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In 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower swung through Jackson, Michigan, on a campaign tour, a nine-year-old boy waited in the crowd at the railroad station, hoping to meet the general. When Ike finally walked by, the boy thrust his hand through the line and touched the coat of the man who would soon be President. It was Dan Coats's first brush with politics.

Today Coats is a seasoned U.S. senator from Indiana, a post he has held since 1988 when he fulfilled the term left vacant by the election of Dan Quayle to the vice presidency. A graduate of Wheaton College (where he met his wife, Marcia), Coats was first elected to the House in 1980. This followed a stint in the military and a law practice in Fort Wayne, Indiana. During this time, he heard a talk by Chuck Colson that changed the direction of his life. "It was as if the other people in the room melted away," Coats says of the effect of the talk. He went home and, with Marcia at his side, dedicated himself to serving God fully in his career.

During the two decades of public service that followed, Coats, a Republican, has supported such conservative goals as a balanced budget, low taxes, a robust military, and strong families. He also authored a set of bills called "The Project for American Renewal." These initiatives emphasize what Coats calls a compassionate "shifting of power, money, and influence out of Washington" back to private organizations and religious charities.

Coats surprised the political world last year when he announced he would not seek re-election when his term expires in January of 1999. Instead, he would seek to further his goals through nonprofit and faith-based organizations. Robert Schwarzwalder, a member of the senator's staff from 1991 to 1994, talked with Coats at his Capitol Hill office about his inside view on issues ranging from Clinton and China to evangelicals, abortion, and the Supreme Court.

How has your faith influenced your conduct in office?
Pretty dramatically. When you go into a situation where so much of what you do is critiqued by your political opponents and the press, it's important that you understand the role your faith is going to play. You have to have a solid foundation of faith, because this is a tough business. You're subject to so many pressures. The public and press are fickle. You can be liked or disliked from one day to the next. It's easy for people to misinterpret your votes. It makes you realize faith is the only real constant in your life.

You have been a pro-life leader in Congress. What lessons have you learned in the fight for unborn life?
All of my training and study—at Wheaton, in church, in my personal study of Scripture—has led me to an unshakable conviction that all of life is God's creation, and so the sanctity of life should be one of the unalienable truths of our system. Still, Christians have often confused principle with strategy. I have tried to express my convictions while developing an effective strategy to translate my convictions into reality.

Sometimes we have to use incremental approaches. Sometimes we have to recast the debate. In the early eighties, the entire debate was on the Human Life Amendment. It just simply was not possible to gain the necessary two-thirds majority in the House or Senate to pass the amendment. We then focused our strategy on taxpayer-funded abortion, which had some success. Now we are working on banning partial-birth abortion.

Some people would have said this was a compromise, that we should accept nothing but a constitutional amendment banning abortion. If we ban partial-birth abortion, will that eliminate abortions? No, it would only limit a tiny fraction of them, but this issue has helped us refocus the debate and has put the pro-choice people on the defensive.

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August 10 1998, Vol. 42, No. 9