Christian Group Adds Budget Items to Agenda

WASHINGTON — When word spread recently that GOP leaders might water down a big tax break for families with children, not a peep of protest was heard from the business lobbyists who scrutinize most tax changes with a microscope.

Instead, it was the Christian Coalition that turned up the heat, firing off letters of protest to Senate Finance Committee Republicans.

A day later, the plan vanished. “They weren’t just a vocal advocate for that tax credit--they were the principal sponsors,” said Stephen Moore, an economist who attended key early GOP strategy sessions on the federal budget overhaul. “They had a huge role in shaping the Republican tax bill.”

Born of an evangelical fervor on issues such as school prayer and abortion, the Christian Coalition has set off on a broader, more ambitious path: It now seeks to influence the national agenda on key budget items, including basic provisions of tax policy that affect millions of households.

As Congress prepares to send the White House its sweeping revision of the federal budget, important tax breaks in the document will bear the Christian Coalition’s imprint.

A set of “family-friendly” tax measures, which would use the tax code to advance social and political objectives, includes a $500-per-child tax credit, a new individual retirement account for homemakers, tax breaks for parents who adopt and a softening of the “marriage penalty” faced by two-earner couples.

“We realize that strengthening the family is about a lot more than abortion issues or welfare issues,” said Brian C. Lopina, director of the coalition’s governmental affairs office in Washington. “It touches many facets, not the least of which is the family budget.”

As the 1.7-million-member group pursues its agenda, it is also aware that it must find friends in strange places, such as the beer industry, and turn to a sprawling, grass-roots network of activists when necessary.

A bank of 30 telephones at the group’s Chesapeake, Va., headquarters can cause a Congress member’s phone to ring off the hook. In addition, the group spent $1 million pushing for the Republican “contract with America” earlier this year.

Not surprisingly, its rising prominence alarms critics on the left.

“They’re a classic, right-wing outfit, and they’re very slick and very skilled,” said Tom Andrews, president of People for the American Way, a group founded in 1980 to combat the rising influence of religious conservatives.

“The message to Congress is: ‘You may not agree with me. You may not like this. But if you want to have a job next November, you had better vote for it.’ ”

This represents a considerable change from a few years ago, when the political-evangelical movement seemed to be sinking. Many moderates had been repelled by the performance of social conservatives at the 1992 Republican National Convention. Soon after, a Democrat occupied the White House for the first time in more than a decade.

It was in 1993 that Ralph Reed, the coalition’s executive director, called on the religious conservative movement to venture beyond its traditional concerns about school prayer, abortion, homosexuality and other social matters. Otherwise, he warned, their movement would not prevail.

“The successful candidate or movement must promote policies that personally benefit voters--such as tax cuts, education vouchers, higher wages or retirement benefits,” Reed wrote in an article titled “Casting a Wider Net” that appeared in a journal published by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

“Without specific policies designed to benefit families and children, appeals to family values or America’s Judeo-Christian heritage will fall on deaf ears.”

The coalition, which had been launched by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson in 1989, sought a place in the political mainstream. It opened a Washington office and made it a point not to embarrass conservative leaders.

It also took a measure of pragmatism to Capitol Hill. For example, this year it teamed up with the National Beer Wholesalers on a measure that would restrict lobbying by nonprofit groups--often liberal--that get federal grants. (The wholesalers said they felt anti-alcohol groups were preying on them.)

“We divided up the list” of House Appropriations Committee members, recalled David K. Rehr, the beer wholesalers’ vice president for government affairs. “In what districts did beer wholesalers have good contacts with the members? In what districts did the Christian Coalition have good contacts with the members?

“They’d have Christian Coalition members calling the districts, and we’d have beer wholesalers and their employees calling as well.”

The restriction passed in committee. Similarly, the Christian Coalition linked hands with the American Farm Bureau Federation to combat funding for the Legal Services Corp., which the coalition sees as a bastion of leftist ideology and which has irked the federation through its role in lawsuits on behalf of farm workers. The coalition also has worked with small-business lobbyists and others on conservative Republican proposals.

“We’re the new kid on the block,” Lopina, a veteran lobbyist, said in the coalition’s offices above a restaurant in a red-brick townhouse on Capitol Hill. “But the more people work with us, the more they like working with us.”

These days, much of the action centers on enormously sensitive budget issues--the size and nature of household tax cuts at a time when health care and other programs face unprecedented restrictions.

It is an area the coalition approaches from a position of strength because the family tax breaks were endorsed by the House Republican leadership more than a year ago. Moore, an economist with the libertarian Cato Institute, recalled Republican meetings in 1994 at which the Christian Coalition and its allies persuaded lawmakers to include family tax relief in the “contract with America.”

Democrats controlled Congress at the time, Moore said, and “none of us imagined that the ‘contract with America’ would really be put into play. But the religious right certainly did. They were very smart and shrewd to see the importance of the document.”

As coalition leaders see it, the $500-per-child tax credit is about much more than economics. It is about shifting money from federal bureaucrats into the hands of families, who they believe would make wiser use of it. Beyond that, tax cuts that help starve federal programs deemed hostile--such as education aid and funding for the arts--also serve a political goal.

“A lot of things are solved with a balanced budget,” Lopina said.

The tax breaks are also aimed at making it easier for parents to afford to stay home with their children rather than work outside the home. An example is the proposed new IRA for homemakers.

A separate provision--to provide a tax credit of up to $5,000 per child to help defray adoption costs--addresses another goal of the Christian right: adoption over abortion.

Not all of the coalition’s efforts have borne fruit, however.

The measure to restrict the lobbying of nonprofit groups that get federal money is stalled, to cite one example. The $500-per-child tax credit passed the Senate with more restrictions than the coalition had wanted.

Many liberals view the Christian Coalition as the vanguard of an intolerant attack on much good that the federal government does in areas ranging from welfare to health care to the arts.

“They’ll use the rhetoric of Christianity and ethics as a means of promoting a very right-wing political agenda,” said People for the American Way’s Andrews, who is a former Democratic congressman from Maine.

But the coalition also has critics on the right. Some religious conservatives are not comfortable with the coalition’s willingness to deal in the horse-trading atmosphere of Congress. They disapprove of its seeming reluctance to rattle the Republican Establishment.

The group’s “contract with the American family,” released this year with the blessing of Republican leaders, also has taken a few lumps.

The document tried to speak to the group’s original social concerns as well as broader new ones such as crime and taxes. But GOP presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan chided the group for omitting a proposed constitutional amendment banning abortion.

“The Christian Coalition wants a place at the table in the Republican Party,” said Rev. Flip Benham, national director of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue. “Many of us don’t want a place at the table--we want to kick the table over.”