The God Network in Washington

Just two days before becoming President of the U.S., amid the tense expectation of a Nixon resignation, Vice President Gerald Ford visited the office of House Republican Leader John Rhodes. What new political turn was being hatched, newsmen wondered, in this pivotal day of Ford's career? When the session was over the incredulous press heard that Ford had simply taken time out for a short prayer meeting with Rhodes, a Methodist, and a longtime Republican colleague from the House, Congressman Albert Quie of Minnesota, a Lutheran.

The prayers were not something special for that tumultuous day. The three men, plus former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, a Presbyterian, had been holding similar meetings weekly for three months, reviving a custom Ford, Laird and Quie had first begun in 1967. Quie says confidently that "we expect to continue," even with Ford in the White House--though the place and time will change.

Satan's Power. The Ford group is only one of an intricate web of groups and individuals--almost an underground network--stretching well across religious and political boundaries, all of them part of a small but growing spiritual renaissance in Washington. It involves both those who have been hoisted to power through Watergate and those who were toppled by it. Quie, for instance, also prays with a Monday morning group that includes Senator Harold Hughes, occasionally Senator Mark Hatfield, and--from January to July--Charles Colson. When Colson went off to prison last month to begin serving a one-to-three-year sentence for obstruction of justice, he carried with him three Bibles and the promise that his prayer-group fellows would keep in touch. Other members of the Watergate cast who have recently re-examined their faith:

> James W. McCord Jr., 50, whose letter to Judge John Sirica burst the Watergate dam, has told friends that sermons in suburban Washington's Fourth Presbyterian Church had a powerful impact on his decisions that winter. On the first Sunday of January 1973, McCord, a Methodist who had started attending the church only weeks before, heard the Rev. Richard Halverson, Washington's best-known evangelical preacher, talk about the power of Satan that tempted leaders to play God. The next week, when approached by White House Aide John Caulfield, McCord refused to plead guilty and remain silent.

> Jeb Stuart Magruder, 39, was accompanied by the Rev. Louis Evans Jr., of Washington's National Presbyterian Church, when he was sentenced in May for conspiring to obstruct justice. Last year after the Watergate affair had begun to unravel, Magruder joined one of the intimate "covenant" groups that Evans had started in order to feed the "spiritual hunger" in Washington. Jeb's wife Gail joined another (also attended by Mark Hatfield's wife Antoinette). The groups are small--typically only a dozen people who bind themselves to each other through eight principles or covenants. The principles include a broad sharing of time, ideas and possessions when another member needs them. His group is continuing Bible studies with Jeb by mail and visits while he is in prison.

> Egil ("Bud") Krogh Jr., 35, recently released after serving 4 1/2 months in prison for his part in the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, had a different kind of experience. Krogh is a Christian Scientist, but according to his wife Suzanne had become religiously inactive. The Krogh marriage was on the rocks before the Ellsberg breakin, she says, but after it, when Bud returned to the practice of his faith, the rift was healed. Just before going to prison in early February, Krogh visited Colson's new-found prayer group to talk about the spiritual reasons for his guilty plea last November.

With figures like Ford and his friends involved, Washington's spiritual renewal is clearly not a matter of Watergate or gallows repentance. It has, in fact, been growing for years. One of its roots can be traced to the early 1950s, when Mark Hatfield was a political science professor and dean of students at Oregon's Willamette University. A Conservative Baptist, Hatfield recalls that his religious life was then "totally institutional, a matter of legalistic no-nos." It was to change drastically after a sophomore named Doug Coe approached him for permission to start a chapter of an evangelical student association.

Coe, then a physics major, remembers that he "set up an experiment to see if God could really answer prayer. One thing I prayed for was that Mark Hatfield would become a convinced follower of Jesus Christ." The experiment seemed to work: Coe's own intense faith won him over, says Hatfield. "Doug talked about the Lord as if he were a friend, were really present."

While Hatfield moved up the political ladder to the governorship, his friend Coe broadened his evangelistic horizons to include political, professional and business leaders. In 1959 Coe left for Washington to join the staff of the International Christian Leadership movement, founded in the 1930s by Methodist Missionary Abraham Vereide to promote prayer breakfasts and personal evangelism among laymen.

Coe has been the untitled head of the Vereide movement--now known as "the fellowship"--since the founder died in 1969. The prayer-breakfast idea had long since caught wide attention, spreading to some 1,800 U.S. cities and towns and at least 40 other countries. But the movement has also expanded to include many other, less formal encounters: groups that meet to pray together, to study the Bible or to discuss personal problems. The fellowship is in touch with more than 100 groups in Washington alone. Most are broadly ecumenical, and have included Jews as well as Protestants and Catholics. Coe himself--like Hatfield, Laird and Rhodes--attends Halverson's Fourth Presbyterian Church, where fellowship leaders meet weekly to set policy.

One thoughtful supporter of the fellowship wonders whether it is too neutral on political questions. "Doug never raises issues," observes Wesley Michaelson, Hatfield's legislative assistant. "The latent assumption is that the solution to political problems is to get people converted and committed to each other. [But] overseas some of the fellowship people are the same generals who carry out martial law." Still, Michaelson concedes that Coe's personal, uncritical ministry has made him "the real chaplain of the House and Senate." It has also forged ties of concern. When an assailant shot Mississippi's Senator John Stennis, a fellowship member, it was Hatfield--one of his foremost foes in the Senate--who spent the night at the hospital fielding phone calls.

Senator Hughes is probably Coe's most devoted convert. Hughes' long spiritual odyssey carried him from Alcoholics Anonymous and Methodist Sunday-school teaching to the Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship, a group of ministers and laymen who explore psychic phenomena. "I was looking for Christ," Hughes recalls. "I wanted miracles today. I wanted to believe in eternal life. My prayer life was constant, and I read the Scriptures, but what I was seeking I didn't find." Then in 1969 he met Coe, "a man who lived, believed and practiced the Scriptures. So, in prayer, Christ gradually came alive to me." Hughes, who remains a Methodist but worships with an independent, neopentecostal congregation, is quitting the Senate at the end of his term in January to devote full time to the fellowship's work.

President Ford will probably preserve a certain independence from the fellowship, despite his close friends in it and the likelihood that his weekly prayer meetings will somehow go on. A lifelong Episcopalian, Ford will continue to worship whenever he can in his "home parish," Immanuel Church-on-the-Hill in Alexandria, Va. Though Ford may get a relatively liberal slant on religion from Immanuel's rector, the Rev. William L. Dols Jr., he gets a fundamentalist pitch at home in Michigan. There he has nurtured a close friendship with the Rev. Billy Zeoli, an evangelical minister who is head of Gospel Films Inc. of Muskegon, Mich., and peripatetic chaplain to a number of professional sports teams. Another, probably even stronger evangelical influence is Ford's eldest son Michael, who is currently studying for a divinity degree at staunchly conservative Gordon-Con well Theological Seminary in Massachusetts.

As for the star-studded East Room services that President Nixon once loved to lay on for Sunday morning, Ford let it be known last week that he plans nothing of the kind. Even so, down-home evangelical American religion has survived its vaunted association with the Nixon era, and seems even to have been given fresh life. One reason may be that Ford's piety, like his presidential style, is both straightforward and natural --and therefore the more believable.

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