(FORTUNE Magazine) – This is the time of the political season when Republicans trim their views to the specifications of the Christian Coalition, when commentators talk of invisible armies of zealous campaigners, when strategists try to calculate the impact of the group's feared voter guides. Not this summer.

With membership static, the staff in upheaval, and telemarketing income way down, the Christian Coalition has fallen on hard times. "They're in disarray," says James Guth, a political scientist at Furman University who studies religious conservatives. "There's no effort to shape a strategy for the 2000 primaries."

The coalition has never recovered from the 1997 departure of Ralph Reed, whose strategic mind and soft political style won him entree to editorial boards and talk shows. "He did something they haven't been able to replace," acknowledges Carole Shields, who as president of People for the American Way is a leading opponent of the group. Pat Robertson, the Christian Coalition's founding angel, has reasserted his leadership. This may rally true believers but may also alienate critics, who will never forgive the televangelist for saying that the Constitution "is a marvelous document for self-government by Christian people."

Though the coalition said in June that it planned to distribute 80 million of its fabled voter guides, which set forth candidates' views on hot-button issues such as abortion, there is growing evidence that evangelical clergy are having second thoughts about helping out. Many pastors believe the guides are disruptive, even in predominantly Republican congregations. They also fear that the guides could jeopardize their churches' tax-exempt status.

The coalition's hold on the Republican Congress never looked so brittle as it did in the days after the Colorado school massacre, when GOP rank and file joined the initial rush for gun control rather than turn the tragedy into the debate Robertson desperately wanted on public morality. "If we still had prayer in the schools, things like Littleton wouldn't happen," says Peggy Hermann, former executive director of the Christian Coalition in Iowa. "We have to get that message out."

Robertson, who recently contributed nearly $1 million to his own organization, seems determined to do that, if he can escape the fog produced by his musings that Scotland is so dominated by gays that it may be headed "back to the darkness." He also has to reassure followers who are increasingly receptive to the message of figures such as commentator Cal Thomas, who says religious conservatives should return to their spiritual roots and to performing good works in their communities. The rise of the religious right reshaped the political world in the last quarter-century. Now the movement itself is being reshaped.

DAVID SHRIBMAN is the Washington bureau chief of the Boston Globe and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political reporter.