Cry aloud; do not hold back; lift up your voice like a trumpet.
—Isaiah 58:1
In 1991, Mike Pence, two-time election loser, was looking for something new to do with his time. Other defeated congressional candidates would return to their prior work in business or a profession, but Pence had no particular interest in practicing law, which was what he had trained to do. He lacked the standing to land a teaching gig (another common choice for defeated politicians), and nothing in his experience suggested he was qualified to work in government. Pence was left looking for some other way for him to stay true to the career mantra of his generation— “Do what you love”—and to make a livelihood out of work that he could enjoy.
What Mike Pence enjoyed was arguing. This didn’t mean he liked to fight, although he had shown he would make verbal attacks when necessary. What he preferred was to charm and persuade, and he was good at it. Like a kid who learns in Little League that he can hit a baseball better than most grown men, Pence had found his preternatural public speaking talent in the high school debate club. And, unlike athletes, who rarely get much better after they become adults, Pence possessed skills that could be developed for decades to come. It was his good fortune to find himself adrift and looking for somewhere to attach himself at a time when a great effort was being made to create comfortable homes for well-spoken young conservatives.
By 1991, foundations and wealthy individuals had nearly completed the construction of an alternative infrastructure for the development of people and arguments to advance an agenda of low taxes, deregulation, curtailed government, and Christian Right morality. Conceived to oppose colleges and universities, which were considered irredeemably biased against conservative thought, these institutions ranged from nationally oriented centers such as the Heritage Foundation to dozens of state and local groups scattered around the country. Year after year, donors kept these think tanks operating with millions of dollars. Corporate backers represented the tobacco, drug, and technology industries, among others. Family foundations included the names DeVos, Coors, Olin, Scaife, and Koch.
The conservative organizations funded writers and researchers—many were given academic-sounding titles such as “distinguished fellow”—who generally devoted themselves to completing manuscripts that supported preset policy goals. Among the notions spawned in these places, the granddaddy of them all was “supply side” economics, which found little support among economists but justified such policy prescriptions as tax cuts for the rich, which also happened to benefit the wealthy and big business. (Put simply, this theory suggests that rather than dampen prices, abundance stimulates demand, so tax cuts would rev up the economy. This is the opposite of what happens in the real world, where once buyers have what they want, they close their wallets.) The salesmanship practiced by the institutes that distributed papers backing supply-side economics and other partisan ideas reduced policy to a matter of marketing, with victory going to the argument packaged with the right slogan and adequate budget.1
At the national and local levels, the think tanks were filled with young people who were groomed for lifelong service to conservative causes and somewhat older men and women who used them as temporary homes when they were between campaigns or jobs in government. Mike Pence fit into both categories and within weeks of losing the 1990 election got a position as president of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation. Funded by many of the same benefactors who supported the national organizations, IPR claimed to commission studies but more typically funded political broadsides. As a Republican budget expert told The Indianapolis Star, “They’ve thrown out some ideas, but so far, everything’s fairly loose.” When Pence took over, the review operated with a budget of $200,000 per year. Its main activities were publishing a journal and submitting articles to newspapers. In general, the group favored businesses and Republicans and opposed Democrats, unions, and government agencies.
The position at IPR required that Pence oversee the operation of the foundation and serve as its principal cheerleader. Friendly and soft-spoken, Pence excelled as a promoter. Within two years, he increased funding to $500,000. During the same time, the little institute gained wider notice in the press and greater influence in the state capitol. Much of this progress was due to Pence’s mild but also determined advocacy, which sometimes required a bit of debate club trickery. When a critic noted that the IPR pledged to “exalt the truths of the Declaration of Independence, especially those concerning the interrelated freedoms of religion, enterprise, and speech” though none of these truths are referenced in the declaration, Pence was steadfast in defense. “We talk about the freedoms of the Declaration, not in the Declaration,” he said. Such sophistry was nonsense.
Under Pence, the IPR became more provocative, adding social commentary to its otherwise dry menu of proposals on taxation and municipal services. In one paper, Douglas Kmiec, a law professor at Notre Dame, used the news that basketball star Magic Johnson had been diagnosed with HIV to argue that “the only genuine morality” in sex occurred in marriage. He went on to criticize President Bush for praising Johnson’s public statements on his condition. Under Pence, the IPR alleged “systemic corruption” at state universities based on a study of instructor salaries that erroneously included administrators and physicians at university hospitals. The author of the study complained that the IPR had released a draft that wasn’t ready for publication and gave it a title he felt was inaccurate. He told a local paper that because of this experience, he hoped to have “little or nothing to do” with the think tank in the future.
Seemingly modeled after the snide and provocative American Spectator, the Indiana Policy Review’s opinion pieces often reeked of derision and prejudice. Its writers seemed especially vexed by gay Americans’ demands for equal rights. In one piece, which included what was undoubtedly the most extensive, prurient, and graphic descriptions of sex acts ever printed in a “policy” magazine, retired colonel Ronald Ray insisted that “homosexuality is a grave threat to our national health and our national security” because it made people vulnerable to blackmail.2
Another essay published by Pence decried the idea that “gaydom be elevated from a pathological condition or mere sexual preference to the status of one of several natural human divergences such as hair or skin color.” (In fact, medical authorities had abandoned the idea that homosexuality was a pathology in 1973.) The magazine was also irked by efforts by the disabled to reach equal status, criticizing President Bush for supporting the Americans with Disabilities Act. The latter piece was credited to a “senior fellow” who had recently been a staffer at the Indiana Chamber of Commerce. The same author, who was called an economist but didn’t have a doctorate, was a frequent critic of public schools and argued forcefully for proposals that shifted tax dollars to private schools under the rubric of “choice” in education.3
In his own writing, Pence initially avoided controversies by taking people-pleasing positions. In one article, he defended native son Vice President Dan Quayle against those who would push him off the GOP ticket. In another, he advocated term limits for elected state officials and members of Congress. Term limits would reduce the power of entrenched incumbents like his nemesis Phil Sharp. (Pence did not consider the argument that long-serving members of Congress often use their seniority to benefit the folks back home.) When he eventually sharpened his focus, Pence aimed at an easy target—a local talk radio host named Stan Solomon. In a piece published in The Indianapolis Star, Pence criticized Solomon for making personal attacks and concluded he was a crank.
New to the Indiana airwaves, Solomon was a conspiracy-minded provocateur whose politics fit well with Pence’s but whose style couldn’t have been more different. Solomon said he believed the Central Intelligence Agency armed civil rights protesters and that the men who carried out the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City were part of a federal plot. He called Rev. Jesse Jackson a “pimp,” declared Anita Hill a “slut,” and said a local critic got his ideas “out of an enema bag.” He also theorized that the Holocaust occurred in part because “influential Jewish people started promoting as fact that homosexuality is just as acceptable as heterosexuality.” To keep himself safe, Solomon always carried a pistol.4
Solomon had a six-day-a-week outlet on a prominent Indianapolis station, WIBC. His job proved the moneymaking power of provocative radio personalities who energized both those who agreed with their views and those who were repelled. The trend toward this kind of on-air talk had been established by the nationally syndicated Rush Limbaugh, whose acidic schtick was more sophisticated but no less pointed than Solomon’s. Among the imitators who arose across the country, Solomon was one of the most extreme and made an easy target for the outrage of those who wanted to position themselves as more moderate.
As he criticized Solomon, Mike Pence was starting his own broadcasting career at WXIR, a tiny station owned by the American Bible Radio Group and which was devoted to the broadcast of sermons and Christian music. In a short time, he moved to a bigger station that gave him a weekly show. Pence performed in a style that he admitted “rips off Rush Limbaugh.” Limbaugh’s record of stoking outrage and intensifying the political divide made him an odd role model for a man who had just published his “Confessions of a Negative Campaigner,” and Pence promoted right-wing views with an Indiana focus. Add the periodic publication of his own Mike Pence Report on politics—about 250 people paid the $19.95 per year to subscribe—and it was obvious that he was building a personal brand that competed with the Indiana Policy Review Foundation. By the end of 1993, Pence decided to leave the little think tank. The break was apparently hastened by a disagreement over founder Charles Quilhot’s increasing criticism of Senator Richard Lugar. A moderate in a GOP that was leaning ever more Right, Lugar wasn’t conservative enough for Quilhot, who called for the senator to resign. (This was the opening salvo in what would be a long assault on Lugar from his Right flank.) Pence objected to the attack, and by January 1994, he was finished as the boss at IPR, which he said was becoming too conservative for him. He was, apparently, a Lugar Republican.5
When The Mike Pence Show went daily in April 1994, the host said he didn’t expect to run for public office again. The “restraints on my ability to be candid are very frustrating,” said Pence as he wondered aloud whether he ever had the temperament for campaigning. In a newspaper interview, he seemed embarrassed by his performance as a candidate. “I don’t think there was any style of negative campaigning I didn’t use,” he confessed. The only campaign mistake he blamed on others was his use of the for-profit committee that paid his bills. He smelled something fishy in the fact that the law permitted these practices even though they were toxic in the minds of voters. “It’s one of those rabbit traps that the political classes laid for challengers,” he complained, and it taught him that politics was a game he would rather not play. Broadcasting was a career choice, he said, not a step toward another run. He said he wasn’t a “good and effective politician” and he felt that all his ambition for office had disappeared. “If I was trying to rehabilitate myself, this would be an interesting way to do it,” he allowed. “I’m just not.”
On the radio, Pence spent 180 minutes daily (minus commercials) sharing his views, interviewing guests, and taking calls from listeners. Folksy in a way Limbaugh could never be, Pence opened his show with the words, “Greetings across the waves of amber grain,” and he talked about everything from basketball to the weather, but his most frequent topics revolved around a bleak vision of American society.
“Our nation is in decline,” he said as he complained about abortion, teen pregnancy, and divorce. Where others saw economic factors—stalled wages, rising prices—requiring parents to work more and putting families under stress, Pence imagined that political liberals were to blame. In his mind, feminism wasn’t a struggle for equality but rather an attack on the way things should be. Social programs weren’t intended to address human needs but rather deliberate efforts to undermine families. “The epicenter of our cultural decline is the decline of the family,” said Pence. “Welfare regulation, illegitimacy, outcome-based education, too much government; all are directly related to the decline of the family.” (An approach that assessed students on their mastery of course materials, outcome-based education was backed by business leaders and many Republicans but then became a bogeyman for Christian conservatives who believed it undermined religion.)6
Radio Mike stood reliably on the Right and often sought to get ahead of whatever trends moved the GOP. When fellow Christian Right activist Newt Gingrich mounted a drive to become Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1994, Pence supported him on the radio. When Pat Buchanan ran well in the 1996 Iowa caucuses, Pence ignored William F. Buckley’s denunciation of Buchanan as an extremist (because he had questioned the historical record of the Holocaust) to say he was “four square in the mainstream.” On the broadcast where he defended Buchanan, Pence also interviewed Chris Dickson of a local organization called Family First, whom he said “proudly falls into the category” of the Christian Right and thanked him for leaving his “horns and pitchfork” at home. Dickson’s main concern was America’s “moral decay,” which he said could be repaired by “conservative evangelicals.” Toward this end, he quizzed candidates on their positions, distributed literature, and ran two failed campaigns for local office. He didn’t like the press and sought to counteract its influence by purchasing airtime on a radio station where he broadcast his views and read from the Bible.7
Skepticism about the news media was a frequent topic for Mike Pence, who said that journalists “vilified” people who applied their religious convictions to politics. Of course, he was not above vilifying others for values that conflicted with his. He declared Dr. Jack Kevorkian “a monster” for assisting a dying woman’s suicide. And a news item about a female officer breaking a military rule against adultery led him to a discussion of the Ten Commandments, “the normalization” of adultery, and whether women should be permitted to serve. “I for one,” said Pence, “believe the seventh commandment contained in the Ten Commandments is still a big deal.” He couldn’t help but mock the woman involved in the affair as both a “grizzled feminist” and a “doe-eyed hapless victim.” He asked, “What could possibly be a bigger deal?” than her affair with a civilian man.
With pop and country music bumpers announcing the start and end of segments, Pence beckoned people to call 1-800-603-MIKE and leafed through the newspapers. As he gained confidence as a broadcaster, Pence tried out some impressions—he did a good Bill Clinton—and put some distance between himself and the likes of Solomon and Limbaugh, who, he said, took things too personally. His show was “infotainment,” he added. “I’m conservative, but not in a bad way.” Pence talked of Solomon as someone who lived in the “paranoid little tributaries” of politics.
Opposite as they were in style, Pence and Solomon were sometimes bonded on issues such as gays serving the military, and they were both outspoken in their hope that conservative Christianity would guide government officials. The main difference was that while Solomon ranted and railed, Pence expressed himself in an indoor voice. After the 1996 Republican National Convention, Pence lamented the low TV ratings and blamed them on appearances and speeches by “an endless line of pro-choice women, AIDS activists, and proponents of affirmative action.” The party needed to remember, he wrote, that “traditional Pro-Family conservatives make up the bedrock of modern Republican electoral success.”8
Solomon and Pence were also both temporarily employed by the same Rev. Gene Hood who had stormed the Miss Gay America pageant, been arrested at a women’s health clinic, and donated to Pence’s failed campaign for Congress. Hood, of the Independent Nazarene Church, controlled a string of Christian radio stations, including two in Indiana. One of his stations carried Pence in 1995 but dropped him when Pence refused to stop booking a guest named Harrison Ullman, who promoted more liberal-leaning views. “I want my show to be fair, civil, and open to all sides of an issue,” Pence had said. Solomon was on the same station as Pence and would remain with Rev. Hood for years despite both his political vitriol and personal attacks. Nothing Solomon said seemed to trouble Hood. Speaking of one local businessman, Solomon said, without offering any evidence, “He can’t keep his hands off very young girls.” When contacted by the press, Rev. Hood said he thought Solomon should “lay off that tacky stuff” but kept Solomon on the air for three hours nightly.9
At the more powerful WIBC, Pence was more Indiana than the state fair, promoting local institutions, from the Indianapolis 500 car race to Indiana University basketball coach Bob Knight. Though hotheaded, profane, and physically abusive, Knight was a living legend in Indiana thanks to three national championships. When players began leaving the team because they couldn’t adapt to Knight, Pence was among those who took the coach’s side. Within three years, after further complaints and video and audio evidence became public, Knight was fired for behavior deemed “uncivil, defiant, and unacceptable.”
Although Knight proved to be in the wrong and undeserving of support, Pence was on firm ground lining up behind him. For one thing, plenty of Hoosiers thought Knight’s success and his position of authority meant he could do what he wanted with his players. Besides, Pence was himself becoming such a comfortable presence with his audience that he didn’t have to worry much about any single comment. He was so well liked that when a station in Kokomo celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, Pence was brought in to do his show from the parking lot.
By the time he was broadcasting from a Kokomo parking lot, Pence was syndicated statewide on the Indiana Network, which was the property of Wabash Valley Broadcasting.
The tone of Pence’s broadcasts helped attract advertisers who made the show profitable. Pence’s income depended in part on the revenue, and he needed the salary to support a growing family. The Pences had always wanted children. However, in the first six years of their marriage, they had been disappointed by their inability to conceive. They had even tried gamete intrafallopian transfer, which is used by some Catholics to get around theological objections to procedures that involve fertilizing eggs outside the body.
GIFT, as the treatment is called, was not accepted by all Catholic authorities. Some objected to it on the grounds that it defied conception via the “marital act,” even though the semen was collected in a condom during sex. Despite their extraordinary efforts, the Pences didn’t conceive, and Karen would say she experienced a crisis of faith. Finally, after ending GIFT, she became pregnant at age thirty-four. A son, Michael Jr., was born in 1991. He was followed by two daughters named Audrey and Charlotte. Karen was no longer teaching, leaving her husband as the sole wage earner for the family. His prospects improved when his employer made him an offer to get into television.
Wabash Valley Broadcasting was owned by one of the wealthiest families in the country, the Hulman-George clan, which was also involved in real estate, finance, energy, and food processing. Its Indianapolis TV station, WNDY, was not affiliated with a major network. It aired mainly reruns of wholesome family shows. The station was a perfect fit for Pence, whose talk show was a mild-mannered version of national political roundtable programs like Meet the Press. It was taped once weekly and aired at odd hours, when it competed against the likes of Flipper, The Lawrence Welk Show, Teletubbies, and Barney and Friends.
On TV, Pence used humor to turn his cornstalk image into an asset. Introduced as “the man who would have been the next James Bond, if his mom had let him,” Pence worked hard to cultivate a connection with people who might share his perspective, which included a bit of anxiety if not resentment when it came to the world beyond Indiana. His first show, inspired by the debut of a racy new film called Showgirls, was set up as a battle between midwestern decency and the straw man of a depraved entertainment industry.
Titled “Hollywood vs. Indiana,” as if the film business had organized itself to hurt the people in Pence’s audience, the entire half hour amounted to an alarm occasioned by a movie that was so bad that hardly anyone went to see it and it ruined the career of its star, Elizabeth Berkley. The little controversy around Showgirls was stimulated by the fact that the perky, blond-haired Berkley was previously known for her part in the squeaky-clean TV show Saved by the Bell, which presented a saccharine version of high school life. In Showgirls, Berkley’s character, a stripper, was often nude or having sex of one sort or another. The contrast with her previous TV role was both intentional and disturbing for parents who had been happy for their kids to be fans of Saved by the Bell.
The panelists on Pence’s first TV show generally agreed with the host’s assault on Hollywood. Some called for regulations to control film and TV. They didn’t seem to be aware that some of what was proposed had been tested before and found by courts to be unconstitutional. The high point of the program may have been Pence’s imitation of national talk show host David Letterman’s “Top Ten” list. In this version, Pence offered the Top Five Differences Between Indiana and Hollywood. Among them were “In Indiana, people with paranoid delusions get therapy; in Hollywood, they write scripts for Oliver Stone” and “In Hollywood, people think Dan Quayle can’t spell potato; in Indiana, people think Elizabeth Taylor can’t spell commitment.”
Setting aside the fact that Vice President Quayle actually misspelled potato on national TV and the elderly Taylor had been reduced to doing voice-overs for The Simpsons, Pence’s Top Five was a pale imitation. The self-deprecating part of his presentation was warm and even charming. The Us vs. Them flavor of the Hollywood bashing seemed purposely crude. Besides, Pence was an avid consumer of Hollywood’s products. He loved The Wizard of Oz, despite the feminist power of its main characters and the occult themes deployed by writer L. Frank Baum, who was a member of the pre–new age Theosophical Society. If he could find something beautiful in Oz, it was disingenuous to encourage a culture war between Hollywood and the Heartland. Supply and demand drove the production of films and television programs, and people in Indiana supplied some of the demand.
As on the radio, on TV Pence rarely wandered beyond Indiana, but when he did, he was likely to fix his attention on Bill Clinton, who, as president, was a favorite target of right-wing broadcasters. Unlike Limbaugh and others, Pence tried to confine his critique to policy, but then came the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal and impeachment proceedings. Pence expressed revulsion whenever Clinton was mentioned, and when Clinton was acquitted, he became convinced that the problem was too much democracy. According to Pence, things went awry with the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, which, in 1913, required that United States senators be elected and not appointed. The amendment had been adopted in response to vote-buying and bribery scandals. The unfortunate result, in Pence’s view, was that senators were too concerned about public opinion and thus wouldn’t vote to strip a popular president of his office. He thought more presidents had been more vulnerable to impeachment under the previous system (history showed this was not true) and that this was beneficial.10
In the Indianapolis TV market, Pence’s half-hour shows couldn’t compete with the nightly news programs. However, week after week, the program gave him the chance to practice and polish his public persona. Ann DeLaney, a prominent Indiana Democrat, was a regular guest who would recall Pence as a man who “was using his personality to make a living, and so it was in his interest, it seems to me, to get along more with people.” Decades later, she would compare the 2018 version of Pence with the one she knew in the 1990s and find she liked the old one better. “He didn’t have the same kind of saccharine sincerity that he evidences now in his public speaking,” she said. “So, he was fine to deal with in that context. You know, you could disagree with him then, and certainly we did. I did. But there wasn’t any animus involved.”
Four times each year, Pence the TV host presented one-hour specials, which brought him into elite circles in business and politics. In 1995, the first of these shows was recorded at the home of Stephen Hilbert, who headed Conseco Financial, which at the time invested in projects across the country, including a building bought with Donald Trump. At the time Hoosiers knew Trump as a New York–based real estate promoter. High flying and highly leveraged, Conseco’s stock was nearing the top of a stunning run that would take it from one dollar in 1989 to fifty-eight dollars in 1998. Named one of America’s “shrewdest dealmakers” by Fortune magazine, Hilbert’s main personal asset was, according to one colleague, “an uncanny ability to get people to believe,” which made him an Indiana version of Donald Trump.
In four years, Hilbert would be fired, as, under his leadership, the firm headed for a crash in the form of the third-biggest bankruptcy in American history, which would wipe out billions in investor equity and render the stock virtually worthless. But in the moment, Hilbert, who earned $117 million in 1994, was one of the most influential executives in America. He was also famously erratic in his personal life. When Pence met him, Hilbert was just beginning his sixth marriage and in the midst of a physical transformation that included a fifty-pound weight loss and surgery to allow him to stop wearing glasses. He was forty-nine. His wife was twenty-four and still practiced an instrument—the saxophone—she’d played in her high school’s marching band. The Hilberts lived in the most expensive home in the state, which was decorated with a mural of Alexander the Great and portraits of nudes painted by French masters. Built at a cost of $35 million, the compound included a separate barn that housed an indoor basketball court and a three-thousand-square-foot guardhouse. Hilbert was personally involved in the local horse racing and casino industries, which depended on state licensing, and was partner in a race car team. He frequently hosted the state’s political elite at his home and regularly donated to their campaigns. He favored the GOP but sometimes gave to Democrats, including Governor Evan Bayh, who appointed Hilbert to the Indiana State University board of trustees and defended him when he was criticized for not attending the board’s meetings.11
When Pence taped his show at Hilbert’s home, the program was arranged as a group discussion with the Conseco chief and seven other executives from big locally based firms, including Mitchell Daniels of Eli Lilly. Daniels had previously been Senator Richard Lugar’s chief of staff. One of the execs caused a little stir when he agreed that “family” was the most important thing in life but added that he considered business associates to be part of his family. Hilbert may have offered the most candid reply to one of Pence’s questions when he confessed that he was motivated by “fear of failure.” At moments the show verged on parody. Longtime local television reporter Jim Shella described it as “movers and shakers sit around a dinner table and hold a conversation. I think it was really bad TV.”
Where DeLaney sensed in Pence a pleasant get-along guy, others detected in him an overeager desire to please. Local political reporter John Krull said Pence had a “puppyish desire to ingratiate himself and oversell everything he does.” Among the powerful, Pence posed as a “good professional son,” added Krull. “He will approach those political figures and say, ‘Please lead me, guide me.’ He’s got the gift of giving them credit, whatever he might accomplish, even if he ended up not taking their advice.”
Taken together, Pence’s broadcasting career—radio, weekly television, occasional specials—made him famous across the state, put him in contact with top political figures, and allowed him to approach men and women who were wealthy potential campaign donors with access to vast networks of like-minded and similarly wealthy people. In every encounter, Pence could offer access to his airwaves in trade for whatever these powerful people gave him. Along the way, he could test out various positions on issues and receive what were essentially instant poll results in the form of listener responses and ratings.
The mostly positive responses helped Pence make adjustments. Bruce Stinebrickner, from his post as a political science professor at DePauw University in Terre Haute, watched Pence’s development and saw a remarkable example of self-invention. “It strikes me if you were drawing up a composite portrait of what a president might look like, Pence was pretty close to it—extremely conservative but also opportunistic.” With decades of experience watching the political process, Stinebrickner had admiration for “principled conservatives.” This was not the main trait he detected in Pence. “I think he’s more political than the average politician. And those are not words of praise.”
The politics practiced by Pence reflected his professed “evangelical Catholic” faith, which allowed him to keep one foot planted in the state’s largest faith group and another in its second largest and most well organized. He and Karen demonstrated their Protestant/evangelical preference by attending Grace Evangelical Church. A large Indianapolis congregation located on the south side of the city in a suburban neighborhood, Grace was a small denomination—the Evangelical Free Church of America—that stressed that the Bible is literal truth handed down by God and completely free of error. Church leaders taught that Satan is a real being with a personality who is the enemy of God. They anticipated Jesus’s return to Earth to reign over one thousand years of peace. In the meantime, the denomination sought to help individuals and communities conform to a conservative Christian way of life.
Grace’s pastor, Bryan Hult, was a clean-cut young man whose short hair and firm posture indicated his past as an army officer and helicopter pilot and his present as a chaplain in the National Guard. Hult was not just a minister but also a counselor certified by the National Association of Nouthetic Counselors. The term nouthetic related to a Greek word for confrontation. The counseling is not psychological but religious, which explains why the association’s founder, Rev. Jay Adams, regarded mental illness as one of many “euphemisms that exist in the area of psychiatry and psychology, which have confused the public so greatly.”
In their rejection of mainstream mental health concepts, Adams and his students were similar to Scientologists, who saw spiritual problems where others saw neurosis or psychosis. Treatment involved getting one’s life aligned with God’s will, as Adams’s ministry determined it. Students of his “institute” were not required to write papers, take exams, or conduct research. God was presumed to monitor their mastery of the material. Certificates were granted on request to those who paid.12
People who joined Grace could immerse themselves in a community devoted to supporting their commitment to a conservative Christian way of life. In the time when Mike and Karen Pence joined, Grace was growing at a rate that would make it one of the first so-called “megachurches” in the state, a phenomenon that began in the South and spread across the country. The trend toward large congregations turned churches into communities where members worshipped, prayed, did business, and even voted together. (The prototypical megachurch was Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, which hosted his Old Time Gospel Hour TV show.) The rise of these big congregations was accompanied by new concern for politics marked by opposition to abortion and an embrace of Republican policies and candidates. Homeschooling was popular among some believers who wanted to remove their children from the influence of public school teachers and students. Others agitated for new laws to permit public funding for private, church-based schools so their kids could learn among the like-minded with the state paying their tuition.
Although the ministers at Grace were not as openly political as the nation’s most overtly partisan pastors, members harbored little doubt that their faith favored conservative Republicans. Their beliefs also commanded them to arrange their marriages so that wives would yield to their husbands and children would show consistent obedience. (The relevant scripture reads, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior.”) They were also expected to go into the world to make it more in step with the Bible as they read it. For Mike and Karen Pence, as well as their fellow congregants, the strict ethos preached at Grace supplied boundaries that could make life seem more ordered and support their preexisting beliefs.
For Karen Pence, one key preexisting belief regarded homosexuality as a sinful state, and she was opposed to efforts to gain acceptance for gays and lesbians. In the summer of 1991, she was offended by a newspaper article that gave six young people who were gay an opportunity to describe their experiences as teens. They generally focused on the difficulties they had endured, and the article was titled, BEING GAY COMPOUNDS TEENS’ PROBLEMS. A sidebar reported on a hotline that provides “help amid terror” (hardly an endorsement of homosexuality) for young people with questions.
Although the Children’s Express page in The Indianapolis Star was punctuated by cautions, Karen Pence noted one nineteen-year-old’s anecdote about a crush he had on a male teacher when he was eight: “I knew I was different from then on.” In a letter to the editor, Mrs. Pence wrote, “No wonder our youth are confused. I only pray that most parents were able to intercept your article before their children were encouraged to call the Gay/Lesbian Youth Hotline which encourages them to ‘accept their homosexuality’ instead of encouraging them that they are not.” Pence wrote that, as a teacher, she had encouraged her elementary school pupils to read Children’s Express, but in the future she would not.13
Having left her teaching career, Karen Pence wouldn’t have to deal with schoolchildren who were concerned about their sexual identity or worry about anything they might read. However, she didn’t entirely withdraw from public issues. In 1998, she helped put together a fund-raiser for a local jeweler named Gary Hofmeister who had decided to run for Congress against Democratic incumbent Julia Carson. Hofmeister was a divorced man who nevertheless decried the social change of the 1960s, when divorce lost its stigma. This record mattered little to his supporters in local evangelical groups, who were firmly behind his campaign. Their faith required only that one profess to be a believer today. Their politics demanded that they share the positions he advocated, including the creation of vouchers to allow parents to direct tax money to private and religious schools and opposition to abortion rights. Despite help from a national organization called the Christian Coalition and local groups such as Good Shepherd Community Ministries, Hofmeister lost by 18 percent.14
Anyone looking at the Hofmeister/Carson election would have been hard-pressed to see any sign that Mike Pence was wavering on his decision to stay out of politics. Karen’s work indirectly reminded politicos that her husband might return to the game. She helped organize a circus fund-raiser in July and then, later in the campaign, helped put together a rally and luncheon where former vice president Dan Quayle and his wife, Marilyn, were the honored guests. These activities brought her close to the state GOP elite, where she could judge the mood of the party, measure the caliber of its ambitious men and women, and, perhaps, imagine where her husband might rank in comparison.