By Amy Virshup

Holy war crusaders

The Christian Coalition's plan includes anointing the next president, but doesn't stop there: It wants to turn back the hands of time. The America it imagines lies on the far side of 1959 -- before the sexual and cultural revolutions of the '60s, before Roe v. Wade, before the explosion in single motherhood.

In his address to a Coalition convention last September, Robertson praised the bygone America in which "every state in the union prohibited abortion... 26 states made sodomy a crime... and [most states] made divorce difficult to obtain." He rhetorically asked, "Is it somehow sinister to say that America was better off in a whole lot of ways during the 1950s than it is in 1995?"

What would the Coalition's America look like?

Their Contract With the American Family -- rolled out last May as a supplement to the Republicans' Contract With America -- appears noncontroversial in its 10 bold points. But in the fine print it aims, among other things, to wipe out the federal Department of Education, return prayer to the schools via the first-ever amendment to the Bill of Rights and completely dismantle the public welfare system. It also would ban abortion. Republican presidential hopefuls always emphasize their opposition to abortion when they come calling at Coalition gatherings -- and they do come regularly.

"The most important issue is the abortion issue," said Leslee Unruh of Sioux Falls, SD, said at the Coalition's annual convention. "Because if human life isn't sacred, what good is anything else?"

Who are they?

The Coalition is overwhelmingly white, middle-class and skewed to the South. Fully 25 percent of the adult population is evangelical, says John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron, and "year in and year out 60 percent of them vote, mostly for conservative candidates. As a voting bloc they're about 15 percent of the adult population. Which makes them bigger than African-Americans, bigger than Jews."

They win because the majority doesn't vote.

The Coalition itself claims only about 1.7 million members -- or about 31 million fewer people than watch NBC's top-rated ER on an average Thursday night. So what accounts for their stunning electoral success and political power? Simply this -- they vote, while many other people don't. The Christian Coalition made a massive effort to mobilize voters two years ago and claimed victory when the Republicans won both houses in Congress for the first time in 40 years. By their account, the Christian Right accounted for a third of the voters in that election. Today, about a third of all representatives and senators vote their way.

Republican candidates seldom miss an opportunity to court Coalition members. Nearly all the GOP presidential hopefuls trooped to the fall convention and turned out again on Feb. 29 when the Coalition threw a "God and Country" rally in South Carolina. Even Steve Forbes, who'd previously called Robertson "a toothy flake," came into the fold, holding a private meeting with Coalition executive director Ralph Reed. Reed calculates campaigns this way: Only half the nation's registered voters turn out for a presidential election, only one third will vote in a congressional race and only about one fifth bother to go to the polls for a local contest. That means that just 151 like-minded voters in a voting precinct -- about one in eight of those registered -- can tip a school board or city council race.

Recognizing this key to the American political system, the Coalition has built from the grass roots and focused on local issues and races. State Coalition chapters raise their own money and staff. The national organization provides additional funds, trains activists and aspirants to public office, approves literature, conducts monthly satellite-TV sessions to keep chapters on message and coordinates federal lobbying efforts. It even has a web page.

Running locally means the Coalition gets what John Green calls "a double-dip"-- it can affect public policy at the most basic level, plus train supporters to move up the political food chain. "We as an organization would rather have 2,000 'profamily' school board members and 1,000 'profamily' state legislators than a single President sitting in the Oval Office," Reed said at the annual convention.

And now it is attempting to claim the mainstream: "We have allowed ourselves to be ghettoized by a narrow band of issues like abortion, homosexual rights and prayer in school," Reed told his followers after George Bush's 1992 defeat. "We cannot win by communicating only with pro-life voters." Accordingly, Reed has toned down Robertson's often inflammatory rhetoric. Like the Contract With the American Family, he makes the Coalition sound a lot more reasonable than many believe it to be.

"When you strip away the moderation of some of the Christian Coalition rhetoric, you find the same face of extremism that Pat Robertson has always presented to the American people," says Rev. Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Coalition spokesman Mike Russell did not return repeated calls for comment on that issue and others reported here.