deal
ice-blue shirt and the muted red tie. A
political theorist? A bloody shirt-waving
crusader? An Iago, as they like to say,
looking for an Othello?
On one wall of Reed's office there is
a bucolic portrait of Reed, his wife, Jo
Anne, and their four children. In his
1996 book Active Faith — a political
history and memoir — Reed frequent-
ly invokes Jo Anne when talking about
his major career decisions. He says
family is one reason why he located
his firm in metropolitan Atlanta, and
"family" is a euphemism he uses when
describing his conservative beliefs.
Ralph E. Reed Jr. was born in
Virginia in 1962. He grew up in Miami,
the son of an ophthalmologist. He went
to public schools, joined the local swim
club, learned to play golf and followed
the Miami Dolphins, he recalls.
Miami also had a large Jewish pop-
ulation. "I really got exposed to
Judaism at a very early age — went to
synagogue with friends and attended
bar mitzvahs," he says. "Obviously, we
were raised Methodist, yet there was
also a commonly shared set of values:
faith in God, the importance of fami-
ly, basic values like honest and hard
work," he says. Reed's father was a
Naval reserve officer, and the family's
politics were bedrock Republican.
But the Vietnam War and
Watergate affected young Reed. "I saw
the confidence in the institution of
government and of politics as a profes-
sion fall into disrepute," he says.
Unlike many of his contemporaries,
however, Reed stuck to his right-wing
roots, while longing for a leader who
could live up to his ideals. He read
history voraciously; he watched the
1972 presidential conventions, both of
which were held in Miami Beach that
year, almost gavel-to-gavel.
He got involved in politics early. By
age 14, he had won a landslide election
for student body president at his junior
high school and worked on the con-
gressional campaign of a family friend.
In 1976, Reed's family moved to
Toccoa, a town in northeast Georgia
not far from the South Carolina line.
Ralph Reed was the symbol and lightning rod
of the Christian Right. He's now a political
consultant to the GOP. Should Jews be worried?
ship becomes even more explosive.
Historically, Jews have been city
dwellers, liberal activists and
Democratic voters; evangelicals have
lived in rural areas and pockets of sub-
urbia, opposed a powerful federal gov-
ernment and voted Republican.
After decades of assimilation, many
Jews may find themselves more com-
fortable with the economic beliefs of
the GOP. But the issues near and dear
to the religious right — such as prayer
in schools, a hard line against abortion
and opposition to gay rights — have
made many Jews wary.
Reed tempered the Christian
Coalition's rhetoric and sought to
bring other mainstream religious
groups into partnership.
"Reed inaugurated two sort-of ini-
tiatives, which reflect an awareness of
the problems of evangelical Christians
in politics in American history," says
Mark Silk, director of the Center for
the Study of Religion in Public Life at
Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.
"One was outreach to Roman
Catholics. The other reflects Southern
evangelical issues. They raised a bunch
of money for rebuilding the black
churches that burned down.
"So he was determined to, at least,
make it clear that the Coalition was not
going to be narrowly sectarian," Silk
adds, and possess any of these sort of
unattractive racist or religious dimen-
sions of some previous manifestations
of Southern evangelical politicking."
Relationships, Reed says, "are the
basis of everything."
"I tried to spend as much time as I
could building mutual respect and trust,
he says. "So when those flash points
came along that provided an opportunity
for division between Christians and Jews,
you could pick up the phone and get
Evangelism And Politics
through it based on your trust and
Evangelical Christians try to convert
friendship ... There were times when
the unconverted, something many Jews
some in the Jewish community said
view as odious. Moreover, the rhetoric
things that were hurtful to Christians,
of evangelicals has occasionally crossed
and times when some in the Christian
the line into anti-Semitism; Jews have
community said things that were hurtful
been denounced as hopeless sinners
),
to Jews.
and part of a world-controlling cabal.
One example Reed offers is the
Add in politics and the relation-
He became active in political organiza-
dons, such as the American Legion
program for young political leaders,
Boys State. (Another Boys State gradu-
ate: Bill Clinton.) But Reed's career
really blossomed at the University of
Georgia, where he chaired the College
Republican Club and eventually
became the executive director at the
national level. He mobilized the youth
vote for Ronald Reagan in 1984, work-
ing with high-profile Republican opera-
tives like Lee Atwater and Ed Rollins.
But Reed had had a born-again
experience while in college, and decid-
ed to leave politics — surely not the
truest path to salvation — behind.
After the Reagan landslide Reed
enrolled at Emory University, and
worked studiously toward earning a
teaching degree in history. His advisor,
Emory history professor Dan T. Carter,
remembers him as a "quick study."
But Reed couldn't quite get the politi-
cal game out of his blood. And in 1988,
attending a Republican caucus at the
DeKalb County courthouse, Reed —
ironically a delegate for supply-sider Jack
Kemp — had his political epiphany.
Televangelist Pat Robertson had
established grass-roots beachheads in
some Midwest and Southern states. In
DeKalb, the Robertson forces had
packed the hall with their supporters;
Ralph and Jo Anne Reed were the only
two Kemp backers in their precinct.
Instead of being discouraged, Reed was
impressed. A year later in Atlanta, he
became the first staff member of the
Christian Coalition, the fundamentalist
organization Robertson created from the
network of his '88 campaign. In five years,
the Coalition had a $20 million annual
budget and 1.5 million supporters.
7)
likening of abortion by evangelicals
to the Holocaust.
Nevertheless, relations between Jews
and the religious right hit a new low in
June 1994, when the Anti-Defamation
League released a report — "The
Religious Right: The Assault on
Tolerance and Pluralism in America"
— accusing Robertson and other evan-
gelicals of fostering intolerance and
tearing down the barriers between
church and state. Other Jewish groups,
including the American Jewish
Congress, echoed the ADL position.
Robertson fired back with his own
report with accusations of defamation; a
series of letters between him and the
ADEs Foxman only heightened ten-
sions. Recalls Foxman, "We did a report;
he wrote a 40-page critique; we wrote a
20-page critique; and then I got a letter
from him, saying that I'm a sinner."
In this charged atmosphere, a meet-
ing was arranged between Jews and
evangelicals in Washington. There,
Foxman and Reed established a working
relationship. Then Foxman invited Reed
to address the ADEs April Leadership
Conference. The two, Foxman says,
))
"had agreed to disagree agreeably
In Chicago; Rabbi Eckstein says he
worked with Reed to "put out the fire."
"Here you have people like Ralph
and Pat [Robertson] who see themselves
as being among the best friends that
Israel and the Jewish people have," the
rabbi says. "So they were extraordinarily
hurt — not just offended, but hurt."
Eckstein helped put together the
meeting where Reed and Foxman met.
"Ralph was essential in supporting the
efforts of building reconciliation
between the Jewish and Christian
communities," says Eckstein,
Reed remembers being "deeply
hurt" by the ADL report. "In politics,
you learn to shrug things off, but that
was hard to shrug off.
"But it turned out to be an oppor-
tunity," he continues. "God used that
hurt for His opportunity."
At the April ADL conference, Reed
struck a deferential note. His speech
described Jews' "history of remarkable
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