Religious fight.

Miss Lopez is an NR editorial associate.

IT was supposed to be a match made in heaven. In September 1995 the Christian Coalition started a new arm called the Catholic Alliance, a form of outreach meant to add to the quarter of a million Catholics who were already members of the one-and-a-half-million-member Christian Coalition. The timing seemed providential. In the wake of Pope John Paul II's call for ecumenism, Ut Unum Sint, Catholic and evangelical leaders had just issued the unprecedented statement "Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium" -- defining their shared goals in an increasingly secular culture.

Now the Catholic Alliance has been divorced from the Christian Coalition, whose hopes of Catholic outreach seem in retrospect to have been hopelessly naive. Catholics, the nation's largest unaligned voting bloc, and arguably the most disorganized, weren't about to answer to Pat Robertson.

For reasons of style, theology, and history, a political alliance of evangelicals and Catholics will remain difficult to forge, which means these two crucial blocs of culturally conservative voters will remain divided at best, distrustful and even hostile at worst. Some of the tensions are as old as the Reformation. But others owe more to the different sensibilities of the two camps.

There is reason to doubt that Catholics will ever have an effective public-policy organization on the model of the Christian Coalition -- because as soon as such a group took a political position some bishop would be sure to explain why it wasn't the true "Catholic" one. This is the inevitable result of the hierarchical nature of the Church, something evangelicals don't have to worry about. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things and one of the founders of the ECT movement, points out that "Catholics are international, in the sense of belonging to the Catholic and catholic Church. Evangelicals tend to be congregational and local. Catholics have a sense of heritage and community. Evangelicals have direct access to the Bible."

"Most evangelicals and Catholics have never really had a reason to or the occasion to get along," explains Richard Cizik, policy analyst for the National Association of Evangelicals. "It would be interesting to survey how many friends and neighbors evangelicals have who are Catholic. My suspicion is that they don't have many."

This unfamiliarity can make for uncomfortable moments when evangelicals and Catholics join together. At the Promise Keepers rally in Washington last year, conservative women from Washington family groups -- led primarily by the Family Research Council -- set up a small cheerleading squad to counter the protest by the National Organization for Women. The friendly chanting was fine, but when it came time to hold hands, sing, and read from the Bible, the handful of Catholics tried to disappear into the background. "This just isn't for me," one twenty-something Catholic remarked as her evangelical sisters sang "Kumbaya" -- "but at least I know the words to this one."

These minor differences matter in the aggregate. "The bulk of culturally conservative Catholics are reluctant to jump on the ecumenical bandwagon," explains congressional staffer and veteran pro-lifer Michael Schwartz. "There are just too many differences in tone and priorities. The divergence shows when it comes to the issue of gay rights." Catholics don't like creating new rights for gays, but they aren't as likely to harp on the evils of homosexuality as evangelicals are. "To the Catholic it is just one more sin."

And, of course, there are deeper splits. The Evangelical and Catholics Together statement was conceived at a 1992 meeting of evangelicals and Catholics originally convened to discuss rising tensions between the two elsewhere in the world, particularly in Latin America. Hoping to avoid more Belfasts, those assembled began to address "the scandal of conflict between Christians [that] obscures the scandal of the cross, thus crippling the one mission of the one Christ." Two years later the statement emerged. "However imperfect our communion with one another, however deep our disagreements with one another, we recognize that there is but one Body of Christ."

ACCORDING to some evangelicals, therein lies the ECT's first flaw --assuming that Roman Catholics are part of the Body of Christ. In Modern Reformation magazine, a publication of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, ACE vice chairman Michael Horton warns: "[As long as] Rome continues to uphold the Decrees and Canons of the Council of Trent, all individual members of that body who follow those decrees . . . continue to stand in opposition to the unchanging Gospel of Christ. If they stray from the official teaching of Rome, either from ignorance or in opposition to those statements, they may be regarded as brothers and sisters in Christ."

Catholic Alliance director Keith Fournier, a self-described "evangelical Catholic" who has devoted his life to "building bridges between evangelicals and Catholics," maintains that such Catholics-are-not-Christian sentiments "have gone the way of the dinosaur." Unfortunately, despite the efforts of many evangelicals, not all these dinosaurs are extinct.

John MacArthur is a radio evangelist (his program, Grace to You, is carried by over five hundred stations worldwide) and pastor to a flock of some eight thousand at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California. In a foreword to a book laying out arguments against ECT, MacArthur reminds readers that "the very thing we differ on is the Gospel itself -- the very things that distinguished true Christianity from damning heresy (Galatians 1:8 - 9). We dare not gloss over this matter of eternal significance." This Easter, a Virginia Beach pastor attacked Roman Catholicism from his pulpit, to an assembly of four hundred, calling it "a false religion" and the "mother of harlots."

Christian bookstores have lots of books explaining Catholicism --but not exactly in the spirit of brotherhood. Graven Bread attacks the "Adoration of the Wafer." The fringe book The Priest, the Woman, and the Confessional tells the story of young women deflowered by their confessors; its author is a former Jesuit priest. And there are even comic books explaining how President Lincoln's assassination was a Vatican conspiracy.

Despite all this, at least evangelicals and Catholics are talking. For too long, "both evangelicals and Catholics have been working off caricatures of one another," says Michael Horton. Debate continues on the second installment of ECT, "The Gift of Salvation," which signers hope will bring evangelicals and Catholics another step closer together. But don't expect a grand alliance any time soon. Mike Schwartz puts it starkly: "In some ways James Carville and his style are more likely to appeal to a Catholic than evangelicals do."

There is still the small matter that parts of the Christian Right suspect that Catholics are in league with the devil. A popular evangelical book, Romanism: The Relentless Roman Catholic Assault on the Gospel of Jesus Christ!, warns readers: "To not oppose Roman Catholicism is to not oppose the very house of Satan!" Meanwhile, production is beginning on a movie based on a fictional series that has been a best-seller on the Christian book market -- the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye (end-times scholar and husband of Beverly LaHaye, founder of Concerned Women for America) and Jerry Jenkins. Slated for release in the fall of 1999, the series tracks the rise of the Anti-Christ, who turns out to be the Secretary General of the United Nations. His right-hand man just happens to be the Pope.