One day on the radio I heard Terry Gross of FreshAir interview a reverend of the evangelical school recant his less-than-spiritual political teachings to his parishioners. The interview did not really tell the moment this man realized violence, bending the truth, and shaming of public figures was not the best way to spread the gospel. I was curious, given present evangelical support for a clearly ethically-challenged president.
If I were to say Costly Grace is just another way of Rob Schenck of achieving what seems to be his lifelong goal—fame & a degree of fortune—it sounds like sour grapes from me. From the start of his ministry Schenck felt he was underutilized. Many of us feel that way in our lives, and supplement our jobs with more meaningful work. In his case, Schenck brought that extra-curricular political work into the pulpit, declaring that defenders of abortion rights are evil. Increasingly strident calls for shutting clinics led to the murder of an abortion doctor by someone Schenck did not know but who lived in his home town of Buffalo, New York.
Though Schenck professed not to advocate violence, his words as reverend were profoundly divisive. Even when he attended the funeral for the slain doctor, he pushed his message in the bouquet he sent to the widow. The pushback he received forced him back a step, but he continued his message, convinced of his righteousness. Faith and Action is a christian not-for-profit ministry he founded to lobby Congress and which he based in D.C. He says
“I struggled with how oversimplifications of difficult and complex human problems and actions were a convenient shortcut for me…Decades later, that cheapening of human experience would haunt me. But not yet.”I don’t resent his admitting wrong-headedness after a long life. I just question whether spending so much time relating his own life and experiences was the best way to do it. Surely a more robust discussion of the reasons such views do not actually follow Christian teachings would be useful, rather than a personal memoir.
Schenck had first been radicalized by Jerry Falwell who thought Christians had been silent too long and needed to make known their political concerns. He was encouraged by Reagan’s “city on a hill” metaphor and W’s answer to ‘the philosopher he admired most was “Christ, because he changed my heart.”’ It is interesting that the beginning of the crumbling of Schenck’s defenses came with the election of Barak Obama, and his understanding of race in America.
Schenck didn’t consider himself racist, having been born to a Jew and subjected in youth to slurs, but he could see why black men and women were rejoicing, could see we lived in a society that had discounted them. He had to admit that God probably loved Obama and the liberals as much as he loved conservatives.
Probably the most important part of Schenck’s re-education came about as a series of visits he made to Morocco to engage with Muslim clerics and a series of therapy sessions instigated by his wife. Schenck had considerable fame at this point, and perhaps an inflated idea of himself and what he had come to believe. He discovered that Muslims are really just humans also, and his wife helped him to see discrepancies between the man he felt he was and how he manifest in the home.
If you aren’t beginning to see why this man annoys me so, you may not understand why this book was unsatisfying. Schenck had not attended college when he left high school but did a course of bible studies for four years and attended a short course in the ministry. His historical, scientific, psychological, and philosophical learning came through life lessons and his work.
This way of learning has a very long ramp up time and Schenck’s life demonstrates that phenomenon. His wife, on the other hand, was interested in her own education and gradually developed more liberal views sooner than her husband. Her influence on her husband, and her views put pressure on him to understand the world in a larger way.
When Schenck was offered the opportunity to study for a PhD, he admits he did it so that he could be called "Doctor" instead of just "Reverend." He decided to study Dietrich Bonhoeffer and travelled to Germany for a short course on his life and writings. Bonhoeffer’s experiences in WWII made a big impression on Schenck, himself the son a Jew. He began to see all people as God’s creation, forcing him to look at his life’s work in a new way.
Called upon to intervene when Pastor Jones of Florida declared he would burn a tower of Korans, he began to see a grotesquerie of passionate evangelicals and extreme nationalism when he discovered Jones’ church escorts were armed. Further, he discovered the evangelical churches operating in America “shared a generic disease with German churches of the 1930s: they’d traded “the supreme lordship of Jesus Christ for the demigods of political and social potentates.” Yes, finally. Long road.
But when he wrote his dissertation, he was afraid if it was circulated that he would become a pariah in his own religious community where he’d been teaching all these years. It was guns finally that changed the argument. How can someone pro-life be pro-gun? When Trump won the nomination and then the presidency, Schenck could clearly see how far evangelicals had strayed from their religious roots.
I am grateful his conversion took place. I wish I could feel as confident that he’d given up his unhealthy attraction to fame and self-aggrandizement. Is it wrong to like the limelight? It could be. That is something he will have to ask himself in conversation with his God.
He writes in the Afterword that his editor at HarperCollins was responsible for “pulling the story out of him.” He also gives credit to his collaborator on the 2015 film The Armor of Light that asks if a pro-gun stance can be reconciled with God’s word. So perhaps this memoir is not a promotional vehicle for the film, as I previously imagined. Again, I can’t judge that. But since we haven’t had many pastors reveal their ‘road to conversion,’ this will have to do.
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