The potential of my mission in D.C. was dazzling: 435 members of Congress, one hundred senators, and more than two thousand staffers; tens of thousands more working in the other branches of government; the Supreme Court justices and their clerks and assistants; the president and vice president as well as their closest advisors; plus other cabinet agencies including Justice, State, Defense, and on and on. If I included the military, there would be hundreds if not thousands more executive-level officials.
I knew I couldn’t reach everyone, but that wasn’t the point. I wanted to be present and available to whomever God placed in my path. But in D.C., there was a certain balancing act I needed to sustain: visible enough to be taken seriously by powerful people, but careful not to fall under somebody’s disapproving gaze. I had seen how the slightest departure from lockstep conformity to partisan messaging, or a breach of protocol or even decorum, could lead to being blacklisted and therefore banned from critical access points. It had nearly happened to me when I managed to get onto a special invitation list to a closed-door hearing, then went and bragged to the media about it. I got an angry call from a committee staffer who barked, “Don’t you know that I can block you from ever getting into any meeting here?” I apologized profusely and had my office send her a large basket of fruit and nuts with a formal letter admitting my faux pas. If my ministry was going to be successful, I would need to reign in my natural embrace and be discreet.
My main vehicle for visibility on the Hill was the Ten Commandments Project. It seemed to have answered a need among many Christian lawmakers for public recognition of their faith they hadn’t previously found. It also signaled their sympathies on a whole range of issues: abortion, the gay agenda, religious freedom. In offices and ceremonial meeting rooms, I presented oversized wood mountings of the tablets, took a few photos, and then published the recipients’ names among a list of men and women who reached a certain standard of courage in their public professions of faith. Most of our honorees were Republicans who shared our moral mission at the time. One then-little-known congressman, Mike Pence of Indiana, accepted the plaque and quickly displayed it in his office. He especially liked my line “When you find yourself in trouble, take two tablets and call Him in the morning.” (He asked if he could steal it—missing the irony entirely.)
Security guards and other personnel now greeted me with warm and familiar smiles when I arrived. I walked through the halls with confidence, and was often stopped for brief conversations or buttonholed into quick meetings with lawmakers or members of their staffs. Each interaction became a moment of pastoral care, an opportunity to inject an instant of biblical truth or Christian sensibility into the political conversation, and to forge an alliance. It paid off.
In the spring of 1996, several lawmakers asked for my help supporting the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA—a measure denying federal recognition of same-sex marriages—introduced by my friend Senator Nickles of Oklahoma. It explicitly defined a “spouse” as one half of a heterosexual couple in a legal marriage, which aligned with everything preached and taught in our churches. He and I spoke about the important role of marriage in the Bible and its theological underpinnings. I explained to him how the term “abomination” in our lexicon was reserved for only a few things, among them the future false prophet associated with the Antichrist—and sexual intercourse between persons of the same sex. Our community was unwavering on this point: homosexuals were driven by the supremely immoral impulses of lust, perversion, self-absorption, and rebellion against both God and society.
For us, holy matrimony was only one thing: a union between one man and one woman in lifelong monogamy. At one time this meant divorced and remarried people were relegated to second-class status in most evangelical churches and unwelcome in others, but we had resolved that problem. Social trends demanded pastors find a way not to demote divorced members or turn new people away. God’s grace was emphasized in place of the previously legalistic interpretations of certain Bible passages, and soon marital status became pretty much a nonissue. By the time I entered ministry, there were growing numbers of newly single and remarried couples in our pews and even in some pulpits—something that would have been terribly scandalous a decade earlier.
There were no such attempts to accommodate gay couples. In May, the Defense of Marriage Act sailed through Congress with large, veto-proof majorities, which meant already committed gay couples were barred from receiving any kind of federal benefits—taxes, insurance, Social Security survivor benefits. Back then, the real human consequences of this policy were of only minor interest to me. I would revisit that evolutionary trajectory years later as I looked critically at my own attitudes on the way our churches treat LGBTQ people.
My side had long objectified homosexual persons to make them easy to depersonalize, and to diminish their humanity in order to reduce a vast, diverse group of men and women to their sexual preference. The next logical step was to demonize them and rob them of any recognition of our common humanity. Looking back, I am shocked at how easy this completely un-Christian behavior was, but I couldn’t see it then. My organization routinely exploited garish public displays of sexual license at gay pride parades in cities like New York, San Francisco, and even Washington, using the images to induce the kind of revulsion and rage that generates interest and big fund-raising dollars from our evangelical Christian supporters all over the country. Small donors would send checks for ten dollars after one of our campaigns, while we could expect thousands from others.
A lot of moral and religious issues surfaced during the presidential campaign of 1996. Paul and I again attended the presidential nominating conventions and were disconcerted by slippage we saw in the commitment of the Republican Party to the pro-life cause. Since 1976 the party had championed a constitutional amendment banning abortion, but Republicans in several important states expressed discomfort with an outright ban. The nominee, Bob Dole, was a hardheaded pragmatist who had been shaped politically in the sixties and seventies, before religious conservatives dominated the party. His was the Republican Party of Gerald Ford, not Ronald Reagan. While he gave lip service to our issues, he demonstrated no passion for them. Our inner circle was determined to remind Dole and the party of our importance. Ralph Reed spoke for all of us when he told the New York Times, “For the evangelical and Roman Catholic voters who have poured into the Republican Party in recent years, this is an issue on which a signal of compromise or accommodation would lose their enthusiasm and probably their votes.”
For our part, Paul and I went to the convention in San Diego and organized a memorial service for aborted children, which we held outside the convention hall. We challenged the so-called moderates who were urging the party to abandon the pro-life plank of its platform, reminding them that the Republican Party was founded during another time of moral crisis in America, when it had stood up against the abomination of slavery, and we needed to stand up for American values yet again. In the end, our hard work succeeded: the party platform reaffirmed the “fundamental individual right to life” for an unborn child and supported a human life amendment to the Constitution.
Turnout for the election was historically low, with only 49 percent of the country showing up to the polls to reelect Bill Clinton. We were discouraged by the outcome but managed to hold on to our congressional majority. Another four years of Clinton stretched before us like a vast, dismal desert, but there was something of an oasis on the horizon: my fund-raisers were now reporting record returns on our direct mail, thanking Clinton for the bump. And I was engaged in blood sport, eager to win, succeed, and do my part to damage the other side. I suppose I was a quick study: the new arrival in Washington who felt uncomfortable with the hubris of Ralph Reed’s declaration about “replacing the table” now felt the same way.
In early December, Cheryl and I received a prized invitation to join other conservative leaders in attending the annual Christmas Eve service at the famed Washington National Cathedral. Its soaring Gothic spires, intricate stained-glass windows, and beautiful gardens made it one the city’s notable landmarks. The cathedral was envisioned in its 1895 congressional charter as a “House of Prayer for All People,” and it had hosted countless national events, including memorial services for thirteen presidents. My family arrived an hour early and the massive sanctuary was already a hive of activity, with a forest of poinsettias on the altar. The small brass orchestra was tuning up, the choir donned their robes, and the extraordinary combination of dignitaries and regular folk began to fill the rows.
Rumor had it Vice President Al Gore would be attending, which explained the presence of Secret Service and the long lines for security clearance. The cathedral always delayed announcing the presence of a president or vice president, both for their safety and to avoid distracting attention from the sacred nature of the gathering. It wasn’t until the service began that I realized it wasn’t Gore in the front row but President Clinton and his family.
My intention that night had been to simply participate in a meaningful observance of Christmas, but as soon as I learned the president was there, my activist ambitions crowded out all other thoughts, most of all the beauty of the momentous celebration of Jesus’ birth. Clinton had recently vetoed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, and I couldn’t miss this opportunity to confront him about it. I had advised members of Congress who had crafted that legislation, and here was the man who had undone all that noble work. He needed to be called to account, and the celebration of Christ’s nativity made the setting symbolically profound to me. I found further justification in Galatians 6:1: “Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness.” My spirit of gentleness was raring to go.
Mentally, I put together a plan of action, impatient for the moment while sleepwalking through the service. My opportunity was nearing and my heart rate was increasing as I prepared to go forward to the altar area and receive Holy Communion. As the ushers organized congregants, I deliberately chose the line that would pass by the president’s seat. When I arrived there, I leaned toward him and said in a measured but quite audible voice, “God will call you to account, Mr. President.”
Clinton’s face flushed red but he stared straight ahead. I proceeded to the altar rail, knelt, and received Communion, then returned to my seat. That’s when I heard the familiar crackle of law enforcement radios nearby. Three Secret Service agents were positioned near our row, blocking any path I might take once the congregation was dismissed. I knew I was in trouble. As my family and I prepared to leave, one of the agents said we needed to talk. I could see the dread and fear on the faces of my family: they had been victims of so many of my encounters with law enforcement, and this would be another one—and on Christmas Eve.
A younger man flashed his badge and became aggressive, telling me I could be sentenced to twenty-five years for threatening the president of the United States. When I heard the words “warrant” and “arrest,” I realized this could be more serious than I had anticipated. I needed to call my lawyer—at 1:30 on Christmas morning. So I took out my cell phone and searched for his number, explaining that I needed to talk to my legal counsel. What I didn’t know at this point was that in all the jostling of my phone, I had somehow hit a speed-dial number that called our home. The automated system tied to my computer answered. As I held the phone at my side, the voice mail recorded the encounter.
Cheryl and the kids stood a few feet away, waiting for me; she was humiliated and smoldering, and Anna and Matthew were clearly distressed. The crowds in the cathedral had dispersed—headed home, perhaps, for a cup of celebratory eggnog before going to bed. But my family was wide-awake, despite the late hour, coping with memories of my previous incarcerations. I paid no attention to how tired and stricken they were. In my activist mind-set, there was just one thing that had to be done that evening: confront the president on his murderous embrace of partial-birth abortion.
The younger agent searched through my wallet, handed it back to me, and let us go. The crisis, it seemed, had passed. It was a somber drive home. My mind was feverishly going through every detail of the encounter while Cheryl sat grim-faced beside me. The kids stared out the windows. Finally, Cheryl broke the silence and asked if I really needed to do this on Christmas—a rare display of criticism in such a highly charged moment. I didn’t answer. I could have ruined the whole holiday, she protested, both angry and sad. She even sounded afraid. I kept my eyes on the road, torn within a swirl of my own emotions: my anger at her criticism, my silent acknowledgment that she may have had a point, my relief that I wasn’t spending Christmas Eve in a D.C. jail. Thirty minutes of silence later, as we walked into our home, Cheryl saw the red indicator light on our computer. She played the recording and announced that the whole episode was on the answering device. Whatever misgivings I may have had disappeared. I was jubilant that there was some record of the incident and suspected, correctly, I hadn’t heard the last of it. Cheryl did not share my euphoria, and after sending the kids to bed she somberly started putting presents out for Christmas morning. She only wanted to salvage the holiday.
The next day, when news started circulating that a clergyman had been detained by presidential security at the Christmas Eve service, a Secret Service spokesman told Reuters that no such thing had occurred. When other journalists came calling, I simply played the recording and took the opportunity to reemphasize my message to the president—and embarrass the Secret Service. A twofer. I had substituted Christmas festivities with a stream of reporters with their microphones, cameras, and steno pads. Our family Christmas was a fiasco, and I was the center of attention; my drama dominated our holiday.
Did I convince the president of the evils of partial-birth abortion? Of course not. It would be another ten years and a different administration before a bill restricting the procedure would be signed into law. But at the time it didn’t matter. I congratulated myself on having provided a prophetic witness. I likened myself to the prophet Amos, who confronted the corrupt political leaders of the day, or to John the Baptist, who was witness to King Herod’s evil behavior. To be a prophet is always to be ready to call out sin, especially when perpetrated by the powerful on the innocent. How could anyone possibly take issue with that?
Although I would later come to regret it, back then I was thrilled that I had confronted the president—and now had a priceless anecdote to share with others who called and congratulated me on my courage. But inside our home unexpressed questions hung in the air. Did I need to do this on Christmas Eve? Why did I put my family through the embarrassment and discomfort? Was there any reason why Christmas that year needed to be overshadowed by my political gamesmanship? What about the sanctity of the cathedral that Christmas Eve? What about my wife and children?