Fun in the sun with Ralph Reed(Ralph Reed's luxurious sojourn at the Key West resort in Florida)

News reports from Florida suggest that Christian Coalition Executive Director Ralph Reed may not be the dour, fun-hating theocrat many Americans have thought.

According to Solares Hill, a Key West, Fla., newspaper, Reed and two top Christian Coalition lieutenants spent a few days at a posh Key West resort in the warm Florida sunshine just after New Year's Day.

The newspaper said Reed, CC National Field Director D.J. Gribben and CC Voter Education Director Charles Cunningham were registered Jan. 2-5 at Casa Marina. Receipts from Gribben's Christian Coalition American Express Card reportedly showed expenses of $4,625.23 during the sojourn. (Cunningham and Gribben stayed in $308-a-night rooms, while Reed occupied a $360-a-night space.)

In response to the newspaper's initial inquiry, Gribben said the trio were in Key West on Christian Coalition business. He refused to accept or return follow-up calls seeking more information.

The pricey Coalition junket to Key West, a destination known more for its partying than its piety, suggests that Coalition receipts must be improving. A Nov. 18 fund-raising letter from the Coalition's Reed complained that the group's massive 1996 election effort had drained coffers.

"As you can imagine," Reed wrote, "the historic Christian Voter Mobilization Campaign we put together in 1996 took an enormous toll on our financial resources. We spent nearly every penny we had on our Voter Guide distribution and Get-Out-The-Vote efforts.... Will you send a contribution today to help us recover from a financially draining election year -- so that Christian Coalition can end the year free of debt and be in a strong position to fight the battle for the family in 1997?

"I must admit," he continued, "I'm not quite sure how we'll be strong enough to fight the battle for the family successfully if good friends like you don't answer this letter by sending a contribution.... I will anxiously wait for your reply to arrive in my mailbox in the next few days."

In other developments regarding the Religious Right:

* A Christian Coalition-backed political hopeful in South Carolina has pleaded guilty to accepting illegal campaign contributions. According to The State, a Columbia, S.C., newspaper, Van Hipp sought the Republican nomination for the 1st Congressional district of South Carolina in 1994 as the Christian Coalition's favored candidate. During the race, the former state GOP chairman accepted $5,500 from two donors who had already given the legally allowed limit and recorded the money as coming from other contributors.

In exchange for the guilty plea, prosecutors agreed to drop charges against Hipp stemming from his involvement in a phone sex scandal. Hipp, an attorney, was accused of helping a phone sex company, B.C. Services, acquire credit cards through fraudulent means. Hipp said he thought B.C. Services was selling baseball cards when he started working for the company, but he continued with the firm once he found out it was in the phone sex business. Hipp faces a $100,000 fine and one year prison sentence.

* Analysts are still trying to sort out what effect religious conservatives had on the 1996 elections. In a post-election press conference, Christian Coalition Executive Director Ralph Reed claimed that evangelicals voted in high numbers and that their participation helped the GOP keep control of Congress.

But Robert Dugan of the National Association of Evangelicals believes differently. Writing in the January issue of NAE's newsletter Insight, Dugan observed, "Several weeks of mulling over election numbers have turned up no evidence that evangelicals voted in higher percentages than the rest of the population -- as they did in 1994. The one-time bump up, to a disproportionately high evangelical influence, was discontinued."

Dugan speculated that the drop off may have occurred in part because churches were intimidated by warnings about their political activities. (Americans United and other organizations publicized Internal Revenue Service regulations forbidding partisan political activity by tax-exempt religious groups.)

Reed's analysis claimed that 29 percent of all voters were self-described "born-again Christians," but others pollsters found sharply different figures. Voter News Service, a joint venture of the Associated Press and five television networks, put the figure at 16 percent. Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling form, put the number even lower at 12 percent.

* California Religious Right politico Edward Atsinger III is busy trying to find ways to circumvent tough new campaign reporting laws enacted in the state. Atsinger, who founded the California Independent Business PAC with three other wealthy business executives, is a multi-millionaire who owns Salem Communications Corp., which owns more than 40 religious radio stations. His PAC has poured more than $4 million into California campaigns in the past four years in support of candidates who toe the Religious Right line. California voters enacted the campaign reform through Proposition 208 last November. The Ventura Star reported that Atsinger's lawyers are busy "trying to find ways around the new law."