I’ll remember Mike Cromartie as a fellow Christian and my friend. I met Mike in the early 1980s. We were roughly the same age and had some of the same interests—at the top of the list, politics and religion. Mike became a master of evangelical Christianity and its involvements in politics in his work at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mike knew everybody in the fields he plowed, and over the years he put together dinners, meetings, and conferences that effectively provided a remedial education in things religious and theological for a generation of media elites that had grown up seldom going to church.
Mike understood the subversive nature of his work, but that he was a Christian was the most important aspect of his life, as it is for all Christians. He understood saving faith as a gift of God. He believed in providence and saw the cancer that took his life permitted by a God who has his own inscrutable ways. Mike, you might have guessed, was Reformed in theology, a Calvinist to some degree, if you dug down with him. In terms of church he was a theologically conservative Episcopalian, and he went every Sunday. He was not shy about discussing what he believed in public settings, and by God’s grace he was a good man: Recently he went to the funeral of a friend’s wife who had died from cancer and spoke encouraging words to the family. Not of himself and his own condition did he think first.
Soon after I met Mike we were on a court, shooting hoops. He loved basketball, having played some at Covenant College in Chattanooga (before entering the NBA as the official mascot for the Philadelphia 76ers). When his boys were in high school, he bought one of those big outdoor shooting machines—and used it a lot. Not many people would so adorn their driveway. But that was Mike. And Jenny, Mike’s fine wife, didn’t seem to mind.
Mike was rarely down. He had a laugh that came easily, and a big smile, and he could talk about most anything; no one was a better companion. A friend of ours once told me that the one thing that could ensure the quality of a party was Mike’s presence. There was never any doubt about that. And I’ll concede: this man of cultural influence, this believer in Christ, the Son of God, was the better shot.
