'Red-Letter' Christianity
In Letters to a Young Evangelical (Basic Books), Tony Campolo reminds all of us that when Jesus spoke, he spoke of social justice. Rev! talked with Campolo about this and other hot-button topics he addresses in the book -- and how his present views compare to those he held earlier.
Have you changed your perspective on the issue of homosexuality over the years?
Campolo: I made up my mind in my mid-20s about this issue. The first time I began to encounter any intelligent discussion on this was when I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. I began at that point to collect research and interview people who were homosexuals because I was doing my studies in the sociology of the family and this was a major issue. I came to the conclusion from a biblical perspective that I had to be faithful to what I thought the Scripture was teaching. Romans 1 does not allow for this behavior, but to condemn people for having feelings that they never chose to have seems crazy to say the least. That was my conclusion.
How out of step do you feel with your fellow evangelicals on this issue?
Campolo: Over the last few years I've become increasingly uncomfortable with my fellow evangelical Christians because they refuse to face the fact that in the overwhelming number of cases homosexuals do not change -- no matter hard they pray. I always emphasize that there are exceptions. But can people be prayed out of Alzheimer's disease? Of course, they can. Do you know anybody who has? I don't. The fact that God can do anything should not be questioned, but to say that you can pray yourself out of homosexuality creates a real problem. Many parents end up being alienated from their own children who are homosexual because they believe that if their kids would just get serious and pray about this they would be delivered. I could give you heart-breaking stories, of boys in particular, who cannot go home and see their parents because their parents say, "Until you repent and pray for God to change you, you can't come home."
Do you still consider yourself to be a political conservative?
Campolo: I used to be very conservative on political issues right up until about the time I was 30 years old. Then things began to change as I became overly aware that the Bible has a host of verses that deal with poverty. There are 2,000 verses of Scripture that deal with poverty, and this moved me out of my conservative mindset. Most of my conservative friends are compassionate -- there's a great willingness to respond to the needs of the poor on a personal or even on a church basis. Where my conservative friends differ with me is that they don't believe it's the role of the government to solve the problems of the poor. They believe it's totally the responsibility of individual Christians or churches.
Over the years I've come to the awareness that both are needed. We need the individual responses of people and the responses of churches. We need charity as Bono of U2 says. What Christian people and churches do is charity, and it's beautiful, and the Bible affirms it and blesses it. But there's something more than that -- in addition to charity there must also be justice. Justice becomes the responsibility of the government. Governments are called upon in Scripture to mete out justice, and when it comes to justice, it's not a good thing for a government to serve the interests of the rich. This is what government does.
If you look at the benefits that oil companies get, that big corporations get, you'd say that there's no question that this government serves the interest of rich people. If you look at the new tax laws, rich people get the good end of the policies. When it comes to issues like trade, fair trade, for instance, has become a great issue among many Christians, instead of free trade. This, of course, is bipartisan. This is not just Democrat or Republican. Both Clinton and Bush argued in favor of free trade. It sounds so democratic, free trade. But we're driving farmers out of business in third world countries because the trade relationships are unfair. We're able to subsidize our farmers; they're not able to subsidize theirs, hence their farmers become noncompetitive on the world market. Thus we're for fair trade rather than free trade. That moves us away from a conservative mindset. I'm moving away from conservativeness and the political conservatives.
Rev: In what other ways has your mind changed or not changed over the years on social issues?
Campolo: I'm for the cancellation of third world debt. I'm saying as an evangelical Christian that the Bible calls us to be environmentally concerned. The 8th chapter of Romans calls upon us to rescue creation. We're called upon to restore the earth; every seven years the land is supposed to be given a chance to revitalize, according to the 25th chapter of Leviticus. I could go through the Scripture and give you a host of verses to legitimate the claim that to be Christian is to be committed to protecting and rescuing the earth from environmental degradation.
Lastly, I've changed my thinking on the whole concept of war and moved more and more to the pacifist position. I've become of late a troubled pacifist. I say "troubled" for this reason: I know my ability to take this line of speaking against war is a privilege I have in the United States because a lot of brave young men and women laid down their lives to give me this freedom.
I've moved away from a just war theory to a pacifist position, but I know that my pacifism would not be allowed if it weren't for the protection that some brave people have provided for me. So that's why I'm a troubled pacifist. I'm quite convinced, as most historians are, that the church was pacifist for the first 300 years of its existence. I've articulated all this in the book -- why I believe these things and how my commitment to Scripture has moved me in this direction.
It's not that I've moved away from Scripture -- it's that I've embraced Scripture more and more passionately. I find in Isaiah Chapter 10 that the prophets call out against those people in government who have not passed laws that would help the poor and the widow and the orphan. In the 25th chapter of Matthew I'm told that God will judge the nations. I see that God holds those who hold political power responsible for the decisions they make concerning the poor and concerning the needy. Furthermore, I know that the charity of the church can do much good, and when you look at situation like Katrina, you'd have to say that if it weren't for the churches, not much would have happened there because the government failed miserably.
I also see that there are 46 million Americans who have no hospitalization, no medical coverage. I don't see how the church can meet that need. I think that's the role of government to meet that need. So I'm for universal healthcare. As you'll find in the book, many of us who are evangelicals are saying, "Maybe we can't call ourselves evangelicals any more." It used to be that evangelicals were people who believed that one was saved by having a personal surrender and involvement with Jesus Christ; one believed in the doctrines of the Apostle's Creed; one believed that the Bible was inspired by the Holy Spirit and was infallible for our lifestyles.
That high view of Scripture, believing in a personal relationship with Christ, believing in the doctrines of the Apostle's Creed -- that's what made you an evangelical. In today's world most people outside the church would say, "Oh, you're an evangelical?" and immediately assume you're gay-bashing, anti-feminist, anti-environmentalist, pro-war, anti-gun control, and pro capital punishment -- but there are a whole lot of us who believe in Jesus, who believe the Bible is infallible, who believe in the doctrines of the Apostle's Creed, who say, "Hey, we believe these things, but we don't go along with your position on these other issues." We don't think Jesus is a Republican. We don't think he's a Democrat either. We want a Jesus that transcends partisan politics, and we feel that evangelicalism has become synonymous with Republicanism in the United States, so we're calling ourselves Red Letter Christians these days.
You have to recognize that if you go back to the middle of the 1800s when Charles Finney was around, evangelicals were the social radicals and liberals of the day. It was Finney who was a primary force for the anti-slave movement. It was under the Finney revival that the feminist movement came about. In short, people like Jim Wallis and myself say, "We're not only evangelical -- we're the true evangelicals, getting back to the evangelicalism of the 1800s not what the 20th century evangelicals have made it to be.
Rev!: You've been somewhat critical of megachurch pastors for keeping silent on the social issues, except for Rick Warren on Aids.
Campolo: I'd also have to put Bill Hybels into that category. These people are willing to speak out on social issues but not without a price that has to be paid. What I find encouraging -- and I should have said this in the book -- is that I find more and more pastors of megachurches coming to grips with the need to redefine the people of their church in terms of reaching out to the poor and oppressed. It's becoming increasingly the thing to do.
I see change, but in most instances they're not going to talk about the policy of government because they know that will alienate people. There are notable exceptions, but generally speaking, chances are that megachurches are quite willing to do charity for the poor and point out the biblical responsibilities that we should all have to the poor, but they're not willing to begin to say, "The minimum wage should be raised. There should be universal healthcare. There should be fair trade. There should be some kind of balance for education so that the people who live in poor neighborhoods don't have lousy education because the tax base of their communities are inadequate." They're not ready to take on social policy issues. They're willing, however, to make it clear that the Bible calls upon us to respond to the poor and to actually get their church people involved in programs to help the poor. It's when it comes to political, social policy that megachurch pastors are ready to back off.
This is why I find, interestingly enough, that I'm much more at home with mainline denominations these days than I've ever been before. People like the Lutherans, the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians are constantly inviting me to their conventions. I'm going there these days instead of the great Jesus festivals because mainline denominations are made up of people who when you talk about theology are for the most part suddenly evangelical. But people in mainline denominations are ready to say that the time has come to address policy issues and acknowledge that the government is called upon to fulfill certain responsibilities to the poor and to the needy of the world. In spite of the fact that mainline denominations are suffering and in many cases dying, I still hang my hat with them, as somebody who believes in what evangelicals believe but who doesn't want to be allied with a mindset that says to be evangelical is to be the Religious Right.
How has your mind changed about pastors -- who they are and what they should be doing?
Campolo: The pastor has an incredibly difficult task in being faithful to his or her responsibilities. In the biblical days there were prophets and there were priests. The priest did the pastoral ministries. They performed marriages, funerals; they were the people who ministered to people on a personal level. They were the pastoral servants of God. Every once in a while a prophet would come down from the hills like Amos and thunder at the audience. People like Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, who would say, "Thus saith the Lord." There were two distinct roles. The problem is that in the modern pastoral position the pastor has to be both the priest and the prophet. These two roles are merged for the contemporary Christian leader in the church, and they're conflicting roles. The more you do the prophetic thing, the less you can do the pastoral thing. The more you do the pastoral thing, the more difficult it becomes to do the prophetic thing.
Rev!: How can anybody then be a pastor and keep any kind of integrity?
Campolo: Let me answer that with a story. It comes from William Sloan Coffin, who during the Vietnam War years preached a sermon against the war. A Colonel, a military man in his congregation was irate. On the way out of church, he shouted at William Sloan Coffin, "It was all that I could do to keep my seat. I wanted to stand up, stomp out, and yell back at you 'bullshit.' " Coffin said, "Why didn't you do that?" The colonel paused and said, "Because the night my wife died, you stayed at her bedside holding her hands, praying with her all night long." This is a great story. Only by being a good pastor can you earn the right for people to put up with you when you do make your prophetic utterances.
What's your perspective on the issue of women pastors?
Campolo: Let me sum it up in one line. I find it absolute hypocrisy when certain fundamentalists are quite willing to send women to preach to people in Africa, and the jungles of Indonesia, or among primitive tribes in the interior of Brazil but won't let them preach in their own town. There's duplicity here. If you're going to deny women the right to preach in your own backyard, then don't send them overseas to preach to those in other lands.
copyright © 2009 Group Publishing Inc.
