Coalition Leader Urges Toughness With Humility

The Christian Coalition, the dominant “religious right” movement of the 1990s, is urging conservative Christians to avoid harsh words and self-righteous demeanor in this election year even while cautioning them to be “tough under fire” against perceived demonic forces.

“God is not looking for wimps,” said Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition, a politically oriented organization that has grown to 1.7 million members and 2,000 local chapters since it was founded in 1989 by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson.

Reed spoke to more than 200 people attending a Wednesday night prayer service in Van Nuys at the Church on the Way. The 9,000-member Pentecostal congregation has been instrumental in supporting and shaping the Tarzana-based California chapter of the Christian Coalition.

Reed exhorted Christians concerned about abortion, divorce and immorality to get involved in politics even as he warned that they will be met with public and media disapproval (“the devil is creeping around like a lion”). Reed invited worshipers to join what he predicted this year “will be the largest election turnout of evangelical Christians in history.”

In displaying some of the religious rhetoric reminiscent of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in the 1980s, however, Reed has also softened the Christian Coalition’s public stances on issues such as abortion and school prayer, and paid compliments to the virtues of humility.

Reed, in a recent Newsweek article, wrote that religiously inspired political movements of the past had been “defined by spiritual arrogance.” Though not abandoning the goal of a “thoroughly Judeo-Christian culture,” Reed wrote, “to get there, religious conservatives must shun harsh language on critical issues--chiefly abortion, Clinton-bashing and homosexuality--and learn to speak of our opponents with charity.”

Copies of Reed’s Newsweek essay were passed out to Church on the Way members Wednesday night at the direction of Senior Pastor Jack Hayford, who emphasized the theme of Christian civility in his prayers before and after Reed’s talk.

“We admit we are often not as humble as we should be. . . . We pray to not let our tongue become a weapon of laceration. . . . Make us instruments of action with gentleness of spirit . . . [that we may] stand firm and not fight fire with fire,” Hayford said in prayers.

Before introducing Reed, Hayford said his church has “always tried to maintain political nonpartisanship” while endorsing the right of believers to act on their political beliefs.

“We honestly seek to be evenhanded,” said Hayford, who was in the first small group of national evangelical leaders invited to meet with President Clinton at the White House in the fall of 1993.

“If Bill Clinton is a sinner, he is no worse than you or me,” Reed wrote in Newsweek, alluding to a classic Christian tenet.

In his speech Wednesday, Reed exhorted listeners not to shift the blame for the country’s ills on others. Rather than fault the American Civil Liberties Union, gay and lesbian activists or other liberals, Reed said, churches need to look to their own obligations as Christians and mount a sustained defense of morality.