THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO RALPH

By JEFFREY H. BIRNBAUM/WASHINGTON

On Sunday, Ralph Reed rests -- at least he tries to. But on the night of April 30, his two-year-old, Christopher, lay awake for hours, badly sunburned from a picnic, leaving Reed little time for sleep in the modern, red brick house in Chesapeake, Virginia, that he and his wife Jo Anne recently purchased. Reed struggles for time with his family. "I get home as often as I can, even if it's only for a day," says the 33-year-old father of three. Still, the executive director of the formidable Christian Coalition has another mission, and at dawn on Monday he was up and off to catch a 7 o'clock flight to Washington, the beginning of a hectic but typical week of lobbying, socializing and expanding his movement. Tuesday morning he was in New Hampshire, where Governor Steven Merrill joked about Reed's imminent appearance before the state senate: "They want to know you don't have two heads, that you don't have horns." Reed, who looks every bit the eagle scout he once was, responded with a guffaw that was too loud by half for his 64-kg frame. The New Hampshire senate, which usually deigns to listen only to would-be Presidents, paid close attention to his message. The ranks of conservative Christians, Reed said, are now "too large, too diverse, too significant to be ignored by either major political party." Not long ago, America's Christian right was dismissed as a group of pasty-faced zealots, led by divisive televangelists like Jerry Falwell, who helped yank the Republican Party so far to the right that moderates were frightened away. But Reed has emerged as the movement's fresh face, the choirboy to the rescue, a born-again Christian with a fine sense of the secular mechanics of American politics. His message, emphasizing such broadly appealing themes as support for tax cuts, has helped make the Christian Coalition one of the most powerful grass-roots organizations in American politics. Its 1.6 million active supporters and $25 million annual budget, up from 500,000 activists and a $14.8 million budget just two years ago, hold a virtual veto on the Republican nominee for President, and will exert an extraordinary influence over who will occupy the Oval Office beginning in 1997. In fact, Reed's success represents the most thorough penetration of the secular world of American politics by an essentially religious organization in this century. To some, this ascendancy evokes more ancient spirits -- say, that of 17th century New England theocracies, which were as invasive as they were close-minded. To the movement's adherents, however, it signifies a bracing, expansive and historic spiritual Renaissance.

Even as he courts centrist voters, however, Reed has been determinedly pressing Republican politicians to move toward the Coalition's right-wing policies. Last week the Coalition lobbied hard against the nomination of Dr. Henry Foster as Surgeon General. Next week the Christian Coalition and many of its Republican allies will unveil their sequel to the Contract with America: the Contract with the American Family. Meanwhile, presidential candidates are dropping in on Reed for counsel. Bob Dole's attack on the morals of Hollywood was the result of consultations with Reed. Lamar Alexander, who last summer held that Washington should neither subsidize nor prohibit abortion, began shifting his view to the right after calling on Reed, who then rewarded the candidate by describing him as "pro-life." Says William Lacy, chief strategist for Dole's presidential bid: "Without having significant support of the Christian right a Republican cannot win the nomination or the general election." Reed is so hot a commodity that the presidential campaign of Senator Phil Gramm of Texas offered to hire him as its political director, the No. 2 staff job. Reed declined. It would have been a demotion.

As executive director of the Christian Coalition, Reed is master of a much more powerful and effective machine than is almost any presidential candidate. By mobilizing eager volunteers down to the precinct (and local church) level and handing out 33 million voter guides -- often in church pews -- prior to last November's election, the Coalition is credited with providing the winning margin for perhaps half the Republicans' 52-seat gain in the House of Representatives and a sizable portion of their nine-seat pickup in the Senate. As a result, Ralph Reed is the man to see among Republican lawmakers and candidates for President. He stands astride the most potent faction in the ascendant Republican Party. And with that power comes scrutiny and criticism-from both the left and the right.

Behind Reed's cool blue eyes is steel. He is no innocent, talking tough politics like the late Lee Atwater, a Republican operative of decidedly secular mien. Last week Time got a close look at Reed and his organization by traveling with him as he moved from Washington to New Hampshire and back. He also provided a rare insider's glimpse at the real source of his clout-the satellite-Internet-and-fax machine juggernaut employed by his soldiers in the field.

Reed got this far by refocusing the Coalition on more than its basic agenda of support for school prayer and opposition to abortion. It now works hand in hand with the congressional Republican leaders and defines its purpose loosely as "pro-family," which encompasses such mainstream issues as deregulation and welfare reform. Acting then as a team player for the Republican Party, the Coalition poured more than $1 million into the effort to pass the Contract with America, including $250,000 for advertising, direct mail and phone-bank work on behalf of the balanced-budget amendment -- not generally considered a scriptural imperative.

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.

Reed gets that kind of respect because he can deliver. With a fat war chest and so many activists on call at all times, the Coalition can stir a flurry of telephone calls and letters to lawmakers on almost any subject within a matter of hours. To train its operatives, the Coalition runs leadership schools, instructing supporters to form rapid-response networks, connected by phone, fax and modem, in hundreds of counties, located in every state in the Union. They update their information on the third Tuesday of every month by attending satellite downlinks of "Christian Coalition Live," an hour of specific instruction on political organizing at which Reed himself plays host. The broadcasts feature target lists of lawmakers to contact regarding specific legislation. More than 200 conservative evangelical churches serve as the meeting places for these high-tech gatherings; the Coalition hopes to have 1,000 downlink sites by year's end.

Such meetings are not confined to the Bible Belt. Last month, for instance, 20 activists braved the rain to attend a showing at the Bethel Full Gospel Church in Rochester, New York, and that was just one of 12 downlink sites in what is supposed to be a liberal state. The meeting began when the county chairman, Tom Jessop, bowed his head and said, "Let's come together in prayer." But he moved quickly to such topics as how to become a Republican committeeman and how to "blitz E-mail." Indeed, the group was nothing like the Coalition members uncharitably described by the Washington Post in February 1993 as "poor, uneducated and easy to command." Jessop, 54, is a senior project engineer at Eastman Kodak. His deputy Rahm Goswami, 44, is a research chemist with a Ph.D. A similar meeting a month earlier in Charleston, South Carolina, was attended by several lawyers and physicians -- all in business suits. Another misconception is that the Coalition is exclusively white. Two blacks came to the meeting in Rochester. "I don't look at it as a color thing," explained Angie Whitlock, one of the African Americans there. "I don't know why more of us don't join up." The chief reason is the blind eye the Christian right turned to segregation in the 1960s.

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.

However, in 1983, shortly before he became the director of a national Republican student committee, Reed not only gave up alcohol and cigarettes but also found God. At about that time, he had seen a politician he admired -- a "pro-family, traditional values" type -- drinking and fooling around with someone he was not married to. The sight disgusted Reed and helped lead him toward being "born again." He apologized to one of his political victims, picked up a phone book, found an evangelical church and started attending. "Since 1983, I haven't been involved with anybody in politics for whom I bear a grudge in my heart,'' Reed told Time. "Which doesn't mean I don't want to win. It means a religious person in politics understands that he's working for goals more universal than taking the next election."

As Reed made his rounds among America's most important politicians last week, he looked for all the world like a junior executive, neatly attired in a crisp, dark suit and starched button-down shirt, dashing, luggage in hand, from taxicab to commercial aircraft. At times, he thumbed through his history book of the moment, Doris Kearns Goodwin's new biography of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. But there was nothing mundane-or junior level-about his encounters. In addition to New Hampshire's Governor, he met with Senator Dan Coats to discuss the Foster nomination and a new bill on school prayer and choice. He then socialized with a collection of the Republican Party's movers and shakers in New Hampshire. Through it all he kept in constant touch with his headquarters in Virginia and his Washington office by way of a cellular phone.

At the state capitol in Concord, New Hampshire, the local press was all over him after his senate appearance. But he was not universally applauded. State senator Burt Cohen, a Democrat, left the chamber in a huff even before Reed spoke. "He [Reed] represents a dangerous trend in this country. We should keep religion and politics separate," Cohen said later. Another state senator, Jeanne Shaheen, a Democratic stalwart, heard Reed out. But she also was offended. She said, "Anytime you paint yourself as having the right answers because of a direct connection to God, that's very dangerous."

Theirs was a minority view in the heavily conservative and Republican senate. Reed was welcomed at a lunch at the estate of a conservative and politically active couple, Ortwin and Pat Krueger. Neither is a member of the Christian Coalition yet, but they love politics and professed to like the Coalition's approach. So with an eye toward helping the Coalition raise money, they happily played host to 10 current and potential contributors at their huge, old house, overlooking a pool, a tennis court and 56 rural hectares. George Fellendorf, a semiretired teacher of the deaf who is the state chapter's unpaid chairman, told Reed that after 18 months of organizing, it was time for the state association to get a full-time, paid executive director. "We're at a turning point," he said. Looking around at his affluent welcome, Reed could not help agreeing. That night he attended another, larger gathering of activists-this one involving 250 people-and expanded on his optimism. The Coalition had just registered its 1,600th county chapter, he said. "We're the McDonald's of American politics."

Maintaining that momentum will take patience, and, Reed admitted, "some degree of retraining of me." Though he says he dislikes the word control, dominance of the Republican Party remains the movement's ultimate objective. But by grabbing for too much of it too soon, he could squander the incredible gains he has made.

He must also fend off insinuations from liberal adversaries that his movement's antigovernment stands contributed to the poisonous rhetoric spewed by violent extremists like those responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing. "We must forsake violence of the fist, the tongue and the heart," he said last week, quoting Martin Luther King Jr. "The Christian Coalition provides an avenue to bring alienated citizens into mainstream political action. Were we not here, the ranks of the disaffected would be much larger." He adds correctly that the Coalition, despite its conservative agenda, does not coordinate with the National Rifle Association, nor does it lobby on gun issues. Nevertheless, at the grass-roots level, there is a large overlap among Coalition supporters and anti-gun-control activists.

Reed tries to keep his eye on the long term. "I'm asking myself where do I want this movement located in the political system in the year 2025," he told Time. "If I fall for the temptation of acting as a power broker within a given political party, then 25 or 30 years from now I will be where the labor unions are today."

But to this point, Reed has steered the Coalition solely into the arms of the Republicans. It is supposed to be nonpartisan, but it clearly plays favorites. Former Coalition staff members hold key positions in the campaigns of Dole,

Alexander, Gramm and Pat Buchanan. None work for Bill Clinton. Democrats are concerned the Coalition may be eating into their dwindling base. Voters are looking for more morality in their politics, and the Coalition is providing it. "Thanks in great part to people like Ralph Reed, they have become a mainstream constituency," said Democratic consultant Mark McKinnon, who is based in Austin, Texas. "I have been advising my clients that we get ourselves in a lot of trouble by attacking the religious right. Instead of inciting them, we ought to try to co-opt them. We need to show we have a backbone of morality in this party."

Still, acclaim for Reed and his Coalition is far from universal, even within the Republican Party. Senator Arlen Specter launched his campaign for President with a broadside against Reed and his alleged "intolerance." Congresswoman Marge Roukema, a moderate Republican from New Jersey, said flatly, "Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition will create a lot of trouble for the Republican Party." And, in fact, if Reed succeeds too well at moving the party in his direction, he stands to alienate the middle-of-the-roaders, whose votes, while notably absent in Republican primaries, tend to decide general elections.

Meanwhile, powerful figures on the religious right feel the Republican Party isn't right enough for them, posing a danger for Reed if he continues to accommodate himself to the party's moderate elements. In March, James Dobson, head of the powerful Focus on Family organization, fired off open letters to party chairman Haley Barbour, complaining bitterly about the lack of immediate payoff from the November election. Fearful of compromising with "anti-family" elements, Dobson argued that it was time to fold the all-inviting "big tent" of the Republican Party. In contrast, Reed argues for a more inclusive Coalition and struggles to appear more secular (in New Hampshire last week, for example, he declined an invitation to give the invocation before the senate because he did not want TV cameras to record him in prayer). There are two faces to the religious right, says Michael Hudson, executive director of the liberal People for the American Way, "the moderate face that meets Bob Dole and the grass-roots state chapters that are still bashing gays. Ralph Reed is trying to create a big tent in the religious right, but can he sell political expediency to his grass-roots movement?"

Other conservatives play down the importance of Reed. Says Gary Bauer, a former Dobson associate and now head of the Family Research Council, a conservative think tank: "I don't think the movement depends on Bauer or Dobson or Reed or any of the names the press focuses on. I see this as a permanent force in American government and politics, and I think it will have a lot to say about public policy for the foreseeable future."

At the moment, however, Reed is the most attractive name attached to the movement-and he shows no sign of resting. "You have to organize, organize, organize, and build and build, and train and train, so that there is a permanent, vibrant structure of which people can be part." He speaks about forming a cadre of at least 10 workers in each of the roughly 175,000 political precincts in the U.S., raising his budget to between $50 million and $100 million and gaining access to 100,000 churches, compared with his current reach of 60,000 churches. "If we do all that," he told an audience last week, "we will be larger and more effective and will reach more people than the Republican and Democratic parties combined."

"The Christians are close to winning the whole war; they might do it by '96," says Frank Luntz, the pollster behind the Contract with America. "By playing hardball they may win everything, but hardball also risks losing everything." Reed frankly admits, "We're on the very threshold of having to make that kind of decision. It's fraught with both opportunity and hazard. If we make this decision the wrong way, 20 years from now we're going to look back and regret it."

Whatever Reed decides-to press for control of the Republican Party now or to rise above partisanship for a while-the religious right is moving toward center stage in American secular life. Henceforth, Reed told Time, "issues are going to have a moral quotient." The Christian Coalition, says Arthur Kropp of People for the American Way, "won't be content to be background music." They will want the oomph of the big band. And a choirboy will lead them. --With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett, traveling with Ralph Reed, and Richard N. Ostling/New York

With reporting by LAURENCE I. BARRETT, TRAVELING WITH RALPH REED, AND RICHARD N. OSTLING/NEW YORK PHOTOGRAPHS FOR TIME BY MARK PETERSON -- SABA