DATE: Tuesday, August 26, 1997              TAG: 9708260354

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A10  EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON POST

DATELINE: WASHINGTON                        LENGTH:   57 lines

CHRISTIAN COALITION PREPARES ITS AGENDA FOR CONGRESS THE MESSAGE IS SIMPLE: NOW THAT BUDGET IS BALANCED, IT'S TIME TO MOVE TO MORAL ISSUES.

When Republican leaders return to Washington next week, they will be greeted with a friendly but firm nudge from a constituency they cannot afford to avoid.

The message is simple: Now that the budget is balanced, it is time to move on to moral issues.

In his debut as president of the Chesapeake-based Christian Coalition Tuesday, Don Hodel plans to spell out a legislative agenda that revives some recent battles and takes up a new one.

Highest on the list is legislation aimed at prohibiting religious persecution worldwide, a clear indication the coalition continues to broaden beyond its early mission of fighting abortion.

Politically, Hodel's announcement, scheduled for a forum at the National Press Club, is also intended to remind official Washington that the Christian Coalition, with its 1.9 million members, remains influential despite the impending departure of director Ralph Reed.

``We are very clearly sending a signal this is where we would like (Congress) to go,'' Christian Coalition spokesman Arne Owens said Monday.

The five priorities being announced today include pending pieces of legislation and general policy suggestions, such as reducing tax rates across-the-board and giving local officials more control over education.

Two of the five items deal with religious freedom. Specifically, the coalition will push for legislation that would impose sanctions on foreign governments that do not permit free religious expression. The bill may draw resistance within the GOP, which found itself divided recently over most-favored nation status for China.

``Today, millions of people of faith around the world are being killed, tortured, raped, maimed, sold as slaves and more, for no reason other than that they are Christians, Muslims because they are Muslims, and Jews because they are Jews,'' Hodel, a former interior secretary, said in his prepared remarks.

Hodel is also touting a constitutional amendment being sponsored by Rep. Ernest Istook, R-Okla., that permits school prayer and other religious expression on public property. It, too, has caused divisions in the party, in large measure because many conservatives feel an amendment is more difficult to pass than legislation. When President Clinton signed the recent budget and tax agreement into law, the Christian Coalition claimed the $500 per-child tax credit as a major victory. But social conservatives suffered a few setbacks, most notably defeat of a provision allowing parents to receive tax credits for private school costs. Perhaps in an indication of the coalition's strength, GOP leaders promised to return to that issue in the fall.

In many respects the list is further fine tuning of priorities identified in the coalition's ``Contract with the American Family'' released in May 1995.

Absent this time are the influential lawmakers - and some of the organization's losing issues, such as abolition of the Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Arts. KEYWORDS: CHRISTIAN COALITION AGENDA

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