DATE: Tuesday, September 30, 1997           TAG: 9709300003

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B9   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: Perry Morgan 

                                            LENGTH:   73 lines

ON THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT: A "FILIGREE OF PIETIES" CANNOT MASK RAW POLITICS THERE'S SOMETHING INDELIBLY CHEAP ABOUT ONE POL EGGING ON ANOTHER TO STRIKE HIS BLOWS FOR HIM

The Christian pols have come into high cotton, mixing tax breaks with beatitudes so smoothly that one wonders about jobs for preachers after the politicians take over moral rearmament.

The sway of anointed but unelected operators grows apace. Ralph Reed, who once told us that he and Pat Robertson were in the education business rather than politics, has begun to count the stars in his new crown as the smartest man you can hire to tell you how to beat the other guy and get good spiritual vibes in the process.

At 36 - intensely secular, glib, shrewd, charismatic, master of his craft's mechanics - some arrogance is to be expected. Reed now dismisses the late Lee Atwater, the GOP legend he succeeds, for seeing the light too late. He no longer wants to be a ``Christian Atwater'' because Atwater ``came to Christ on his deathbed,'' seeking forgiveness for harsh tactics.

For Reed and Robertson, early redemption is in order. And before a Christian Coalition blowout in Atlanta, the big mules of the Republican Party came forward with penitent heads.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich, bearing prizes from the arena, was derided as weak, compromising and separated from soul.

This from plutocrat Steve Forbes, he of the nervous grin; his learning curve on gospel politics has risen sharply. After dismissing the Coalition last year as a group that ``does not speak for most Christians,'' Forbes evoked seven standing Coalition ovations by trashing his party's elected leadership and positing a ban on abortions as a unifying, rather than divisive, issue.

Til now Forbes has been the one-issue messiah of the flat tax, which will encourage the deserving rich and provide a few bob in his own deep pocket, not that he cares about that.

Forbes wants the presidency. He is on fresh scent of new allies and reads the tablet handed him. Understood. But there's something indelibly cheap about one pol (Forbes) egging another (Gingrich) to strike his blows for him. Where's his own outrage against Bill Clinton, and where's Reed's and Robertson's? The president bleeds from many cuts. Why does Coalition virtue flinch from denouncing a man of so many appetites?

Poor old Newt. Having reclaimed Congress for his party, forced a balanced-budget scheme and welfare reform, and got tax breaks tasty to the Coalition and to Forbes, he is cut up with the little knives of ingratitude.

Gingrich gamely lifted his cup to Reed's emergence as a ``national leader'' who, as The New York Times reports, now confesses occasional practice of politics but ``wants to stay on our knees and aim for salvation.'' There's a blessing. Positioned so, he can kiss his ring himself.

Reed and Robertson will not get to their goal of their knees; nor will the oligarchic Byrdland with its squinting moral sense respond to Robertson's pining for machine politics. The usual techniques will be applied - money, organization, message manipulation and tax-free campaign spending so lamentable, they say, in the hands of libs and labor leaders. And yes, of course, some sort of civic faith tinctured by religion.

Reed and Robertson want Americans to be good. As conservative columnist Cal Thomas notes, they want to apply their standards top-down rather than bottom-up. If the church was knocked about in storms of individualism, and, as well, in the favor-dealing pliancy of TV Jehovahs, you must give it a booster shot of law. Hug Christ, Caesar!

Conservative author David Frum sees to the core of gospel politics. As he wrote in his oft-quoted book Dead Right: ``American spiritual life does not stand apart from, as a refuge from and a witness against, the excesses of American culture. It fully participates in that culture, receives its ideas from that culture, and is decisively shaped by that culture. In their faith, Americans are keenly aware of what they want the authorities to do for them and strikingly indifferent to their obligations to the authorities.''

That indifference can be encouraging in a time when Bible-thumpers try to lay a filigree of pieties over the rough, everyday leaves of politics. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot.

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