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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.