ATONING WITH TONY
FERGUSON, ANDREW
ATONING WITH TONY Bill Clinton's Confessor By Andrew Ferguson Emotion is what life is all about for me," l-H Tony Campolo has written, as if we couldn't 1 J have guessed. Though he is a large and...
...Viewers didn't know it then, but a few days earlier, the president had called Campolo and another well-known evangelical, Gordon MacDonald of Lexington, Massachusetts...
...He was in the East Room of the White House at the time, with an omelet cooling on the plate in front of him, as President Clinton delivered his famous I-have-sinned apology to a breakfast gathering of friendly, handpicked "spiritual leaders...
...Call to Renewal organized more than 40 town meetings in the month before the 1996 election, in hopes of transcending those "doctrinaire ideological approaches to the issues" and reelecting President Clinton...
...The President confessed: 'This was wrong.' What more must we know...
...It is a work of the Evil One that must be destroyed...
...We want our President to be allowed to be President...
...By all outward signs this is how the president sees himself: a man brought low by his enemies, a victim in trouble merely because the world done whipped him so...
...When he was caught in an adulterous romance with a congregant in the 1980s, MacDonald removed himself from his post and spent two years submerged in various forms of penance before returning to his vocation, a chastened and presumably wiser man...
...es to the issues of the day...
...Campolo is a sociologist by training—he teaches at Eastern College in Pennsylvania—and a political activist by inclination...
...It's when he's at his lowest and can't believe in hisself 'cause the world done whipped him so...
...The book titles give the flavor of his appeal: Is Jesus a Republican or a Democrat?, How to Be Pentecostal Without Speaking in Tongues, Twenty Hot Potatoes Christians Are Afraid to Touch, and The Kingdom of God Is a Party...
...The president asked his friend to speak at a church service the morning of his second inauguration, and he wasn't disappointed...
...Conservative evangelicals] are saying, 'This administration cannot be an instrument for changing the world for God,'" Campolo thundered from the pulpit...
...When Campolo discusses welfare reform, for example, he approvingly cites the work of Charles Murray...
...when they done good and made things easy for everybody...
...issuing a press release about it, appearing on ABC's 20/20 with Diane Sawyer, and making other comments, he has stuck to his word...
...We need a new kind of politics in America," he writes, "that will refuse to buy into the party labels of the past...
...Here's where Tony Campolo can be useful...
...You know, to have the president of the Unites States yelling at you...
...It is disconcerting to discover that even conservative evangelicals talk this way...
...Well, then, you ain't learnin'—because that ain't the time at all...
...Here's a verse of Scripture...
...This lack of equivocation is all the starker placed alongside a typical comment about abortion, from the same book: "When all the pros and cons on this issue have been heard, I argue that it is safest to adopt a pro-life position...
...He has written that secondhand smoke is as dangerous as firsthand smoke, even that it causes mental retardation...
...Like the late Hug Doctor, he is given to extravagant physical gestures...
...Because he needs to be hugged...
...When we're down there with the president," Campolo told ABC, "we're not just going to walk in and do a 15-minute, 'How you doing...
...What sets Campolo and his books apart—what has drawn the president's attention, and what has troubled many of his fellow evangelicals—is his politics...
...They met with him before the nationally televised prayer breakfast, and the president's elegantly turned apology was the result...
...there's the work of the American people to consider, after all...
...Though he is a large and consequential figure in evangelical circles, the wider world was unfamiliar with Campolo until September 11, when television cameras broadcast pictures of him wracked, doubled over, by heaving, shuddering sobs...
...The friendship has only intensified with the president's current troubles...
...If we are to be truly Christian, we must transcend such doctrinaire ideological approachIN CAMPOLO, THE PRESIDENT HAS FOUND A SOULMATE: EMPHATIC ON SECONDHAND SMOKE, RUMINATIVE AND RESTRAINED ON ABORTION...
...A verse a day will keep the devil away.' We won't let him off that easily...
...Even so, in 1985 he was placed in the dock for a "heresy trial" by the Christian Legal Society...
...Of the two pastors, MacDonald seems the better suited to the work of shepherding philanderers, having written widely on the subject and, indeed, having been one himself...
...His current fascination is with gay rights...
...the leaders wrote...
...Christians have an obligation to organize and put pressure on state and national legislators to pass more controls on smoking," he writes...
...And that's not an easy thing...
...Sorry as he is, the president is unlikely to go that far...
...After Clinton's disastrous non-apology on August 17, Campolo and ten other "religious leaders" immediately issued "An Appeal for Healing" to show they were still on board...
...It is advertising," he writes in Carpe Diem, "that has made the gratification of artificially created wants more important than the satisfaction of our real needs...
...This led him and two other evangelicals in 1995 to found Call to Renewal, so that Christian liberals could become mere courtiers to the power of the executive branch...
...The press release Campolo issued on September 14 explaining their new pastoral relationship closed with a revealing quote from the play A Raisin in the Sun: Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most...
...It is advertising that psychologically conditions us to sacrifice intimate relationships as we invest our time and talent just to get the stuff we are deceived into thinking we have to have...
...Thus his answer to the question in his book title—Is Jesus a Republican or a Democrat?—is, reassuringly, Neither...
...It was a conflation of Christian hope and political success that might have made even Jerry Falwell blush...
...Smoking is not just a bad habit...
...Campolo is theologically orthodox, in that he believes in the literal truth of the Bible, the Virgin Birth, the bodily resurrection, and so on...
...Campolo has the popularizer's knack for combining anecdote, truism, and slight observation as a means of trivializing the most sacred questions of human existence and making them digestible for the hungry hordes...
...Campolo and MacDonald have allowed that their counseling of the president will be arduous, searching, and confrontational, in the evangelical tradition...
...The leaders responded to the president with a unanimous standing ovation, and even a smattering of shouted "amens," but only Campolo went the whole hog and broke down— emotion being, as he says, what life is all about...
...TONY CAMPOLO’S FAME COMES FROM HIS DAZZLING POWER AS A MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER AND HIS FECUNDITY AS AN AUTHOR...
...Campolo, who is 62, ran unsuccessfully for Congress from his native Philadelphia in the early 1970s...
...The president is from Hot Springs, where easy marks are a dime a dozen...
...The apology the president delivered at the prayer breakfast was by any measure self-canceling— expressing his desire to turn away from his misbegotten actions while simultaneously unleashing his lawyers to "mount a vigorous defense" of them—but that didn't keep Campolo from bursting into tears...
...When I walk into the Oval Office," he has said, "I never shake hands with the president...
...That's when conversations become real, isn't it...
...If you're going to be pro-life, you ought to not only have a discussion about abortion, you also have to have a discussion about tobacco...
...He does 400 speaking engagements a year, and his books now total upwards of 25...
...We will, in fact, confront him in the name of Jesus...
...We need our country back...
...In this he is indistinguishable from dozens of other roadshow spiritualists...
...Amazingly, though, He does seem to agree with Tony Campolo on just about everything...
...In person and on the page, Campolo conveys enormous energy and cheerfulness...
...When the Christian Coalition supported the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, Campolo was alarmed that Christian conservatives were becoming mere courtiers to the power of the legislative branch...
...In the sermon Campolo hauled out one of his favorite preacherly riffs about Christ's resurrection: "It's only Friday, but Sunday's comin...
...He ran as a McGovern Democrat, and he remains one to this day, with modifications appropriate to the Clinton era...
...You're not pro-life if you're not talking about guns," Campolo said a while back...
...We've seen him yell at us," Campolo went on, "when we have come on so strong that he ended up yelling at us...
...Campolo says he wants to keep his pastoral relationship with the president private, and except for Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The two first met at a conference on inner-city troubles in 1993, and the friendship blossomed thereafter, as the president tried, with some success, to shore up support among evangelicals...
...His book Rebuilding Your Broken World counsels others to consider his example...
...In reality, smoking should be illegal...
...In his books and public pronouncements he declines to dwell overlong on the subject of abortion, and his criticism of the president's support for partial-birth abortion was muted...
...Where Campolo is truly unorthodox is in his strange inversion of the traditional social concerns of evangelicals...
...It is time once again to be led by our President...
...Campolo cooperated with the four-member panel, which cleared him of heresy but nevertheless scolded him for "some involuntary unorthodoxies of substance as well as some calculated unconventionalities in presentation...
...In this as in much else, the president and his pastor are in complete agreement...
...He asked MacDonald and Campolo to form a kind of pastoral tag team to help him through the difficult days ahead...
...His fame among evangelists springs from his dazzling power as a motivational speaker and his fecundity as an author...
...With Campolo thus on record as opposing the president's resignation, Clinton surely felt comfortable inviting his friend in for pastoral counseling...
...Translated into practical politics, however, this radical critique turns out to be rather toothless—Clinton-ian, even...
...I always hug him...
...Except he added a new spin...
...It was subtitled "A Pastoral Letter to the Nation," and it contained more exclamation points than an e-mail from Monica Lewinsky: "We want our country back...
...When he made the call, on Labor Day evening, Clinton's escalating round of apologies had been receiving bad reviews, owing partly to a certain—how to put it?—Clintonian quality ("I take full responsibility for my self-inflicted wounds," he slyly said in one plea for forgiveness...
...The president, in other words, has found a pastoral soulmate: absolutely emphatic on matters of secondary importance, strangely ruminative and restrained on the issues of urgent moment to their fellow Baptists...
...Sunday's comin...
...Tobacco is a particular Campolo obsession...
...His books are featherlight—happy pills for the brain...
...He acknowledges that homosexuality is, in his delicate phrase, "contrary to Scripture," but vehemently endorses the agenda of gay activists, short of homosexual marriage—a self-contradicting straddle that serves as a Biblical equivalent to the president's incoherent policy of "Don't ask, don't tell...
...Much of his analysis of our basic social ills carries a strong whiff of the faculty lounge, where the spirit of Herbert Marcuse continues to hover menacingly...
...Throughout Clinton's first term, Campolo visited the White House often, earning a mention—"my good friend Tony Campolo"—in the 1994 State of the Union address...
...He's a kind of Leo Buscaglia with Biblical citations...
...But they don't know it's only Friday...
...Our fundamental problem is acquisitiveness, which in turn is induced by dark forces of meretricious advertising that we are powerless to resist...
...Falwell and his fellow religious rightists were a favorite target of Campolo during the Reagan era, and the vehemence of Campolo's condemnation then lends irony to his friendship with Clinton now...
...Unlike most evangelicals, he sees abortion as one "life" issue among many...
...Campolo is a man of unquestioned devotion, and you don't need to doubt his sincerity to point out that his view of the president's situation is as generous as any penitent could ever wish— almost identical to the presi- dent's view, in fact...
Vol. 4 • October 1998 • No. 5
