The alliance between the Christian Right and GOP has no better exemplar these days than the support of two Ohio megachurches for gubernatorial candidate Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell seems headed for defeat, but that's his fault -- arrogant, unethical opportunist that he is -- and not that of the megachurches' two de facto PACS, Rod Parsley's Reformation Ohio and the Ohio Restoration Project, chaired by Russell Johnson, senior pastor of Fairfield Christian Church.
by Of the two, Parsley is better known, but Johnson, in my view and that of others who've encountered him, is the more impressive operator. Whatever his faults, he comes across as a true believer and not an Elmer Gantry type.
Last evening I learned that Johnson has agreed to be our sixth discussant at an upcoming Forum on Church and State in Ohio's Electoral Politics. I was pleased to hear it, having met Johnson last March after a "town hall meeting" with Jim Wallis. Here's my account of that episode. I hope it humanizes the conflict between progressive Christians like myself and conservatives like Pastor Johnson.
It was 2:30 p.m.; we wanted to get downtown in time to hear Jim Wallis of Sojourners, and Russell Johnson of Fairfield Christian Church, engage in a dialogue about the appropriate role of evangelical Christians vis a vis electoral politics. The event was held at the Capitol Theatre. Admission was free, but you had to register online beforehand since the organizers expected the theatre to fill up completely. From what I could see it, it did not -- it was maybe three-quarters full -- but since the theatre has a 903-seat capacity you were still talking, say, 700 people.
In the seat next to me on one side sat a member of my church. On the other side sat a complete stranger, who might have been a fan of Jim Wallis or who might have been in complete sympathy with Pastor Johnson's Ohio Restoration Project. At first there was no way to know. For that matter, there was no way to know how many people in the theatre embraced the ORP's philosophy and mission and how many found it troubling. I would have guessed that the ORP would have done sufficient "advance work," to use a phrase from campaign politics, to pack the theatre with its supporters. But I turned out to be wrong. Once the dialogue got going and the audience began to respond to things that Wallis and Johnson were saying, it became evident that a majority of those present -- including the neighbor on my left -- found Wallis's message far more resonant than Johnson's.
There were a couple of reasons for this. First, Wallis simply represented a point of view with which they were more in sympathy. But secondly, Wallis obviously had vast experience in dealing with Christians with differing viewpoints. He was very deft at making his points irenically. Johnson, by contrast, seemed to be used to talking mainly to the politically and culturally like-minded. At one point, for instance, he spoke of "homosexuals" and "sodomy" in the same breath. Then, belatedly sensing that many in the audience found the phrasing offensive, he added that he had sat at the bedsides of many people who were dying of AIDS -- a statement which not only blundered into the hoary stereotype about AIDS being the gay plague, but which, given the condescending tone, came off as if he were saying, "Some of my best friends are sodomites."
Indeed, throughout the 90 minutes of the dialogue, Pastor Johnson bounded from disaster to disaster with what often seemed a kind of animal joy. Even his hundreds of supporters found few occasions on which they could really applaud him, whereas the moderates in the theatre vocally groaned at any number of his statements while vigorously cheering Jim Wallis.
The low point, which of course the Columbus Dispatch pounced upon as its lead when reporting the event, came when Pastor Johnson, struggling to make the case that the MSM was biased in its reporting of the situation in Iraq, remarked that the media had given fifty-eight more times coverage to the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib than to -- I forget the specific example -- the reopening of schools in Baghdad or some such. He not only implied that the prisoner abuse was overblown, he all but said so outright. That was more than one woman in the audience could tolerate. She stood up and screamed, "You're condoning torture! You're condoning torture! You're condoning torture!"
Pastor Johnson reacted for all the world as if the woman had simply taken leave of her senses and descended to the depths of rudeness. A surprising number of people in the audience seemed to be with him on that point. Personally I thought she was the only person in the room with any guts. Some opinions really do deserve zero tolerance, and the bland acceptance of the physical and psychological abuse of humans who, whatever their previous offenses, are within one's control and utterly helpless, is just plain unacceptable.
But that was the nadir of the event. And it was heartening to see that Wallis and Johnson could and did agree on a few things, most notably the need to do something to address poverty at home and abroad.
The event concluded around 5 p.m. or so, maybe sooner. To my surprise it was easy to walk on the stage to meet the principals, the moderator, etc. A clutch of groupies all but surrounded Wallis. Johnson was more accessible; he was just talking with a handful of men who were leaders or staffers of ORP. I went over to say hello. We got to talking; Johnson found out I was a military historian and asked what the officers of my acquaintance thought of the media's coverage of Iraq. I told him I seldom heard them even speak of it. When Iraq comes up, they mainly talk in terms of U.S. policy and whether or not it makes good strategic sense. It's basically the civilians who care about the MSM. When you've been on the battlefield or know people who have, you don't need the MSM; you have your own independent perspective. So unless you believe that the MSM really has an impact on the enemy's perceptions -- that they're over there thinking, boy, we'd give up this insurgency in a heartbeat if the American media weighed in on the side of the Bush administration -- the whole MSM thing is just a case of the age-old itch to shoot the messenger.
The thing that surprised me is that he managed to seem genuinely interested in me. He asked me for my business card and gave me one of his. In fact, although I think he perceived that we were on opposite sides of many political and spiritual questions, he seemed to be the kind of individual whose default mode, so to speak, is to appreciate and enjoy other people. In that respect there is much I could learn from him.
At some point I snapped a shot of Pastor Johnson, probably this one:
by radical1civility
He remarked that "that thing" -- by which he meant my digital camera -- was going to have a big impact. I assume he was referring to the ease with which a person can take a picture and then slather it all over the Internet. Which, come to think of it, is how we came to learn about Abu Ghraib in the first place. I asked him if he'd ever heard of a site called Under Mars. I wish we could have had a conversation about that, because I would have been interested in his opinion of photos like these (which I've discussed elsewhere). But almost immediately his handlers indicated he was needed at the post-event reception.
The reception was quite nicely done. It was hosted by members of Fairfield Christian Church. I took the opportunity to chat with several of them. They seemed like very nice people. I got a good vibe from them. And in answer to my questions, they told me that prior to Pastor Johnson's arrival, Fairfield had had about 240 members. It was Pastor Johnson's infectious dynamism and drive that had made it the megachurch it is today. Regardless of what one thinks of the megachurch phenomenon, it's self-evident that they manage to connect with the spiritual needs of a lot of people, which in a sense requires as much willingness as my own church to meet people where they are in their faith journeys. They're just different journeys.
The bottom line is that, paradoxically, I found myself as warmed spiritually by Pastor Johnson and his parishioners as by my own liberal, open and affirming congregation, despite the fact that in purely human terms, these groups are about as disparate as one could imagine. You walk away from encounters like that and you think, something bigger is at work here. Or rather, Someone bigger.