While I was in the middle of lawsuits, arrests, prosecutions, and jail time, Cheryl was juggling her own demands. I did what I could to help maintain a home and parent two young kids, but my presence was sporadic and unpredictable. Cheryl was now virtually a single parent and also attending the University of Buffalo full-time, having transferred from her community college program into a bachelor of science track for occupational therapy. Over the years, I came to accept Cheryl’s academic interests—even embraced and celebrated them—but I also constantly had to defend them to many in my community.
In the churches where I preached and in the pro-life universe where I was a leader, being a full-time wife and stay-at-home mom was thought to be a woman’s greatest source of fulfillment and happiness. There were, of course, exceptions. Dual-income couples were not excluded from our churches, but they were anomalies. Among pro-lifers, women were to be mothers, first and foremost, with lots of children—eight, or ten, or even fifteen. Not only did I now have to hide Cheryl’s professional status by evading questions that had to do with her college life, I also had to excuse myself for only having two kids. (Paul, in contrast, had six.) Fewer than four children suggested the couple might be “contraceptors,” artificially interfering with God’s intended abundance from the womb. We did, in fact, use contraception but never would have acknowledged it. Disclosing that could have taken me out of the pro-life leadership. Cheryl’s bout with cancer—though totally unrelated to reproduction—became my convenient excuse for having only two children.
It was more difficult to keep her education secret. The University of Buffalo was viewed by pro-lifers as the dark citadel of the cursed law professor Lucinda Finley, lead counsel for the Pro-Choice Network of Western New York. But Finley was only part of the broader problem; the campus paper considered us enemies, and student groups would often counterdemonstrate when we showed up at clinics. For many in my world, UB was a damnable place.
Not for Cheryl, though. She loved being a student there. She had a group of friends and favorite professors—and graduating from UB would be her gateway to the profession of her dreams. In my world, I didn’t dare say a word about my own wife’s association with such an alien institution. Compounding the problem, though, was my real, unspoken concern that Cheryl would be receiving a prestigious degree before I did. Still, she was my center of gravity. No matter how many demands pulled at us, the love that had brought us together as kids deepened and became more complex over the years. We may have been growing and changing, but I knew we could rely on this constant. I put my concerns aside and tried my best—which didn’t amount to much—to celebrate her academic accomplishments.
During these years I found myself having to navigate between several different worlds and formidable personalities. There were the pastors who thought my arrests for anti-abortion activism bordered on anarchy, because I was distracted from my true ministerial obligations. Then there were the hard-core Operation Rescue types who thought I should do more jail time, not less, to symbolize the sacrifice our work demanded. My supporters were a heterogeneous group: some lavishly rewarded me for my moral courage, and others withheld their support until I stopped saving babies and returned to saving souls, as the Bible commanded me to do. I wanted to do everything at once—save souls and save babies—and not disappoint anyone.
The vision that first drew me to ministry, of the parson, the shepherd caring for his lost sheep—Fred Dixon, Peter Bolt, Tommy Reid—was getting lost in the oversized, frantic, belligerent warrior priest, the model of a pro-life activist clergyman that I had become. Some days, in my fantasies, I would leave the culture wars behind and retreat to a little clapboard country church where common folk came to find spiritual solace, newborns were dedicated to the Lord, and the elderly were visited at home before I buried them in the churchyard. In those daydreams, people would call me “Pastor Rob,” not “Reverend Schenck.” Some nights I would lull myself to sleep thinking what a beautiful life that would be for Cheryl, Matthew, and Anna. But I knew that when morning came I’d eagerly dive back into the fray.
In October 1993, hundreds of friends and supporters joined us to celebrate the tenth anniversary of our ministry. As Cheryl and I looked around, seeing our children and all our friends, we felt blessed by the world that had opened to us since we moved back to Buffalo. But the revelry was a rare moment of ease that fall. We otherwise seemed to be constantly preparing for, appearing in, and recovering from a date in court. The lawsuits from our demonstrations during the Democratic National Convention continued to haunt us. I was facing a $25,000 penalty for displaying Baby Nathan, and nearly $100,000 in claims against me by abortion providers for damages to their businesses and monetary penalties for violating court orders. Later that month I was set to appear again with Harley Belew and Joe Forman before Judge Ward in New York.
After a colorful trial during which pro-choice spies who had infiltrated our secret planning meetings testified, videos of half-naked, lesbian protestors were shown, and Harley Belew detailed how he had presented Bill Clinton with a dead baby, Judge Ward offered us a deal. He would hold collection of a twenty-five-thousand-dollar judgment if we would agree not to engage in such public displays of activism for a year in his district, which included Manhattan, parts of the Bronx, and Brooklyn. His offer meant incredible burdens would be removed from my family and me. I accepted on the spot. Besides, our anti-abortion efforts had already moved into a new phase. We would continue more modest demonstrations at clinics, but we were planning more strategic action in the form of federal and state legislation. For me, Ward’s deal was tantamount to a slap on the wrist.
The year before, Paul was not so lucky. His denial that we switched identities sometimes to fool the surveillance cameras had come back to haunt him. His false statements under oath became the centerpiece of the case against him. A grand jury had been impaneled by a federal prosecutor. On November 4, 1993, he was charged with perjury, and his lawyers prepared for a trial. Paul was mortified. While he would be the first to acknowledge his many faults, dishonesty was not one of them. That single injudicious remark had mushroomed beyond all reasonable proportion, threatening his and his family’s future.
The burden of the criminal case seemed to act as a kind of catalyst for Paul to change his ministry. I wondered if he might not have felt ashamed in his own congregation about the charge of perjury and needed to flee from what he thought was their disapproval. I had always been the itinerant preacher, and Paul had been the homebody. But increasingly he began traveling more frequently and spoke about expanding our ministry to Washington, where the real decision makers lived. Our old Operation Rescue comrade Pat Mahoney was now living in D.C., and he told Paul about his vision for a church on Capitol Hill that would actively engage the culture of Washington: the bureaucrats, the staff and members of Congress, and the federal judiciary.
Paul had been down in Washington several times and he and Pat had already assembled a core group of activists who had pledged time and money to a new church start-up. As we slowly distanced ourselves from Randall, and as Operation Rescue itself began to lose its momentum, replaced by more mainstream advocacy organizations, we, too, wanted to be viewed less as the bomb throwers and more as the judicious figures in the movement. We had a national reputation, and it seemed only fitting that we would work in the seat of power in the nation’s capital.
Paul not only supported the effort, he wanted to move from Buffalo to Washington and build the new church. For the founding pastor of a large and successful congregation to leave and undertake a new start-up was highly unusual. But Paul believed those who lived and worked in Washington might not be literal enemies—despite the presence of the Clinton administration—but instead were most in need of being reminded of the importance of Christ’s moral and spiritual instruction. The new congregation would be under the aegis of the Assemblies of God, which did not have a congregation on Capitol Hill. Paul would be the first to bring the values from Main Street, from the small churches all over the country, into the metropolis of Washington. This was the job of lawmakers. Why couldn’t it also be the job of ministers? “The kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies,” said Martin Luther, the catalyst for the Protestant Reformation, whom we claimed as one of the founders of evangelicalism.
Our plans were still inchoate, but a few important people had caught wind of them, including Hans Helmerich, the CEO of an oil and gas drilling company out of Tulsa. He was a significant financial supporter of our Operation Serve program in Mexico, and even though he was often critical of our pro-life activism, he had bailed 150 people out of jail during the Spring of Life demonstration. When Hans heard about the Washington possibility, he wanted to introduce me to his friend Senator Don Nickles, an outspoken Christian and pro-life advocate, and arranged for us to lunch with him in the Capitol Building. In late autumn of 1993, Hans picked me up in his corporate jet and we flew to Washington.
This was my first time inside the U.S. Capitol, and I tried not to look like an overwhelmed tourist as we entered the private Senate Dining Room for lunch. I took note of the well-known lawmakers sitting at tables around us—Bob Dole, Alan Cranston, John McCain, Chuck Grassley, and Ted Kennedy. I was in awe, and yet felt an odd sense of belonging.
The conversation immediately turned to our common concerns about the spiritual state of the nation under the Clinton administration. Senator Nickles, who was in his third term and was the youngest senator to be elected from Oklahoma, called himself an “evangelical Catholic.” He had a long record of appearing at Southern Baptist and charismatic churches, so we shared the same language of faith. We discussed how the erosion of traditional values in our country could be traced to the widening distance between the decisions our representatives made and the Christian faith espoused by most of the American Founders. An essential ingredient of campaigns was the appearance of candidates at local churches, but any sympathy with faith often disappeared once they were in office. And yet, there were so many people of deep religious faith—like Senator Nickles, who longed for a kind of local infrastructure to support that faith in his work as a lawmaker.
Yes, there were chaplains in the Congress, but this work was internal, politically neutral, and largely ceremonial. What was needed would be a kind of missionary to Capitol Hill. Someone who was tethered not to a particular state but to a state of grace—and a rack of principles. He would be able to evangelize lawmakers, advance Christian morality, and communicate what was really going on in Washington to people in the pews of America’s churches. He suggested I bring my ministry to Washington. He assured me he would introduce me to the power brokers and open doors for me throughout Capitol Hill. He said our national lawmakers needed to hear the Word of God, learn to pray, and get some common sense told to them about right and wrong. He gave me a brief tutorial on how such a minister would make his way around Capitol Hill, where the minefields were, and how to navigate the complex relationship between church and state.
The conversation with Senator Nickles marked the final link in a chain of events from Pastor Thorne’s word to me from God to the discussions with Paul about relocating to D.C. and planting a new church. As we spoke, a vision of what was possible took shape in my mind. I was not entirely certain of the details, but I could see the unique role Paul and I could play in these halls of power. I took it as confirmation that it was God’s will for me to expand my ministry to the most powerful city on earth. Suddenly I felt liberated not only from the strictures of blue-collar, working-class, Democrat-dominated Buffalo but also from the social marginalization of Bible-believing Christians that Paul and I endlessly carped about in sermons, interviews, and even in a book Paul had published entitled The Extermination of Christianity: A Tyranny of Consensus. In it, he argued that an unwitting conspiracy between modern education, the media, left-wing politics, and popular culture was bent on wiping out all vestiges of traditional Christian beliefs, practices, and adherents from the American landscape. A formal invitation from a United States senator to bring our work inside the U.S. Capitol, arguably the seat of power in our system of government, seemed the cure for our social and political ostracization.
When I got back home to Buffalo, I walked into the kitchen, where Cheryl was washing the dishes and cautiously but with resolve asked how she felt about moving our family to D.C. before the next school year began. We had been talking about the possibility since Paul started his exploration there, so she wasn’t unprepared for the question, but until that moment it had only been theoretical. She paused for a minute, asked about a variety of details, then said, “It feels right. I think we need to go.” I was the one surprised by her easy agreement, which I took as an answer to my prayers. Over the next few months we gently explained our plans to the kids and listed our house for sale. After Cheryl graduated summa cum laude from the University of Buffalo as a fully trained occupational therapist in June of 1994, she began applying for jobs in the metro Washington, D.C., area.
Cheryl’s graduation spurred me on to fill out my own academic credentials. In early 1994, I found Faith Evangelical Seminary, a small school in Tacoma, Washington. “Faith” had been established in 1969 as an independent Lutheran seminary to combat the creeping liberalism in that denomination. It had since expanded its constituency considerably, enrolling more Baptists than Lutherans. I flew to Washington State for an interview with Dr. Michael Adams, who was then the dean. He was aware of my work through the national media, and complimented me, saying having an alumnus with national name recognition would benefit the school. Given that, he was willing to ease some of the requirements to accommodate me. He allowed me to enroll in a combined bachelor’s and master’s program. In the end, I would obtain a BA in religion and an MA in Christian ministry. I was able to complete the program by way of intensive short-term classes and long-term research projects, which culminated in 1998 when I received the degrees. No big ceremony for me, however—I was too busy. And still dreaming that one day, I might be able to complete a doctorate.
The summer of ’94 was unimaginably frenetic. My longtime friend Charles Nestor, pastor of a large congregation in Manassas, Virginia, thirty-five miles west of D.C., and his wife, Belinda, offered to be our area guides. We were stunned by the prices of everything, but especially homes. In Buffalo you could get a nice house for $75,000; that wasn’t even a down payment anywhere near Washington. When I asked pastors in the D.C. area what they paid their office workers, it was as much as a well-tenured senior pastor made back in our hometown.
I looked for creative ways to get things done at the lowest possible cost and tapped every major donor I knew for substantial gifts. We decided to move to Manassas because, even with the seventy-mile round-trip commute, it would be significantly cheaper to live there. And we would be close to the Nestors, the only friends we had in the area, in a community we thought more closely resembled what we had left behind in Buffalo. I would work out of a small shared office space on Pennsylvania Avenue, midway between the White House and the Capitol. It wasn’t ideal for church work, but it was the best I could do on a missionary’s start-up budget. When Cheryl landed a job with the local school district as a therapist, it was a big relief. We rented a small house and, with the help of one of our ministry supporters, eventually built a lovely home with four bedrooms. Still, the challenge to remain financially viable became my biggest exercise in faith.
Before Paul could join us, he had to face a potentially merciless sentence in the federal court, one that would be unbearable for Becky and the kids, and so he decided to accept a plea agreement. As they had for me in Bestry’s court, hundreds of people—including our Democratic congressman John LaFalce—wrote Paul’s sentencing judge, asking for leniency. On August 12, 1994, we stormed heaven with prayers for mercy. The sentencing guidelines for perjury recommended a year in prison and a fine of up to $20,000. Instead, the judge remanded Paul to thirty days in the Federal Correctional Institution, McKean in Lewis Run, Pennsylvania, followed by five months of house arrest. He also fined him $500. “Mr. Schenck, you are not known to be a deceitful man,” the judge said, adding that “lying in court is an inexcusable crime that attacks the foundations of the American justice system.”
Paul and his family were in the final stages of making their move to Washington, and suddenly nothing was easy. Shortly before he was scheduled to report to prison, the American Center for Law and Justice, his representation in the case, urged him to join its team as vice president in charge of operations. A public-interest religious-liberty law firm, the ACLJ was established in 1990 by Pat Robertson as an answer to liberal juggernaut ACLU. In its short history, the organization had already scored a big Supreme Court victory guaranteeing the freedom of Bible and prayer clubs to meet on public school property. The successes kept mounting and the organization developed a reputation within the evangelical world for legal rigor that was often missing in our fight for religious liberty. Teams of lawyers with Ivy League educational credentials—Harvard, Stanford, Yale—were working cases that would advance Christian freedom in all sectors of public life. The new offices were at Regent University, a graduate institution also founded by Robertson and situated at the Christian Broadcasting Network’s sprawling headquarters complex in Virginia Beach, Virginia. This job would be a wonderful opportunity for Paul and his family, but he was conflicted. We had already obtained the necessary permission from the Potomac regional office of the Assemblies of God to form what we had named the “National Community Church on Capitol Hill.” Paul felt as if he would be letting me down if he went to Virginia Beach, but I urged him to go, promising I would take the reins of our work in Washington.
Before Paul could move anywhere, however, he had to serve his time at McKean. His incarceration was the darkest period of his life. Prisoners were there for every imaginable crime, and many were violent offenders. During my phone calls with him, he expressed greater fear than I had ever heard in him before. Inmates routinely threatened each other, and sometimes followed through. We both knew the Protestant chaplain there very well, and I figured Paul was in good hands. But I was wrong. He was lonely and terrified.
My brother was now a convicted felon. Once released, he would be required to check in regularly with a parole officer and wear an ankle bracelet for five months to ensure he only traveled to and from his new office. Worst of all, he was banned for life from voting in federal elections. It proved a terrible time to up and move. Both Paul and Becky were attached to their extended families, and the sudden separation from siblings, parents, cousins, and lifelong friends was traumatic for all of them. For the first time in his life, my brother sank into a paralyzing depression.
There had never been such an extreme disparity between our states of mind; I was at a loss to know how to offer comfort or reestablish our brotherly bond. So as I did so often when confronted with complicated emotional demands, I plunged into work. And there was so much work to be done. Not just the logistics of organizing our move, but the more important ones of informing my supporters of this change. I had developed an extensive mailing list over time, and needed those people to be more generous than ever in their support. When I visited the small churches that had been so much a part of my life over the years, I described my plans for working in Washington, assured them that I would be their voice in that political wilderness, told them I would keep them informed, not just of our work, but of other issues and activities they could never learn about from watching the daily news or reading their papers. The abundance of their response was proof that I was on the right track.
At the turn of the year, I wrote a New Year’s letter to my friends and supporters outlining my new plans.
DURING THE LAST TWELVE MONTHS WE HAVE WATCHED OUR GOVERNMENT DECLARE OPEN SEASON ON UNBORN CHILDREN, AUTHORIZE THE USE OF THEIR BODIES FOR GRUESOME EXPERIMENTATION, PROMOTE HOMOSEXUALITY AS A LEGITIMATE AND EVEN PREFERABLE LIFESTYLE, ATTEMPT TO PERSECUTE CONSCIENTIOUS CHRISTIANS THROUGH DRACONIAN LAWS, AND DISMISS ADULTERY BY DESCRIBING IT AS “NOTHING WRONG.” ISN’T IT TIME WE DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT?
The answer was clearly yes, and I asked my supporters to become members of what I described as “Gideon’s Army,” an allusion to the biblical story when a ragtag militia of three hundred Jews defeated a heathen horde of tens of thousands. We would preach in our new mission field made up of elected and appointed officials and those who worked for them. I was very clear about the long-term objective: “All of this will be done with a view toward 1996 when spiritual, moral and religious issues will be very prominent in the debates surrounding the next presidential election. We want to be in Washington when all this happens so that God can use our voices if He so desires.” I dubbed the new effort “Operation Save Our Nation.”