It seems the Capitol is now manifestly beyond salvation. The Center for Christian Statesmanship, launched in 1995 to convert members of Congress and their aides to evangelical Christianity, has shuttered its operations in Washington.

The group had been a ministry on Capitol Hill of a 10,000-member megachurch, Coral Ridge Presbyterian, of Fort Lauderdale.

It’s not the mother church that is suffering: Coral Ridge runs a television show and two radio programs from its Florida headquarters and reports about $40 million a year in revenue. But the church is “refocusing to do media outreach exclusively,” says spokesman John Aman. Among other things, that means a push to increase viewership for its programming by an order of magnitude, to 30 million. “To reach that goal, the board wanted to contract the ministry in order to set the stage for future growth,” Aman says.

With that end in view, Coral Ridge also has closed its Center for Reclaiming America for Christ, a Florida-based grass-roots arm that had developed a list of 400,000 e-mail addresses of Christian activists willing to contact their legislators on political issues. Aman says the group had tapped the network last fall to coordinate the delivery of a 160,000-name petition to the Supreme Court on the day of oral arguments in Gonzales v. Carhart, the case questioning the constitutionality of the 2003 law banning “partial birth” abortion. (The court upheld the law last month.)

The two political units were “superb ministries,” Aman says. “But they weren’t entirely consistent” with the church’s new media-centric focus. Aman would not say how many lawmakers or staff members had converted. “We don’t divulge names of people touched by the ministry,” he said. That said, it’s probably a safe bet the group brought in fewer converts than hungry staffers. Its best-attended Hill function had been its monthly “Politics and Principle” luncheons, which supplemented evangelical appeals with complimentary sandwiches.

But just because the group is getting more media-savvy doesn’t mean it will be any less political. Aman says Coral Ridge is collaborating with a conservative advocacy group, the Family Research Council, on a video that opposes legislation the House passed this month to federalize crimes motivated by bias against gays and lesbians. Both groups will be retailing the video on their Web sites, and it will get a broadcast airing on a Coral Ridge TV show to be hosted by Family Research Council president Tony Perkins.

Meanwhile, there may yet be that most revered of American evangelical institutions — a revival — in the works for the lost souls of Capitol Hill. George Roller, the Center for Christian Statesmanship’s director, says he’s trying to raise funds to reconstitute the group.