. "It was wonderfully witty initially and then marvelously deep and thoughtful. He really seemed to be comfortable with his voice here."