COLUMN ONE : When God and Politics Converge : Faith spurs many to civic activism. A pastor takes on a city. A Christian Coalition official turns to prayer to help him vote. A Catholic woman fights for social justice in South-Central L.A.

Pastor Gabriel Varga takes the pulpit on the Sunday morning before Thanksgiving in a Daytona Beach district called the Bottoms, the prettiest bad neighborhood you’d ever want to see. He is here this day as a visiting preacher to beg, plead and rally the congregation of Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church, so that together they might feed the city’s poor and battle the city’s mighty.

It’s a big job for a small time slot, 10 short minutes in a three-hour service sandwiched between a lesson on spiritual maturity and the Praise Pioneers of Shiloh--three dozen children in shiny blue robes performing a precision pantomime to taped hymns and shouted blessings ( Oh, yes, Lord! Oh, yes! ).

The city, he says, won’t let him feed the hungry. It won’t let him shelter the homeless. It says churches can’t do those things. But we will do them anyway , at a Shiloh food giveaway on Tuesday and a dinner for the needy on Thanksgiving. And, brothers and sisters, we will fight back .

“What we’re doing here Tuesday and Thursday is illegal in the city of Daytona Beach. Can you imagine that?” Varga tells them. “You need to call [Mayor] Bud Asher . . . and tell him we must get this law changed, this ungodly law.”

Rarely have God and government been as tightly entwined as they are today--in local fights like Varga’s and all the way to the race for the White House.

From the Florida straw poll to the far reaches of cyberspace, groups such as the conservative Christian Coalition and the moderate Interfaith Alliance are battling over who will be the authentic political voice for millions of observant Christians and Jews. “Pat Buchanan was right,” says the Rev. James Armstrong, co-chair of the central Florida chapter of Interfaith Alliance. “This really is a battle for the soul of America.”

But in the often-rancorous public debate over the relationship between religion and politics, one private component is often overlooked: motivation. Those who study politics and prayer say that stronger faith leads to greater activism--for causes on the right and left. But where do those who are political and religious find spiritual direction for civic acts?

What makes Varga--a dyed-in-the-wool conservative--take Daytona Beach to court, picket the city commission, leaflet the townsfolk?

What in her spiritual foundation tells Edna Williams to register voters and battle for affirmative action as head of the social justice ministry at St. Brigid Catholic Church in South-Central Los Angeles?

Why does John McReynolds work for political ends such as low-income housing by organizing the churches and synagogues of California’s Central Coast? “I know lots of people who just talk,” he says. “But if you believe something, you have to act on it. It’s not an option. It’s required.”

In America’s political tradition, Jews and Muslims have clearly played important roles. Historically, however, Christians have dominated U.S. activism, in part because of their numbers. And today, they are at the forefront in shaping this nation’s electoral process.

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Some, such as George Gruber of Hobe Sound, Fla., pray for guidance on their political path and take direction from “the things my savior Jesus Christ said when he was here on Earth.”

As a delegate to last month’s Florida straw poll, Gruber found himself in a quandary the night before voting for the Republican presidential candidate of his choice.

“I was going to vote for Buchanan when I walked in here this morning,” said Gruber, 64, a retired banker and head of his local chapter of the Christian Coalition. “But the Lord just laid it on my heart that I should vote for [former ambassador Alan] Keyes. I prayed last night on it. I got the answer today.”

When he turns to prayer for political insight, Gruber joins the nearly 90% of the population who say they pray to God regularly, a figure that has remained virtually unchanged for four decades while voter turnout has tumbled.

In 1988, when pollster George Gallup and sociologist Margaret Poloma conducted a nationwide survey for their book “Varieties of Prayer,” they found that 76% of Americans agree that prayer is “an important part” of their daily lives.

They also found that the majority of Americans consider God’s help to be crucial in dealing with life’s difficult decisions. So it should come as no surprise that many seek guidance through prayer when they head to the polls and pray for the success of the candidates they back.

In fact, Poloma said, people such as Gruber who practice so-called meditative prayer--a mystical experience in which they say they feel God’s presence--are far “more likely to be involved in religiously motivated political activities” than those who pray in other fashions or do not pray at all.

Those who experience God during prayer are more likely to support the mixing of politics and religion, she and Gallup wrote. A more surprising finding, however, was that “prayer experience proves to be the best predictor of political activism.”

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But there’s a reason why Americans’ prayer lives were studied only 16 times between 1872 and the mid-1980s: Such research is a slippery business for those in the world of social science, Poloma says, and the line between delusion and prayer can be difficult to detect. “The scary thing is, I think, a lot of times people can think they hear God but there’s no check on it,” she acknowledges.

Paul Melton doesn’t care if social scientists find it hard to measure prayer. The Costa Mesa father, 39, prays regularly with Catholicmen Fellowship, a growing group of the like-minded faithful who meet in Rancho Santa Margarita to work through life’s challenges, both actual and spiritual.

“We don’t try to fix things,” he says of his band of conservative evangelical Catholics who use their meetings to hash out what it means to be a Christian man at home, work and worship. “We always, always pray about them.”

That kind of prayer is public and spoken--a small group of men in an Orange County living room talking about love and lust and duty, worrying about work, wives and family, and together turning to God for guidance.

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“We’ll set a chair out in the middle of the room and pray around it,” Melton says. The chair is empty. It is there for God. “We believe God inhabits the praises of his people.”

In contrast, when Melton prays alone--and he does it often, at work and at play--it is an exercise in meditation, “the silence of my own heart and my own mind,” he says. “I find a peaceful place where I can converse with God.”

When it comes time to vote, those conversations turn to politics. No, he doesn’t pray about bond issues, about what he calls the no-brainers on the ballot, such as the recent measure to bail out bankrupt Orange County with a sales tax: “We don’t need to give these people any more of our money. They have enough.”

But he points to two tough choices that have sent him straight to his knees: Proposition 187, California’s anti-illegal immigration measure, and the death penalty, which was on the California ballot in the late 1970s. This active, anti-abortion Catholic voted in favor of both--guided, he said, by prayer, by God, by Scripture.

“It’s not that I’m in favor of taking life,” he says testily of his death-penalty stance. “I’m in favor of protecting life. If you take one life to protect numerous others, it is justified. The people of Israel were called to war continually.”

With Proposition 187, Melton recalls, the Catholic Church was officially opposed. So a day or two before the 1994 election, Melton hashed the issue out in prayer--a meditation with God on the possible effects of a “yes” vote on the state’s illegal immigrants.

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That session, like most prayer, was “not as much me talking,” he says. “It’s God communicating with us if we just listen.” What Melton felt that night was a nudge toward “yes”; Proposition 187 would likely be taken to court, he reasoned as he prayed, would therefore not do real harm to real people, but would make legislators think about reform.

“So far, it’s happened the way He told me it would,” Melton says. “[Proposition 187] is tied up in court.”

Edna Williams takes great exception to mysticism such as Melton’s. Her prayer life is a far less interactive proposition, says the retired phone company manager, 60 years old and crisply pragmatic.

This mother who lost a beloved son to painful and lingering illness prays for help and strength to endure. This active participant in the politics of her community prays in thanksgiving after projects well done. That, in fact, is her favorite kind of prayer; “I get a lot,” she says, “from being able to thank God.” And while she prays regularly and prays hard--”every day, all day, if there’s a need”--she would never consider asking God how to cast a ballot.

She does, however, turn to Jesus as a model for the work she and her husband do as heads of the social justice ministry at St. Brigid church, a South-Central parish where Catholic Mass is celebrated in three distinct Los Angeles flavors: English, Spanish and gospel.

It is through St. Brigid that Williams registers voters and battles the so-called California civil rights initiative that would ban affirmative action in government hiring and contracting. It is through St. Brigid that Williams is involved in fighting drug abuse in her neighborhood, along with other members of a brand-new family life ministry that was formed in the parish after the “Million Man March” in Washington.

The strength she gains from her spiritual life, she says, empowers her to battle the liquor stores in her neighborhood, which were destroyed in the 1992 riots but are now in the process of being rebuilt. They are magnets, she insists, for crime and violence. Their presence in South-Central is just one more injustice. And Williams cannot abide injustice.

“When Jesus walked the Earth, He was for justice,” Williams says. “It just bothers me to see injustices, and in this day and age, they are so blatant. You don’t have to look for them. But you have to have the heart to do something about them.”

And St. Brigid is where Williams gets that heart. You cannot miss her: “I’m tall, I wear my hair on top of my head, I’ll be wearing a button that says Social Justice Ministry and I’ll be sitting on the right, close to the front.”

The 10:30 gospel Mass one recent Sunday morning found Williams in her usual spot and Father Fernando Arizti at the pulpit.

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First, Arizti thanked the “Anglo Americans” scattered throughout the crowded hall: “I know you don’t live in the neighborhood. If you are here, you came to the heart of South-Central to worship with our people, and I say thank you.”

The applause died down, and he began again, this time honoring the mothers and sisters, the daughters and aunts, the women who made the “Million Man March” possible for those who traveled to Washington from St. Brigid. Come up here, he told them. Stand at the altar, let us recognize you. Eighteen women and girls walked proudly forward to stand beneath the black crucifix draped in bright-hued African cloth.

“This is the backbone of the ‘Million Man March,’ ” Arizti said with a sweep of his arm, taking in Williams, front and center, head high, smile enormous. “I’m so proud of you, sisters.”

Catholics have traditionally been the backbone of the Democratic Party, a foundation that shifted in the 1994 election, when Republicans gained control of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

Historically, says Corwin E. Smidt, a political scientist who specializes in religion at Michigan’s Calvin College, mainline Protestants formed the bedrock of the Republican Party, while evangelical Protestants, Catholics and Jews were the majority of the Democratic coalition.

Evangelicals began to slip rightward in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in the South. But it took until 1992, he said, for their voting habits to shift strongly enough that they became the GOP’s base.

By 1994, Smidt wrote in a study released this summer, “mainline Protestants have left the GOP in large numbers, and like Catholics, are now an electoral swing group.” In terms of its effect on the congressional election, “religion was more powerful than economics in 1994. . . . “

But voting is just one part of a political life, party affiliation just one measure, and neither are very good ways to gauge involvement in America today; religion is actually a better means. A nationwide Times Poll conducted in late autumn showed that the more important religion is in people’s lives, the greater their likelihood for political activism--on the right or the left. And the more distant they are from the God they worship, the more likely they are to feel disenfranchised, to vote as independents or not vote at all.

Which explains John McReynolds, 55--a devout Presbyterian and community organizer among the churches and synagogues of California’s graceful Central Coast.

As executive director of the Interfaith Community Organizing Project, McReynolds’ life is usually lived behind the scenes, treading that fuzzy line between political action and social welfare, working with a score of parishes and local governments to get California’s faithful to improve their lives.

He has helped the First Presbyterian Church of Lompoc to set up a citywide after-school program for middle-school students who could otherwise be at risk of straying into gangs and drugs and danger. In northern Santa Barbara County, he has helped churches open a homeless shelter and start a program that enabled 120 needy Santa Maria families to build and own homes. In Santa Barbara, his work is behind 500 street lights, cleaner parks and safer neighborhoods and a middle-school curriculum designed to teach values.

All of this, of course, takes money. Which is why one recent Wednesday found a weary McReynolds standing in a banquet room at the Goleta Holiday Inn talking about religion and politics over rapidly chilling scrambled eggs, kicking off a fund-raising drive for next year’s work.

Why organize churches for political ends? “When you’re dealing with faith communities, you’re dealing with people’s most fundamental values,” he tells the attentive diners before they reach for their wallets. “If [the work] is connected to your faith, to what’s in your soul, that’s what makes you hang in and get it done.”

But what makes you even consider it in the first place? McReynolds’ answer is a New Testament one, James 2:17, to be exact: Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.

For Pastor Gabriel Varga, on the opposite coast, motivation comes from the same book, different chapters.

For three years, Varga has been in a protracted battle with Daytona Beach officials to open a rescue mission in this scrappy coastal town.

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The way Varga tells it, in a 1993 effort to streamline government, the city folded several regulations together, in the process changing the definition of a church. The new definition, Varga contends, does not include ministering to the homeless--a job that this minister came here to do.

City Atty. Frank Gummey begs to differ and points to the city’s Salvation Army shelter as proof that Daytona Beach is not hostile to the homeless. The problem, he says, is one of zoning, not feeding. The site Varga chose is not appropriate for a shelter.

So Varga filed a suit in federal court in Orlando, where a judge ruled in the city’s favor earlier this year. Varga is appealing the decision.

And while he waits for the justice system to grind out its answer, he continues to hand out groceries and serve meals at churches throughout the city, and has recently begun a similar program in Tampa.

“I don’t think it’s the government’s job to feed and clothe and shelter people,” says Varga, 51, as he sits on the steps of Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church waiting for a load of Thanksgiving groceries. “It’s the church’s. . . . The Bible is full of this, from cover to cover.”

There’s Matthew, Chapter 25, he says.

There’s Luke 4:18, and he quotes: The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted.

In Daytona Beach these days, that’s politics, Varga says. But it’s also something else.

“See who Jesus went to--the poor, the crippled,” he said. “That’s Christianity. If people don’t do that, they’re missing the whole point.”

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Politics and the Pulpit

“Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement. No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity.”-- Edmund Burke, 1790

A look at religion and politics in America:

America’s Religious Makeup

Protestant: 56%

Roman Catholic: 28%

Other: 4%

Jewish: 2%

None: 10%

Who Prays?

Four decades of Gallup Reports show that the number of Americans who say they pray has held surprisingly steady.

Year: 1948

% who pray: 90

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Year: 1978

% who pray: 89

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Year: 1988

% who pray: 99

God and Government

In 1988, for the book “Varieties of Prayer,” pollster George Gallup and sociologist Margaret Poloma asked more than 1000 people nationwide: “During the last three years have you done any of the following largely because of your own religious beliefs?”

Prayed in support of a particular issue or candidate: 27% (Yes)

Voted for a particular political candidate: 25% (Yes)

Talked to people about why they should vote for a candidate: 18% (Yes)

Made a contribution to a candidate or political group: 10% (Yes)

Attended any political meetings or rallies: 8% (Yes)

Worked for a particular political candidate: 6% (Yes)

Sources: Gallup, CIA World Factbook