ASHINGTON - The Republicans converge on Philadelphia this month to begin their quadrennial national convention - and a quadrennial debate over whether religious conservatives are too powerful, too extreme, and too visible a part of the GOP coalition.
This year the debate may be over before it begins. And the answers will be: no, no, and no.
The convention that will nominate as the party's presidential candidate Governor George W. Bush of Texas - who speaks openly of his dramatic personal religious experience - will include more evangelical delegates than the conventions that nominated his father for president in 1988 and for vice president in 1980 and 1984.
And yet the likelihood that the party will be rent by disputes over abortion is far slimmer; the chance that the GOP will give the Democrats an opportunity to paint their rivals as ''extremists'' is far smaller; and the probability that the phrase ''culture wars'' - the two words echoed ominously throughout the Houston convention, perhaps destroying President Bush's chances for reelection in 1992 - will be heard is near zero.
The explanation is not simply that this is, to choose another phrase redolent of the Bush years, a ''kinder, gentler'' generation of religious conservatives. Evangelicals have changed, to be sure, but so have the party and the country.
The Philadelphia Republicans will care about abortion - not a syllable of the party's traditional language will be changed when the first platform draft is circulated - but they will care more about winning the election.
''The evangelicals you will see on television at the Republican convention will be, above all, pragmatists,'' says James Guth, the Furman University specialist on religious conservatives. ''These are political people. ... The kind of evangelicals who became Bush delegates, even in a place like South Carolina, are the kind who know how to run in elections and to win elections.''
For Republicans - who have watched a Democratic president retain high approval ratings despite repeated bungles, and then saw him capitalize on such GOP issues as overhauling welfare and balancing the budget - the Clinton years have been difficult enough. But for religious conservatives, these years have been downright wretched. They watched the president survive a personal scandal that was an affront to the values - personal integrity, the sanctity of marriage - that they hold dearest.
As a result, religious conservatives are confident enough in the antiabortion-rights convictions of Governor Bush that they are willing to keep in the background in Philadelphia. For their part, the dwindling band of GOP moderates who support abortion rights are willing to hold their tongues in the hope that Bush will end Democratic control of the White House and, once installed as president, will not assume an aggressive antiabortion posture.
So far the tacit pact of silence has held. The two platform hearings, held far from the madding crowd in Dayton, Ohio, and Billings, Mont., have been almost serene compared with sessions held four years ago in San Diego. Religious conservatives have even signaled to Bush that they would not rebel if he chose a running mate like Governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, who supports some abortion rights.
This pact of tolerance - a word that presidential candidate Bob Dole tried to insert into the GOP platform four years ago before backing away - comes as political scientists gain new insights into the role and political behavior of religious conservatives in American elections.
These findings, based on voter interviews and surveys, show that religious conservatives are at once more prominent a part of the Republican coalition and less out of synch with mainstream American values than political pros once believed.
A study undertaken this spring by the Survey Research Center at the University of Akron, for example, shows that no group of Americans - not even Mormons, traditionally regarded as the most Republican religious group in the country - favors Bush more than do orthodox white evangelicals. That group, according to the center's Survey of Religion and Politics, chooses Bush over Vice President Al Gore, himself a Southern Baptist, by a margin of 77 percent to 23. Roman Catholics, by contrast, split almost evenly, with Jews (a far smaller segment of the population) favoring Gore by a 72-28 margin.
These evangelical voters were far more likely to have supported the president's impeachment than any other group, were much more supportive of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr - and, tellingly, take a far less rosy view of the president's performance on the economy than any other group. (''Religion,'' Guth explains, ''shapes how people look at other issues, including the economy.'')
At the same time, a separate new study, based on 2,600 interviews, shows that evangelical voters are far different from the stereotypes - and far more like the rest of the country.
''It appears that most non-evangelicals have little more to fear from the majority of ordinary evangelicals than being thought of as spiritually or morally mistaken, and thus prayed for, shown a life of good example, and occasionally offered a word about one's relationship to God,'' Christian Smith, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writes in ''Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want,'' published in April. ''These may be things that non-evangelicals would prefer to do without. But they are hardly views and practices that threaten civil American pluralism and democracy.''
In truth, evangelicals have always been an important part of American politics, and throughout most of the last century fit comfortably inside the Democrats' coalition; three-quarters of the evangelicals in the House in 1953 were Democrats, although today the same percentage are Republicans. Indeed, in the 1930s and 1940s, the vast majority of rank-and-file evangelicals were Democrats because, as George Washington University historian Leo P. Ribuffo puts it, '' They were poor, Southern Democrats - or both.''
The nature of the evangelical movement is always changing. There was a great religious revival during and after World War II; the percentage of Americans who said they belonged to a church increased from 49 percent of the population in 1940 to 69 percent in 1960. The evangelicals of the late 20th century, fortified in numbers by the Cold War and the appearance of leaders such as the Reverend Billy Graham, moved sharply to the right as a result of the upheaval brought on by the protests of the civil rights and antiwar movements, a number of US Supreme Court decisions that undermined the prominence of religion in American life and schools, the sexual revolution, and the feminist movement.
By 1972, a year before the Roe v. Wade decision establishing abortion rights, the Republican presidential candidate, Richard M. Nixon, won 80 percent of the evangelical vote.
By the Ronald Reagan years, evangelicals were firmly within the GOP tent - and their prominence began to worry some Republican strategists who believed religious conservatives put a face of intolerance on the GOP.
That notion has been largely absent in this election year.
One reason surely is that the concerns of religious conservatives - personal and public morality, the crisis of the family, entertainment values - no longer seem out of the mainstream; listen carefully to Democrats running for the House and the Senate this year and to Gore, who speaks openly about religion, and it is clear that the language of religious conservatives has become the language of all politicians.
But it isn't only the Democrats who have changed. Religious conservatives have changed, too. Tune in to the floor action at the GOP convention and look for the evangelicals. They'll be everywhere. But you'll hardly notice them.
