“Emotion is what life is all about for me,” Tony Campolo has written, as if we couldn’t have guessed. 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. 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.” 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.
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. 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). He asked MacDonald and Campolo to form a kind of pastoral tag team to help him through the difficult days ahead. They met with him before the nationally televised prayer breakfast, and the president’s elegantly turned apology was the result.
Campolo says he wants to keep his pastoral relationship with the president private, and except for 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. Campolo and MacDonald have allowed that their counseling of the president will be arduous, searching, and confrontational, in the evangelical tradition.
“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? Here’s a verse of Scripture. A verse a day will keep the devil away.’ We won’t let him off that easily. We will, in fact, confront him in the name of Jesus.”
“We’ve seen him yell at us,” Campolo went on, “when we have come on so strong that he ended up yelling at us. And that’s not an easy thing. You know, to have the president of the Unites States yelling at you. That’s when conversations become real, isn’t it?”
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 book Rebuilding Your Broken World counsels other to consider his example. 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.
Sorry as he is, the president is unlikely to go that far; there’s the work of the American people to consider, after all. Here’s where Tony Campolo can be useful. Campolo is a sociologist by training — he teaches at Eastern College in Pennsylvania — and a political activist by inclination. His fame among evangelists springs from his dazzling power as a motivational speaker and his fecundity as an author. He does 400 speaking engagements a year, and his books now total upwards of 25. 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.
In person and on the page, Campolo conveys enormous energy and cheerfulness. He’s a kind of Leo Buscaglia with Biblical citations. Like the late Hug Doctor, he is given to extravagant physical gestures. “When I walk into the Oval Office,” he has said, “I never shake hands with the president. I always hug him. Because he needs to be hugged.” 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. His books are featherlight — happy pills for the brain. In this he is indistinguishable from dozens of other roadshow spiritualists. 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.
Campolo, who is 62, ran unsuccessfully for Congress from his native Philadelphia in the early 1970s. He ran as a McGovern Democrat, and he remains one to this day, with modifications appropriate to the Clinton era. 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. Our fundamental problem is acquisitiveness, which in turn is induced by dark forces of meretricious advertising that we are powerless to resist. “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. 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.”
Translated into practical politics, however, this radical critique turns out to be rather toothless — Clintonian, even. When Campolo discusses welfare reform, for example, he approvingly cites the work of Charles Murray. “We need a new kind of politics in America,” he writes, “that will refuse to buy into the party labels of the past. . . . If we are to be truly Christian, we must transcend such doctrinaire ideological approaches to the issues of the day.” Thus his answer to the question in his book title — Is Jesus a Republican or a Democrat? — is, reassuringly, Neither. Amazingly, though, He does seem to agree with Tony Campolo on just about everything.
Campolo is theologically orthodox, in that he believes in the literal truth of the Bible, the Virgin Birth, the bodily resurrection, and so on. Even so, in 1985 he was placed in the dock for a “heresy trial” by the Christian Legal Society. 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.” (It is disconcerting to discover that even conservative evangelicals talk this way.) Where Campolo is truly unorthodox is in his strange inversion of the traditional social concerns of evangelicals.
His current fascination is with gay rights. 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.” 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. Unlike most evangelicals, he sees abortion as one “life” issue among many.
“You’re not pro-life if you’re not talking about guns,” Campolo said a while back. “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.”
Tobacco is a particular Campolo obsession. He has written that secondhand smoke is as dangerous as firsthand smoke, even that it causes mental retardation. “Christians have an obligation to organize and put pressure on state and national legislators to pass more controls on smoking,” he writes. “In reality, smoking should be illegal. . . . Smoking is not just a bad habit. It is a work of the Evil One that must be destroyed.” 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.”
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 of their fellow Baptists. 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.
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. The president asked his friend to speak at a church service the morning of his second inauguration, and he wasn’t disappointed. In the sermon Campolo hauled out one of his favorite preacherly riffs about Christ’s resurrection: “It’s only Friday, but Sunday’s comin’!” Except he added a new spin. “[Conservative evangelicals] are saying, ‘This administration cannot be an instrument for changing the world for God,” Campolo thundered from the pulpit. “But they don’t know it’s only Friday! Sunday’s comin’!” It was a conflation of Christian hope and political success that might have made even Jerry Falwell blush.
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. 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. 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. 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 friendship has only intensified with the president’s current troubles. 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 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!” the leaders wrote. “We want our President to be allowed to be President. . . . The President confessed: ‘This was wrong.’ What more must we know?. . . It is time once again to be led by our President. We need our country back!”
With Campolo thus on record as opposing the president’s resignation, Clinton surely felt comfortable inviting his friend in for pastoral counseling. 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. The president is from Hot Springs, where easy marks are a dime a dozen.
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 president’s view, in fact. 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; when they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well, then, you ain’t learning’ — because that ain’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest and can’t believe in hisself’ cause the world done whipped him so.
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. In this as in much else, the president and his pastor are in complete agreement.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
