In May 1959, George Gallup released a survey showing that over one-fourth of Americans said they would not vote for a Catholic for president. Gallup’s research showed that John F. Kennedy led Richard Nixon by 57 percent to 43 percent among likely voters when religion was not called to their attention.1 The fear in the Kennedy camp was that those numbers would change markedly if faith was brought to the forefront.
The Kennedy strategy was to distance him from the Catholic hierarchy as much as possible. He met in private settings with Protestant leaders who expressed concern about his faith, and submitted himself to their soft inquisition. For every possible issue in which there might be a concern about how Catholicism impacted public policies, Kennedy erected a wall between his faith and his politics: Were Catholics required to attend Catholic schools? No, he and his brothers had attended other schools. Would a Catholic politician hire only Catholic staff and appoint only Catholics to powerful positions? No, hiring and appointments would be based on merit—just look at his Senate office. What about federal funds for Catholic schools? The Supreme Court had ruled such funding unconstitutional, and Kennedy agreed with that. Would he appoint an ambassador to the Vatican? He would not.2
Kennedy hoped that these private meetings would quiet the Catholic questions. They didn’t. During the campaign, Kennedy’s faith kept coming up, requiring him to do interviews and give major speeches on the subject. He told Look magazine in February 1959, “Whatever one’s religion in private life may be, for the officeholder, nothing takes precedence over his oath to uphold the Constitution in all parts—including the First Amendment and the strict separation of Church and State.”3 In April 1960, he told the American Association of Newspaper Editors, “I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President who happens to be Catholic. I do not speak for the Catholic Church on issues of public policy, and no one in that Church speaks for me.”4 And, in one of the most memorable speeches made by a presidential candidate in recent American history, he told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in September 1960, with just a few weeks to go until the election, “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the President—should he be Catholic—how to act. . . . I want a chief executive whose public acts . . . and whose fulfillment of his Presidential office [are] not limited or conditioned by any religious oath, ritual or obligation.”5
As Kennedy did his best to keep religion out of the election of 1960, a group of Evangelical Protestants were doing their best to keep the issue on the front burner. In April 1960, the National Association of Evangelicals passed a resolution that stated that “due to the political-religious nature of the Roman Catholic Church we doubt that a Roman Catholic president could or would resist fully the pressures of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.”6 Evangelical publications offered the specter of a nation under the thumb of the Church. “A Catholic President: How Free from Church Control?” was the cover story in the May 1960 issue of the NAE’s flagship magazine. A tract published by the organization titled Shall America Bow to the Pope of Rome? included a picture of the US envoy to the Vatican, Myron Taylor, bowing before the pontiff. Wherever Catholics were a majority, these Evangelicals claimed, the church hierarchy put policies in place that marginalized other communities. Crimes of Intolerance: The Slaughter of Protestants in Mexico and the Fate of Protestants in Columbia and The Truth about the Protestant Situation in Spain were two popular tracts along these lines.7 The Catholic hierarchy, the claim went, had similar designs on America. Selective quotes from Catholic leaders were trotted out for proof: a 1948 statement of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops that called the separation of church and state a “shibboleth of doctrinaire secularism,” a quote from Pope Leo XIII from 1885 that called for Catholics to “penetrate, wherever possible” into circles of influence in their nations.8
One of the leading forces among Evangelicals seeking to keep Kennedy from the White House was Billy Graham, the reigning king of the community, perhaps the most influential American Protestant of the twentieth century. Graham carried on a correspondence with Nixon, pleading with him to raise the issue of Kennedy’s Catholicism “at this uncertain hour of history.” He invited Nixon to make a public visit to his home in North Carolina, believing that it would both tip that state in his favor and focus the spotlight on the religion issue. Graham also emphasized that he himself was playing a direct role in influencing the election of 1960. He had encouraged the Southern Baptist denomination to pass a resolution that was effectively a denouncement of Kennedy and an endorsement of Nixon. He had also sent a letter to the 2 million American families on his mailing list encouraging them to “organize their Sunday school classes and churches to get out the vote.”9
In the summer of 1960, Graham brought a group of American Evangelicals together at a conference in Europe to set a strategy to defeat Kennedy. It was a moment of inspiration for Norman Vincent Peale, one of the nation’s most prominent religious figures and one of Nixon’s former pastors. Peale decided to make Graham’s mission his own, and to continue to galvanize Evangelical forces in America against the Kennedy candidacy. On September 7, 1960, at the Mayflower Hotel, in Washington, DC, Peale held a gathering that amounted to a larger, higher-profile follow-up to the Graham meeting. “Our freedom, our religious freedom, is at stake if we elect a member of the Roman Catholic order as president of the United States,” Peale told the conference of 150 people representing a broad spectrum of American Evangelical Christianity. The conference manifesto stated that the “actions and policies of the Catholic Church have given Protestants legitimate grounds for concern about having a Catholic in the White House.” Each participant received a fact sheet on what made the Catholic Church so dangerous. Among the charges were the following:
The Roman Catholic church is both a religion and a political force whose doctrine is ultimately incompatible with the American ideals of freedom, equality and democracy;
Wherever Catholicism is the majority religion, it dominates other groups and faiths, effectively making them second class citizens;
The Catholic Church demands total obedience and gives explicit guidance on a comprehensive range of belief and behavior;
If conflicts arise between the conscience of the individual believer and the doctrine of the church, these are always resolved in favor of the Church. Individuals who persist in their own independent thought are excommunicated;
The Catholic Church, through both its religious figures and elected officials, has a history of exerting its influence on public policy for its own benefit, including procuring funds for its own schools and hospitals.10
The Reverend Harold Ockenga, pastor of the Park Street Church, the flagship of New England evangelicalism—located at the corner of Boston Common, where Lyman Beecher had stirred the Protestant masses to violence a century earlier—gave one of the opening keynotes. “If we want to know what will happen if Roman Catholic America ensues, we must understand the official teaching of universal Roman Catholicism,” he declared.11 The purpose of the Catholic hierarchy was to become the state, he continued, to use the instruments of government to convert every soul and to program the thoughts and actions of every citizen. And Catholics, he warned, were closer to their goals than most Americans thought. Their numbers were growing in America at an alarming rate. Once they achieved some combination of critical mass plus political influence, well, the best Protestants could hope for was to be tolerated. The election of John F. Kennedy could well be the final straw.
What of the fact that Kennedy had repeated over and over again that he believed unambiguously in the separation of church and state, that the church would neither influence nor speak for him on matters of public policy, that his record of fourteen years in Congress betrayed no evidence of preferential treatment for the views of the Catholic Church? According to Ockenga, none of this mattered. The Catholics had a doctrine called mental reservation that allowed them to lie in order to advance their faith.12
Ironically, Protestant politicians were all over the map on the various issues that American Evangelicals put before Kennedy. For much of the presidential campaign of 1960, Nixon refused to say whether he would appoint an ambassador to the Vatican. Moreover, Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower—all Protestants—each did appoint such an envoy. And on the central issue, whether religion should influence politics in America, the Evangelicals organizing against Kennedy were far guiltier than the Catholic candidate. They were, with seemingly no sense of irony, using the power and platform provided by their religious offices to force a presidential candidate to say he would grant no power to religion.13
“John is such a poor Catholic,” his wife, Jacqueline, once remarked about him. His aide and confidante Theodore Sorensen claims that he never remembers Kennedy talking about religion in any depth. But for the anti-Catholic forces of the mid-twentieth century, the question wasn’t about how Catholic Kennedy was; it was about the thirst for dominance of the Catholic hierarchy, the inherent totalitarian code of the tradition itself.
Replace “Catholic” with “Muslim” and “church hierarchy” with “sharia law” and, fifty years later, the pattern is repeating itself. Like the anti-Catholic movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the central argument of the forces of Islamophobia is that the very nature of Islam is in conflict with American values, especially freedom of religion and the separation of church and state. The problem is not with individual believers; the problem is with the belief system, which requires its adherents to adopt its policy of domination. Their secret weapons are overpopulation, conversion, and acquiring the mechanisms of political influence. The best evidence for this is in how that religion is wrecking other countries—Latin American nations, in the case of Catholicism; the Middle East, in the case of Islam. And the danger is not only in developing nations; ample evidence exists of the domination of the Catholic hierarchy or sharia law in Europe. When speaking of such dangers, above all else, be dire. Highlight America’s imminent decline. Underscore the need to wake up and recognize that the barbarians are at the gate: “Our American culture is at stake,” Peale said of the prospect of a Catholic in the White House in 1960. “I won’t say it won’t survive, but it won’t be what it was.”14 “Nobody in our secular elites is prepared to stand up and defend Western civilization against the routine steady erosion,” Gingrich told his audience at the American Enterprise Institute.15 In today’s parlance, Kennedy was part of a stealth jihad meant to replace the American Constitution with sharia law launch a dawa offensive on the American population, and he was practicing taqiyya in order to get elected.
At one of the early debates between the 2012 Republican presidential candidates, the question was raised about whether any of these candidates would allow Muslims to serve in their administrations. Not without an explicit declaration of their loyalty to the United States, said Herman Cain, a declaration that he would not require of either Jews or Christians. This was Gingrich’s moment, and he seized it. He told the story of a Pakistani-American Muslim who built a car bomb that luckily failed to go off in Times Square (without, incidentally, mentioning the Muslim street vendor who notified the police about the suspicious vehicle) and continued, “Now, I just want to go out on a limb here. I’m in favor of saying to people, if you’re not prepared to be loyal to the United States, you will not serve in my administration, period.”16
As he said it, I had two thoughts. The first was whether Gingrich the historian, the recently converted Catholic, the man who had helped Muslims find a place to pray in the Capitol, who had gone to meetings about sharia financing with the goal of wooing Muslims into the Republican fold, who had written eloquently on America’s first principle of religious tolerance, was giving any thought to what a past Catholic candidate for president had experienced on account of his faith. The second was which group did Gingrich seek to appeal to with that statement? That’s when it occurred to me: the very community that opposed Kennedy’s candidacy based on his Catholicism was attracted to Gingrich’s presidential aspirations because of the Speaker’s recent conversion. A mere fifty years separated the two campaigns. It was one of the most remarkable shifts in the religious and political landscapes in American history, a shift that Newt Gingrich was going to take full advantage of.
“I began to realize that what happens with Evangelical Protestants and with Catholics is this strong sense of . . . assault . . . they are under siege from radical Islamicists,” Gingrich told the Los Angeles Times.17 After the spectacular fall, Gingrich’s subsequent political rise can be attributed in no small part to the popularity he has built with Evangelicals. Gingrich has somehow managed to make his personal sins work for him politically with this group, tearfully asking forgiveness of God, country, and Evangelical kingmakers like James Dobson. Many Evangelicals have been moved by these acts of contrition, and impressed by Gingrich’s conversion to their policy issues. In 2009, Gingrich institutionalized this support, launching Renewing American Leadership, an organization whose mission is “to preserve America’s Judeo-Christian heritage by defending and promoting the four pillars of American civilization: faith, family, freedom, and free enterprise.” The board and staff involve highly influential Evangelicals like David Barton, a phony historian who likes to portray America’s founders as the fathers of a Christian nation, and Jim Garlow, who spearheaded the campaign to prevent same-sex marriage in California. Gingrich’s central role in the Cordoba House affair and the anti-sharia movement have proved quite useful to Renewing American Leadership, helping the organization raise millions of dollars and gather names and addresses that can easily be repurposed as a list of supporters for a presidential campaign.18
Gingrich seems to enjoy the company of Evangelicals in Iowa best of all. In 2010 and 2011, he visited the state often and typically had meetings with pastors on his schedule. “I think he’s just excellent,” gushed Pastor Brad Sherman of the Solid Rock Christian Church in Coralville. So did the majority leader of Iowa’s state House of Representatives—whose company all the prospective 2012 GOP candidates appeared to enjoy—and who gave his endorsement to Gingrich.19 Gingrich played a key role in the unprecedented campaign to recall three Iowa state Supreme Court justices who approved same-sex marriage, offering “strategic advice” and arranging for about $200,000 in seed money. Iowa is, of course, the state that holds the first caucus in the presidential race, giving it outsize political influence. Sixty percent of Iowa Republican caucus-goers describe themselves as Evangelicals, and a large number seem quite taken by Gingrich’s faith, even though it is not the same as theirs.
The Catholic Church is not Gingrich’s first religion, and Callista is not his first wife. The former Speaker is on his third in both departments. Raised a Lutheran, he left that church to become a Southern Baptist (an Evangelical denomination) when he lived in the South, and he left the Southern Baptist tradition for his current Catholic faith around the time he started making noises about running for president. But if anything raises the eyebrows of Evangelicals about Gingrich’s candidacy, it is his number of marriages, not his number of conversions. Richard Land, for one, remarked that Gingrich has “one ex-spouse too many for most Evangelicals.”20 Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, frequently represents Evangelicals in the media. That he appears more concerned about Gingrich leaving his second wife than his second church (the one he served as a senior officer, no less) is further evidence of just how much religious attitudes and interfaith relations have changed in the past half-century in America.
Sharia translates as “the path to a watering place.” In a religious context, the term refers to various abstract values like the importance of life, religion, and education as well as more practical matters dealing with prayer times and funeral rites. In other words, it’s the ways of believing, behaving, and belonging that makes Muslims Muslim. The key sources of sharia are the Qur’an and the example of the Prophet Muhammad. Throughout the course of Islamic history, various Muslim scholars applied these sources to real-life situations in different ways, a process of judicial interpretation known as fiqh. Plainly speaking, there is not a single sharia, just as there is not a single way of being Muslim. In Muslim-speak, there are a variety of schools of fiqh. But in any version of sharia, criminal codes—meaning punishment for destructive or deviant acts—are a very small part. When the term sharia comes up in an American court, it almost always has to do with personal matters like marriage and divorce, probating wills, and resolving money disputes—the very same matters other religious communities expect American courts to consider.21
This is one of the reasons many American Jews have found themselves alarmed by the anti-sharia movement. In fact, a number of Jewish groups have sent letters to state legislatures considering sharia bans, urging them to reject such laws. As an article on the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s website by Ron Kampeas stated, “If the state legislative initiatives targeting sharia are successful, they would gut a central tenet of American Jewish religious communal life: The ability under US law to resolve differences according to halacha, or Jewish religious law.”22
The evidence that Muslims are poised to impose a draconian version of sharia in America boils down to a single court case in New Jersey. A Muslim woman sought a restraining order against her husband, stating that he was forcing her to have sex with him. The man claimed that sharia law allowed him to do so. The trial judge agreed with the man and did not issue the restraining order. The appellate court overturned the trial judge’s ruling, stating that US criminal law trumped any other body of law. Abed Awad, a New Jersey–based attorney and an expert on sharia, wrote, “The appellate ruling is consistent with Islamic law, which prohibits spousal abuse, including nonconsensual sexual relations.”23
While the material used to justify the sharia scare is thin, there are instances when other religious laws have been cited to cover up clear and heinous crimes. Joanne Mueller was surprised when her seven-year-old seemed upset that Father John Geoghan was coming over to visit. He was a popular, playful priest, and she was a single mother of four boys, over-joyed that a man wearing the safety of a collar would come to take her kids out for ice cream or to play in the park. Father Geoghan even did bedtimes, and he didn’t mind giving the boys baths. “He was our friend,” she said. Something strange was happening with her son that evening, though. He didn’t seem happy about the news that Geoghan was on his way. He was silent for a while, and then he started to sob. “What is going on?” Mueller wondered, thoroughly confused. Finally, her son said, still wailing, that he didn’t want Father “touching my wee-wee.” Mueller simply stared at her seven-year-old in disbelief. She summoned her youngest son, five years old, and told him that Geoghan was coming over. He broke down into tears as well. She called for her two older boys. When she mentioned the priest’s name, they stood next to their two sobbing brothers, stiff and speechless, and then they started to cry as well. Then the oldest took the responsibility to speak the words of their shame aloud: “Father said we couldn’t talk about it and tell you, never to tell you, because it was a confessional.”24
It was raining and cold outside, and Father Geoghan was about to arrive. Mueller put coats on the boys and raced them out the door, driving them to their parish, St. Mary’s in Melrose, where she asked to see Reverend Paul Miceli, a parish priest who knew both the family and Geoghan. Miceli was overwhelmed by the story. Mueller later testified that he said, “He will never be a priest again. It will never happen again.” That was 1973. Geoghan would continue his sexual abuse of boys while wearing a Roman Catholic collar for the next twenty-three years. His principal targets were the boys of poor, overwhelmed, single mothers, women who felt blessed to have a father figure in the lives of their sons. It was an arc of abuse that lasted nearly thirty years and that likely included somewhere between five hundred and a thousand victims.
Church officials knew from the very early days. Parents like Joanne Mueller told them in emotional personal meetings. Family members too intimidated or ashamed to confront a church official in person wrote letters telling their stories. At least once, another priest caught Father Geoghan in the act. One victim tells the story of a priest walking in on Father Geoghan as he was performing oral sex on the victim in the upper rooms of a rectory. “Jack, we told you not to do this up here,” the victim recalled the priest saying. Geoghan was not only moved time and time again, he was also given plum assignments, including a summer-long retreat in Rome with $2,000 of spending money.25
Writer (and liberal Catholic) Anna Quindlen said of the clergy child-molestation scandal that “the bishops . . . were allowed to make their own laws.”26 It is not just a figure of speech. In May 1993, as the ironically named Cardinal Law, who had been head of the Archdiocese of Boston since the early 1980s, was trying to discern a way forward through the mounting allegations of priest sexual abuse, he asked a group of eminent experts in the field of child sexual abuse to advise him. They came for lunch at his palatial Italian Renaissance residence in the Brighton area of Boston. Carol Newberger, a child psychologist, was very clear about the proper procedure: report any cases to the civil authorities, remove any accused priest immediately, and keep them as far away from children as possible, because the likelihood of repeated behavior is extremely high. After studying the cases, she and the other experts told Cardinal Law in no uncertain terms that he and the Catholic Church had mishandled the situation, paving the path to further abuse rather than preventing it.
The more they talked, the more they felt they were not getting through. According to Newberger, the cardinal sat stone faced and silent most of the time. When he finally spoke, it was not to voice his sympathies for the victims and their families or to declare his anger at the priests who would abuse their collars; it was to say that the Catholic Church had its own ways of dealing with such matters. In situations like these, the cardinal stated, canon law had to be considered.
The words fell like a hammer on the gathering of child psychologists. “Whatever we had just told him didn’t seem to be registering,” Newberger later said. “Canon law was irrelevant to us. Children were being abused. Sexual predators were being protected. Canon law should have nothing to do with it. But they were determined to keep this problem, and their response to it, within their culture.”27
For people familiar with the anti-Catholic tropes of previous eras, this sounds like the worst of the Evangelical predictions coming to fruition: It is priests abusing their privilege to prey on others. It is the sexual abuse suffered by Maria Monk (who, incidentally, was a fictitious figure), except forced on poor prepubescent boys instead of a novice nun. It is the Catholic hierarchy being party to the ugliest evil.
And though there has been a responsible movement seeking appropriate reform so that such a scandal never occurs again, there has been no widespread panic about Catholic influence in America. There is no legislation pending in twenty-plus states to make canon law illegal. Newt Gingrich, when he was talking about his Catholic faith on the campaign trail, was not asked if he would allow canon law to protect pedophile priests were he to win the White House. Senator John Kerry, a Boston Catholic and the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 2004, was not accused of being the tip of the spear for the Catholic hierarchy’s American takeover. Nor were Vice President Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House from 2008 to 2010. Nor, to my knowledge, were any of the six Catholics who serve as US Supreme Court justices. Catholics have gained significant influence in American society, even while some of the most respected members in their fold have been guilty of abusing the power of their collars in the most reprehensible ways. The American public has made very little connection between the two.
In fact, Evangelicals have swung in the opposite direction, a dynamic illustrated by their support for both Newt Gingrich and his fellow Catholic in the 2012 Republican primary, US senator Rick Santorum.28 It was Santorum who received the plurality of the Evangelical vote in Iowa and Santorum who won states like Alabama and Mississippi, where approximately eight out of ten Republican primary voters are Evangelicals. Santorum is a life-long Catholic and very publicly associated with the conservative wing of the Church. His opposition not only to abortion and same-sex marriage but also to contraception has been a hallmark of his political career. Many Evangelicals cheered when Santorum accused one of their fellow Protestants, Barack Obama, of having a “phony theology” not based on the Bible. The Evangelical mega-leader Franklin Graham, son of the famous Billy, said on morning television that he couldn’t say for sure if Obama (again, his fellow Protestant) was Christian but felt entirely certain of Santorum’s good standing in the faith.29 And when Santorum declared that he wanted to “throw up” when he read Kennedy’s Houston speech, in which JFK stated his belief in the absolute separation of church and state—a speech that Kennedy gave to assuage the concerns that mid-twentieth-century Evangelicals had about too much Catholic influence in the White House—early-twenty-first-century Evangelicals supported Santorum in the face of the public outcry.30 Fifty years ago, Evangelicals organized an all-out effort to prevent a nominal Catholic from winning the White House because they were afraid he would take his marching orders from the Pope. In the 2012 Republican primary, Evangelicals organized an all-out effort in support of a Catholic candidate who promised to do precisely that.
In the early 2000s, as the clerical-abuse scandal was unfolding, Robert Putnam was undertaking an ambitious statistical survey of Americans’ attitudes toward the various religious groups in our nation. The results showed that Catholics were among the most favorably viewed. Muslims, on the other hand, were at the bottom of the likeability barrel.
Looking at this data, it occurred to me that the two big media stories about religion during those years were Muslim extremism and clerical molestation. Barely a week went by without a story of a suicide bombing or an accused priest on the evening news. Both Muslim extremism and clerical molestation involved only the smallest fraction of the larger body. Why did the first taint an entire religious community while the second didn’t? Why were ordinary Muslims (who were far more likely than any other religious community to be killed by Muslim extremists) suspected of actually being terrorists, while most Catholics were viewed as victims of predatory priests? Based on his research, Putnam believes that the central reason is that most Americans, over the course of the past two generations, have had the occasion to meet and become friends with Catholics. In that process, they’ve learned to admire things about the Catholic faith, and they’ve learned that fears of Catholic domination are somewhere between unfounded and ridiculous. Most Americans are far more likely to associate the Catholic faith with their Catholic friends than with pedophile priests. Unfortunately, the same is not true for Muslims. Not enough people report a positive relationship with a Muslim or appreciative knowledge of Islam to counter the negative representations they see on television.
It’s hard to overstate the role of Evangelicals in all of this. For many generations, they were the chief perpetrators of anti-Catholic prejudice. Now they seem to have turned that animus toward Muslims, using some of the same archetypes that they once applied to Catholics—a religion bent on domination, a tradition inherently opposed to freedom, a seditious force within our nation. I’ve heard people draw a straight line between the anti-Catholicism of the past and the Islamophobia of the present, essentially saying that the Evangelical impulse is to hate someone, the only question is who. I find that cynical. Seeing only the consistency of prejudice clouds a more important story when it comes to Evangelicals—the story of change.
The fact is, when it comes to relations with Catholics, Evangelicals have traveled a long way in a very short time. And the Catholic issue isn’t the only area in which Evangelicals have changed. On everything from attitudes toward AIDS to protecting the environment, from race relations to relations with Jews, there is marked positive progress. Evangelicals constitute 40 percent of our nation, too huge a group to write off or to get wrong, and one with cultural power even greater than their numbers suggest. Simply put, when Evangelicals change, America changes.
The Evangelical shift around Muslims is starting to happen. Some of the most powerful allies Muslims had during the Ground Zero Mosque debate were Evangelicals. Jim Wallis, of the Christian social-justice organization Sojourners, was on television regularly sparring with the anti-Muslim crowd, saying that his mother always told him to stand up to bullies on the playground and that’s all these people were. Gabe Lyons, founder of the Christian learning community Q, invited Imam Feisal to share the stage with him for a plenary presentation at the 2011 edition of the Q conference, one of the most important gatherings in the Evangelical movement. But for me, the most striking story of an Evangelical supporting Muslims was of a pastor with a strong Southern accent and a megachurch outside of Dallas, a guy who knows something about prejudice and change.
Growing up as an Evangelical Christian in East Texas in the 1960s, Bob Roberts remembers guest preachers climbing into the pulpit of his father’s Southern Baptist church and talking about the pope as “the Great Whore of Babylon,” the false prophet referred to in the Book of Revelations destined to lead a false church bent on world domination. The books he checked out of the church library said much the same: Catholics are not Christian. They believe in things like penance and good works, they have a different Bible, they pray to Mary. They do not know Jesus.
“That’s what you were taught?” I asked.
“And it’s what I taught others,” he responded. “I started preaching as a teenager. I took the idea of spreading the one true faith very seriously, and I was good at it. I’d get up in pulpits and tell people about the false prophet, the false church, the false prayer. It was all part of teaching right and wrong, convincing them to stay on the one true path, the path of conservative Evangelical Protestant Christianity.”
In 1985, at age twenty-seven, Bob started his own church in a Dallas suburb called Keller. But what he really wanted to do was be a missionary, to take his gift for bringing people to the one true path to those wandering astray in the darkest corners of the darkest places in the world. Each time he went before the International Missionary Board of the Southern Baptist Convention and presented his skills and wishes, he was turned down. He did not take this in stride. He would pray, “God, I am your faithful servant and a heckuva preacher. I can do you lots of good in the world. Why won’t you let me help you?” Finally, an opportunity presented itself.
“There was a guy at my church, a Vietnam vet who had been shot down three times in the war,” Bob said. “He’d become a medical doctor and done quite well for himself. He had some contacts in North Vietnam, and he suggested we go there, spread the gospel and such.” If there was one group Bob feared more than Catholics, it was Vietnamese Communists. Growing up, he’d watched the guys he looked up to, who laughed and played baseball and bought Cokes for the kids, go off to Vietnam and come back in stony silence, broken, or not come home at all. “I remember sitting in my dad’s car with the windows down as he went in the funeral home to visit a family whose son had been killed in the war,” Bob said. “I could hear the wailing outside.” Bob was scared, but he was also excited. Who better to convert than your former enemies? It was a sweet sort of revenge to bring those who once sought to kill American Christians back to the straight path. You could call it a holy victory. At that time, in 1995, Vietnam still severely restricted religion, so Bob couldn’t go formally as a missionary; he had to get a humanitarian visa.
Bob got to be friends with the Vietnamese authorities. The rule was no preaching, but Bob didn’t want to just go sightseeing and have lunches with dignitaries. His church back home was involved in all kinds of community projects. Some of the Vietnamese officials knew about those, and they proposed he try to launch some in Vietnam, starting with building schools and clinics. It became something that galvanized Bob’s whole church community. Delegations started going to Vietnam regularly—sometimes twenty delegations a year—building schools and clinics. Wherever they went, there was always another group of people who seemed to be there first, who had already built schools and clinics and were happy to work with the Northwood church group on more projects: Catholics. When Bob asked one why they were involved like this, he answered, “Well, we believe in works.”
There was only one functioning Protestant church in North Vietnam at the time. Bob remembers driving the roads around Hanoi and being surprised to see old, run-down Catholic churches, a vestige of French colonialism. He remembers thinking to himself, “If the Vietnamese people are ever going to come to know Christianity, it’s probably going to be through those churches.” And then he caught himself: Catholics aren’t Christian, right?
Bob remembers seeing an old Vietnamese Catholic priest coming out of one of the churches wearing a collar. Just being openly identified with a religion was taking a great risk. The Communist government had the authority to arrest religious leaders, an authority it exercised frequently. On that fact alone, Bob admired this man’s faith commitment.
The man was nervous when Bob approached him but seemed calmed when Bob said he was a Christian. Bob told him that he was part of a group that was bringing Americans to Vietnam to build schools and clinics. The Catholic priest nodded, happy to learn that Americans knew something of Vietnam other than the war. He noted that much of his work was building schools and clinics as well; it was part of the Catholic faith. Bob asked if there was anything he could do for the priest. The man said he needed Bibles.
This was a perfect missionary opportunity. This agent of the Great Whore of Babylon was relying on Bob, a follower of the one true path, to bring him the Scriptures. One of the greatest cleavages between Catholics and Protestants in American history was over which Bible to use. The Catholic Bible contains several books the Protestant Bible does not. Riots broke out in several American cities in the nineteenth century because Protestants believed Catholics were going to use their Bible in public schools. Bob could have easily sent this man thousands of copies of the Protestant Bible and taken pride in bringing the true Gospel to a false follower in Communist Vietnam.
Instead, when Bob returned to Keller, he called the closest Catholic church, St. Elizabeth Anne Seton. He introduced himself to the priest as a fellow Christian who had just returned from Vietnam, where he had met a remarkable Catholic priest ministering to the people at great personal risk to himself. The man needed Bibles. The priest at St. Elizabeth told him to come over; the two of them should get to know one another.
As Bob’s church grew, so did its relationship with Vietnam. It was a two-way exchange. Youth from Vietnam would come for extended visits to Texas, always staying with families who were part of Bob’s church. They weren’t forced to come to church, but they generally did, and they participated in the youth group, too. Truth is, this made some of Bob’s congregants nervous. These Vietnamese kids were, after all, Communists and atheists. Part of what Communists and atheists are taught to do is brainwash Christians, right? Could this be happening right in their church’s youth group? Bob wasn’t worried, and to ease the nerves of some of his more skittish congregants, he participated in a very personal way in the exchange program, taking Vietnamese kids into his home.
On September 11, 2001, as Bob listened to the surreal news of planes being hijacked and used as weapons on American soil, he was at the dining table with his Vietnamese exchange student. The first thing he did was make sure everyone he knew in New York City was OK. Then he said a prayer for his family and his country, and especially that young Vietnamese kid sitting at his table, whose parents on the other side of the world were probably out of their minds with worry, wondering what kind of crazy country they had sent their son to. Then he thanked God for guiding him to work with Communist Vietnam in the company of Catholic priests. Such peaceful, lovely people, those Vietnamese. Such a generous community, those Catholics. He was very grateful that his church had no relationships in the Middle East or with Muslims, a bloodthirsty lot if there ever was one. He wanted to live a good, long life, not get his head chopped off by a terrorist who prayed to a false god in a strange language.
It didn’t take Bob long to discover the irony in his thinking. He had been taught to hate Communists, and above all Vietnamese Communists, but had found himself overcoming his fear through personal relationships. He had been taught to revile Catholics as followers of a false church, but had learned to admire the great personal risks they took for the opportunity to serve others. Perhaps the same thing would happen if he ever got the chance to work with Muslims. Bob was starting to see a new wisdom in his own faith, especially Jesus’ command to love your enemy. “The whole point is that when you love someone, they stop being your enemy,” he told me. “Maybe there’s no such thing as enemies, just people we don’t know and haven’t met.”
He got his chance a few months later, when a group approached him and asked if he and his church might do in Afghanistan what they had done in Vietnam. Bob agreed. He grew his beard out long, flew to Pakistan, and traveled with a group of Christians and a guide across into Afghanistan. Bob was pretty proud of himself; he felt both intrepid and enlightened, going into the heart of dangerous territory to love people that most Americans felt were enemies. No one else he knew had done anything even close to this. There was something that gave him pause, however: the schools and hospitals he saw in northern Pakistan were built and run by Catholics. “Holy cow,” Bob thought to himself, “these people are everywhere.”
When I visited Bob in Dallas in 2009, he brought me to a dinner and told me, “There’s this Muslim guy you’ve got to meet. He’s young, smart, politically active, a good Republican. You guys are a lot alike.” And then he stopped and grabbed me by the shoulders. “You are a Republican, right? Don’t forget, this is Texas.”
“Let’s go meet your guy,” I told him. It turns out that the guy he was talking about was Suhail Khan, one of the first American Muslims Bob had come to know. After working on Capitol Hill for Congressman Tom Campbell, Suhail had worked in the Bush White House, where he had become friends with a lot of Evangelicals. After that, he had moved to Dallas. Figuring that after their experience with Vietnamese Communists Evangelicals there would be open to Indian Muslims, Bob asked Suhail to come speak at his church. It was such a positive experience that Bob began planning an international interfaith conference at his Southern Baptist church in Keller, Texas, in November 2010. I had the honor of speaking there.
Bob is convinced that building bridges between Evangelicals and Muslims is a priority similar to the Catholic–Evangelical understanding that took place in the late twentieth century. During the Cordoba House furor, Bob would tweet top-ten lists about Islam and Muslims: “What I Love about Muslims” and “What I’ve Learned from Islam.”
But his highest hopes are in younger Evangelicals. Just as his generation viewed Catholics differently than their parents did, he hopes the next generation will view Muslims differently than the current one does. He addresses the issue directly in his speeches to younger pastors. One of those pastors came to see me in the fall of 2010, right around the time the anti-sharia referendum passed in Oklahoma. “I just got back from a conference,” he told me, “and the keynote speaker, Bob Roberts, said one of the most Christian things a pastor could do is build relationships with Muslims in our city. He said that just as Christianity values compassion, so does Islam. That is an alien idea to my congregation. But if we’re going to build relationships with Muslims, we will have to know things we admire about Islam. Will you come do a guest presentation at my church?”
Listening to this pastor in my office, I realized that Bob Roberts wasn’t traveling the path of interfaith cooperation alone. He was bringing others with him. As he changed personally, he implemented changes in his church, and he spread the gospel to his fellow pastors, knowing that each of them had the power to impact large churches as well. Moreover, Bob seemed to intuit that there were two key levers to changing people’s attitudes about other religions—the knowledge they had about a particular religion, and the people they knew from that community. I met Bob in 2009, after I’d been doing interfaith work for more than a decade, and silently marveled at how much somebody outside the formal circles of the movement had figured out in such a short period of time. “Hmmm,” I thought to myself, “maybe we should be implementing some of Bob’s strategies at Interfaith Youth Core.” I only wish I’d met him earlier and learned from his approach faster. It would have saved me a lot of headaches, especially during the summer of 2010.