THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, November 10, 1994 TAG: 9411100070
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E01 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ESTHER DISKIN, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 196 lines
THREE YEARS AGO, Ralph E. Reed Jr. exulted in being an invisible man.
As leader of the Christian Coalition - a grass-roots political organization built from the rubble of evangelist Pat Robertson's failed presidential bid - Reed led an assault on the Democratic Party in Virginia Beach.
He did it with a massive phone drive to get conservative voters to the polls, 15,000 voter guides distributed in churches, and not a whisper of publicity. The Republicans won big. The Democrats didn't know what hit them.
``I do guerrilla warfare,'' Reed told a reporter in the post-election euphoria.``I paint my face and travel at night.''
Fast forward to election 1994: The tools are the same, the darkness is gone.
Headlines trumpeted the Christian Coalition's distribution of 33 million voter guides and phone calls to 2 million homes across the nation. On Tuesday, Reed told viewers of Robertson's ``700 Club'' that Christian Coalition's exit surveys showed that 33 percent of the voters were ``self-identified, born-again evangelical voters.''
Those voters, who typically have conservative views, helped give Republicans control of Congress, taking a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. ``Tidal wave! Landslide! Tsunami! Carnage!'' Robertson gleefully told his viewers.
Reed is riding high, out of the shadows and into the national spotlight. He believes he can expand the coalition's database from 1.5 million donors to 10 million in the next five years.
In bookstores across the country, Reed's boyish face grins from the cover of his new book, ``Politically Incorrect - The Emerging Faith Factor in American Politics.''
Reed unabashedly compares his organization to the feminist and civil rights movements. Authors and leaders like feminist Betty Friedan, Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers and rights champion Martin Luther King Jr. are heady company. But Reed didn't get where he is by thinking small.
``I felt it was important for us to issue a manifesto of our movement, to describe what kind of America we believe in,'' Reed said in an interview before Tuesday's election. ``I wanted to write a statement that would be for us what the `Feminine Mystique' was for the feminist movement in the '60s, what `Soul on Ice' or maybe what `Letter From a Birmingham Jail' was for the civil rights community.''
For the past year, Reed's been consumed with showing Americans that the Christian conservative movement, which he has taken to calling the ``pro-family movement,'' is mainstream and appealing to people of many faiths.
Reed wants to bring religion into the public square. And he's out to show America that it has nothing to fear if he succeeds.
In Reed's vision for America, a landlord could decline to rent to an unmarried couple because of a religious conviction that sex prior to marriage is wrong. Students could recite a Bible prayer over the school intercom in a daily message. States could ban abortions except in cases of rape, incest or danger to the mother's life.
Politicians could proudly state how their religious convictions shape their views on public policy, instead of feeling that their faith can be practiced only on Sunday.
That vision informs the title of his book. ``The most politically incorrect thing to be in American today . . . is a conservative with faith in God and religious beliefs,'' he says. ``I don't think it is going to be that way much longer. We're changing that.''
FOR THE 33-YEAR-OLD REED, a conservative political ethic hardened before faith came along. Reed says his rebirth in Christianity 11 years ago has shaped his style more than his ideas.
When it happened, he was a young turk on Capitol Hill, chasing a career in the fast lane: ``My goal was to be the next Lee Atwater - a bare-knuckled, brass-tacks practitioner of hardball politics,'' he writes in the book. He had the techniques - he tore down the opposition's campaign signs and sent spies to work for Democratic campaigns.
One Saturday night, while socializing with friends at a local restaurant and bar, his conscience tugged: He needed to go to church. He walked to a phone booth, flipped through the Yellow Pages and found an evangelical church.
He was in the pew the next morning. When the pastor led an altar call, Reed ``raised my hand in affirmation and began a new life of faith.''
Reed once told about his born-again experience with more passion, telling reporters that he ``saw death'' in the lives of his drinking buddies and that in church the next morning, he felt his creator calling him. In the book, those insights are absent.
Reed says he stopped sharing them because reporters used his faith experience as a ``colorful anecdote,'' and it became distorted and trivialized through repetition.
``Some aspects of it are between me and my God,'' said Reed, who attends Kempsville Presbyterian Church in Virginia Beach with his wife and three kids, ages 5, 3 and 2, when he's not on the road for political campaigns.
Reed says Christianity has altered his style of delivering his message. He isn't tearing down signs anymore. And he heartily regrets using metaphors of warfare to fire up his followers - sound bites that he complains were repeated and distorted by his political enemies - because he says that language doesn't fit with God's message of love.
He says his book should show conservative Christians how to win by persuading instead of preaching.
``I wrote it to provide a tutorial for our own people about how to speak, how to act and how to conduct ourselves the very volatile world of politics,'' he said. ``There is a right way and a wrong way.''
What's the wrong way? In May, a little-known conservative Christian group solicited donations to defray the legal expenses of Paula Corbin Jones, who is suing President Clinton for alleged sexual harassment during his tenure as Arkansas governor. The group's press conference, Reed says, left the impression that it was exploiting the incident to raise funds.
HE ALSO NIXES THE IDEA OF STARTING A THIRD PARTY - a question he is often asked by grass-roots volunteers. ``Historically, third-party movements either flounder or succeed by failing: their agendas are absorbed by one of the other parties (as happened to the Populists and Progressives), causing them to wither and die,'' he writes in his book.
Work in the system, he advises. Christian conservatives can rock the foundation of the existing parties by volunteering, contributing money and running for elected office, he says.
In his book, Reed lays out a broad agenda for legislative action that puts restoration of the two-parent household at the heart of reversing the nation's social decline.
With Republicans on Tuesday seizing a majority in the House and Senate - and Christian conservatives getting credit for helping them to victory - Reed is plugged in and may be positioned to get pieces of his vision accomplished.
He outlines some ideas to help the family:
A standard federal income tax deduction of $10,000 per child. (The current personal exemption is $2,350.)
Vouchers for up to $2,500 to allow any child to attend a private school.
A school curriculum emphasizing Judeo-Christian values. Sex education would focus on abstinence, not ``safe sex.''
But Reed is concerned with ideas of the spirit more than economics.
He devotes an entire chapter of his book to listing specific cases in which prayer and religious symbols have been banned in schools, libraries and courthouses. He wants religion to be brought back into the public dialogue, particularly in schools.
Reed says voluntary, student-sponsored prayer in schools should be protected as free speech under the First Amendment. For example, he says, a minister or rabbi should be allowed to recite a prayer to God at a school graduations, even if some in the audience don't subscribe to that expression of faith.
``You don't take away someone's constitutional right because their exercise of that makes someone uncomfortable,'' he said. ``It isn't a question of being inclusive or exclusive. It's a question of constitutional right.''
This year, on the Christian Coalition's fifth anniversary, the board gave Reed a statue of an eagle engraved with the words ``Man of Destiny.''
REED SAYS HE CAN'T IMAGINE where he'll fly next, because he's so satisfied with what he's doing. Elected office? Political consulting? Dusting off his doctorate in history to become a professor? All tantalizing possibilities.
If Ralph E. Reed Jr. has a virtue, it is patience. When Reed talks about destiny - for his movement and for himself - he talks about the long haul. Twenty, thirty years, half a century. He's going to be there, on the front lines.
``There's a line, I think from Ralph Waldo Emerson: `Our patience will achieve more than our force.' That's what I think will do it,'' Reed said. ``There is all this reportage about this growing force on the right, how well organized they are and how committed they are, and how they stay longer and work harder and make more phone calls - as if that's the reason we'll impact things. That won't be why.
``The reason is that we'll be patient. It'll take twenty, thirty, fifty years. And if we stay in it that long, we will change the country.'' ILLUSTRATION: Staff color photo by TAMARA VONINSKI
Ralph E. reed Jr. says of his book, ``I felt it was important for us
to issue a manifesto of our movement, to describe what kind of
america we believe in.''
[Color photo of bookjacket]
``Politically Incorrect''
By Ralph Reed
IN HIS OWN WORDS
In ``Politically Incorrect'', Ralph Reed explains his religious
conservative vision of America.
ON SCHOOL PRAYER: Voluntary, student-initiated prayer in public
schools would be treated as protected speech under the First
Amendment.
ON ABORTION: Abortion would no longer...be paid for or promoted
with tax dollars. The mother's womb would no longer be the most
dangerous place in America for a child.
ON PRO-FAMILY CANDIDATES: Despite the efforts of some to
marginalize religion in the public square, faith is still an asset
to most candidates and is considered an admirable character trait to
the average voter.
ON THE FAMILY: People of faith frankly and forthrightly seek to
restore the centrality of the two-parent, intact family as the
foundation of our democratic society.
ON POPULAR CULTURE: Chastity movements are filling the void where
government fails, sweeping the nation like wildfire as teenagers
resist the sexually explicit refrain of rap music, television, and
movies.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY CHRISTIAN COALITION
by CNB