One of my favorite photographs from my walk to Mexico is of me and seven-year-old Matthew. We are walking hand in hand, sporting identical Nike gear—T-shirts, shorts, socks, shoes, and baseball caps—and matching packs. I loved showing off that photo and pointing to my boy, literally walking in my footsteps. But that scene was from what felt to be a lost, idyllic time. In the fall of 1997, nine years after my walk, Anna had gone off to college and Matthew had started to change. He became inordinately withdrawn and moody.
Adolescence is never an easy time, and Anna and Matthew confronted Cheryl and me with all the usual conflicts: Matthew wanted to stay out late with friends and girls; Anna wanted to go off for a weekend with classmates without adult supervision. However, all the normal tensions were amplified by the special anxiety I brought to my parenting—anxiety that had nothing to do with concern about the welfare of my kids. I was haunted by the fear that any of their transgressions would be seized upon by my enemies as an example of the contradiction between my public rectitude and private vulnerability. I tightened the standards of what was acceptable, constantly worrying that a normal family conflict would be revealed as a pastor’s private life out of control.
Mine was not an idle worry: many ministerial careers had been ruined by less. Dysfunction among rebellious preachers’ kids was well known in my community. The pressure to appear “perfect,” to live up to unrealistic expectations, can lead families to act one way in private and the other in public, making kids feel as if they are surrounded by hypocrisy. My own insecurities about who I was—too young, undereducated, a Pentecostal minister—combined with my increasing visibility as someone members of Congress and their staff would turn to for spiritual help, made me even more demanding that my family always did the right thing. Matthew and Anna each felt the pressure in different ways.
Anna never went in for wild music or daring fashion and was always serious about her worship, her youth group, and her Bible reading. Matthew never fit that mold. He was culturally adventurous—into heavy metal bands, albeit the Christian version, with names like Stryper, Whitecross, and Leviticus. By his sixteenth birthday, he had ventured into secular genres, including, egregiously, the Rolling Stones. When he stapled a photo of the flagrantly immoral Keith Richards—the embodiment of everything I then condemned—to his bedroom wall, I imagined photographers ambushing the room to capture the image of what Reverend Rob Schenck—president of the National Clergy Council, head of Faith and Action—permitted his son to do. In my world, the behavior of a minister’s children determined whether he was legitimate and worthy of financial backing. Faith and Action was now a growing organization with an increasing number of donors who appreciated the importance of having my evangelical presence among lawmakers. Not only did I have my family to support, but a dozen people now worked for me and depended on my success in fund-raising for their financial security. I constantly worried that my supporters would discover something wrong with my kids and judge me as deficient, and our income would plummet. This preoccupation affected my relationship with my children in very negative ways.
Conflicts between fathers and sons are part of the natural order of things, but I saw Matthew’s behavior not as adolescent individuation but as an act of betrayal—against God, our family’s mores, and, most important, against me personally. It wasn’t just that he was drawn to pagan music, ear piercings, and even nose studs—clearly, he didn’t want to follow in my footsteps anymore. Now, when I looked at our FaithWalk photograph, it seemed to reproach me. How could he have gotten so out of sync with me?
The crisis in our relationship came to a head after Anna had gone off to Grove City College, a prestigious Christian school north of Pittsburgh. One day Matthew’s girlfriend’s mother called Cheryl to tell her she had found a used condom in her daughter’s room after Matthew had left. At that time, one of our cardinal beliefs was that sex between teenagers constituted a serious sin. Numerous Bible verses unequivocally ban sex outside of marriage. Every message we conveyed to our kids about sex was consistent with these biblical passages and was reinforced in their Christian schools, their Sunday school classes, their Bible studies, and the teachings of their youth pastors. Cheryl and I spoke frankly about the serious nature of sexual relationships and the grave consequences of promiscuity. Both our kids knew full well that sex was reserved only for marriage.
I was incredulous, and I was furious. I worried what this could mean for Matthew—a pregnancy, an STD, eviction from the church’s youth group. And what did this mean for us as a family? How could I parent a child who wasn’t a virgin and who had crossed the line of adult intimacy? And what about God? What did this imply about Matthew’s relationship with Christ, with Christianity, with other Christians? By the time I confronted my son, I had amassed an overwhelming case against him. I returned to the danger of pregnancy, his inability to pay for a baby. I went on and on, doing everything possible to convince him he had made the worst mistake, taken the greatest risks, and inflicted the most grievous injury to our relationship, to another member of our church, and to God. If he wasn’t sufficiently guilty already, I hoped he was now. For me, this was a crisis of monumental proportion, demanding that every weapon in my arsenal be deployed.
Cheryl watched this unfold and realized in ways I couldn’t that this was a family problem that required professional help. We went to see our friend and pastor Charles Nestor in hopes he could refer us to a good Christian counselor. I dreaded how exposed I would be, how I would be judged an utter failure as a father, a minister, a faith leader, a Christian man. I had always been haunted by the verse from the apostle Paul’s letter to the young first-century pastor Timothy: “If someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?” Many of my efforts in resolving Matthew’s misdeed were designed to circumvent public criticisms of me that could damage my credibility in the churches and on Capitol Hill. This wasn’t only about Matthew and the family; it was fundamentally about me and my ministry. These worries occupied my entire field of vision.
As I sat in Charles’s office shamefully recounting what had happened, I was surprised that he wasn’t more concerned or more censorious. In fact, he was reassuring. He acknowledged the seriousness of what had occurred but did not turn it into a wholesale indictment of Matthew, our family, or me. I almost longed to be criticized, but instead Charles referred me to a Christian psychologist, Dr. William Bixler, who was trained at evangelical institutions and had a degree in theology. Going to see a shrink was enormously controversial for evangelicals. Psychologists were often vilified as the high priests of a new, pagan, anti-Christian religion—anti-theists who attempted to use worldly philosophy to replace God’s wisdom.
I had never imagined that I would find myself in a therapist’s office. Paying someone to listen to one’s troubles seemed a waste to me. Then there was how my religious community viewed the practice: when we were troubled, the cause was not psychological and the solution was not secular. All human problems could be addressed through our relationship with God. And then, if I dared to admit it, I couldn’t bear the thought of being judged by a stranger as I shared my shortcomings and vulnerabilities. Now I found that I had to face not just the world but myself in ways I had never even considered.
Notwithstanding all my objections, I took small, hesitant, and not fully engaged steps in this new process, but even then it did give me some insights. I saw early on that I lacked internal awareness of what constituted appropriate boundaries—in relation to my family, my staff, my donors, the churches, the media, the outside world. So much of my thinking, my motivation, my decisions, my actions, and my relationships were predicated on how others felt about me; what others would do with me, to me, and for me; and how my actions affected them. Dr. Bixler gave me my first glimpse into the possibility that my self-perception as a paragon of virtue or Christian perfection might not be particularly healthy. In fact, I was one big porous mess, and it eroded my relationship with Cheryl—and had for a long time—and it was central in the dysfunction in my relationship with my son. I could not metabolize the advice Dr. Bixler gave me that day and wouldn’t for years. But he had planted a tiny mustard seed in my psyche.
While my participation in therapy was fleeting, Cheryl and Matthew kept going individually. It became a profound source of help for her, and for Matthew as well. We seemed to be back on an even keel. Still, there was trouble beneath the surface. Cheryl hinted she was not content with the state of our marriage, and that bothered me. I didn’t ask what she meant, and she did not go further. Our focus was on Matthew, so I didn’t think to look at how our marriage might have been a part of Matthew’s problems.
I was far more worried about what had happened in the youth group, and whether it would get into the broader church community. They never condemned me for the sins of my son, but I continued to be ashamed over what I saw as being my failure to properly parent him. I didn’t pay attention to the more forgiving gospel message of the Prodigal Son. In my family, God had become the harsh judge, not the merciful father. For so many reasons I grew increasingly uncomfortable at Manassas Assembly of God, and I started thinking about moving the family to a different church. Matthew felt ostracized by the church’s young people, and Cheryl was longing for a different kind of Christian community to nurture her soul—one that did not impose exacting demands, strict conformity, and unrealistic perfection. She craved meaningful relationships, friends who not only accepted her with all her imperfections but affirmed her in them as she longed to do for others.
She found such a church meeting at the elementary school where she spent most of her working hours, where the incipient congregation of Christ the Redeemer Episcopal Church, or CTR, was renting space. In our circles, the Episcopal Church was considered irredeemably liberal and, therefore, unfaithful to the gospel. The Episcopal Church in the United States of America may have been the oldest continuous line of churches in the country—George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were both members—but since the 1970s it had taken on a distinctly progressive or what we considered apostate stance. It was one of the first Christian church institutions to sanction birth control and applaud Roe v. Wade. In the past, I had repeatedly thundered against one of its most famous bishops for denying the core doctrines of the Christian faith, including belief in the literal resurrection of Christ, for evangelicals the sine qua non of being a Christian.
I was shocked when Cheryl wanted to attend a congregation associated with all these profanations. Her decision left me in turmoil. On one hand, much of our early formation as Christians was in ecumenical circles that included Episcopal and other liberal church bodies. In theory, I liked the idea of being in a church that welcomed a variety of opinions on what I felt were not cardinal doctrines of the faith: whether speaking in tongues was a legitimate supernatural gift, what version of the Bible was the truly inspired one, or when and how Jesus might return to claim his people. The formalities at CTR were familiar—the structure of their services, the vested clergy, the weekly observance of Holy Communion. And as it turned out, CTR was thoroughly evangelical in its orientation and, as such, an outlier in the Episcopal world. It eventually passed my theological and social litmus test, but it would be impossible to justify our membership in an Episcopal church to my supporting evangelical pastors and top-level donors. I worried if I acceded to Cheryl’s selection, the ecclesiastical grapevine would soon be filled with rumors of my unreliability. But my wife had found a Christian family where she felt at home and unconditionally accepted, and one that she believed would be healthy for our family. After Cheryl and the kids visited the church together on a weekend when I was away preaching, they were convinced: CTR was going to be their new church home.
It didn’t take long before some of our donors caught wind of a change and raised concerns. Not that I had become a full-fledged Episcopalian—far from it—but that I had left the Assemblies of God entirely. Separating from Manassas Assembly of God over Matthew’s crisis had induced me to look more critically at my overall church affiliation. It had become impossible for me to continue espousing the denomination’s idiosyncratic doctrines, especially the necessity of speaking in tongues. Every year that I was a member of the Assemblies of God, I had to sign a form indicating I did not differ with any area of the doctrinal statement, and specifically on “speaking in tongues as the initial evidence of the baptism in the Holy Spirit.” I just couldn’t accept such an assertion, because it didn’t comport with reality. Plenty of good Christian people I knew—including icons like Billy Graham—had never spoken in tongues, but they were clearly filled with God’s Holy Spirit. I could no longer in good conscience sign the agreement. I needed to move to a different credentialing body.
While Cheryl’s search for a specific congregation led her to the new Episcopal parish, my search for a new denominational affiliation led me to the Evangelical Church Alliance, or the ECA. One of America’s oldest ecclesiastical networks for independent evangelical ministers, missionaries, and military chaplains, its tenets of faith weren’t as narrow as the “Fundamental Truths” of the Assemblies of God. I was especially attracted to one of its bylaws, “In things essential, unity; in things non-essential, liberty; and in all things, charity,” which would allow me to relate to a much broader field of churches.
My transfer to the ECA, while hardly controversial, was noticed, and two reliable Faith and Action donors peppered me with questions about why I had left my former church and demanded to know what church I now attended. One longtime and very generous supporter cried when she learned I was keeping company with Episcopalians. She and other benefactors began hinting at withdrawing their financial support from my nascent organization if I couldn’t assure them I still believed and preached the truth. Repeatedly, I answered their interrogations and reassured them that I had not drifted left, and that I still believed the Bible to be the inerrant Word of God in its entirety. I needed to reinforce that my organization had become an important point of reference on Capitol Hill, and that there were still many battles left to fight during Clinton’s second term. My defense seemed to assuage most of the complainers, at least in the short term.
All our big denominational changes coincided with Matthew’s last two years of high school. His grades were good and he stayed out of trouble, even volunteering for a pro-life youth organization, but my relationship with him continued to be stormy. He always seemed to be testing my authority, and I often took the bait. I hate to admit that I was relieved when it came time for him to go to college. We had steered him to Valley Forge Christian College, a small school in Pennsylvania. It was affordable, and I knew some of the administration and faculty personally. With our kids in two fine Christian academies, Cheryl apparently doing well, and my ministry booming on Capitol Hill, I thought that 1999 was turning out to be a wonderful year.
In December, my ministry achieved a new level of belonging in Washington by purchasing a row house for Faith and Action right behind the Supreme Court. Putting down permanent roots at the center of Washington power—across the street from the Supreme Court, a block from the Capitol, and ten minutes from the White House—was a real boost to our credibility. Even though all finally seemed to be right in my world—better than just right—Cheryl kept asking me for a deeper emotional connection. I had no idea what she was talking about, and besides, I was too preoccupied with pressing national matters. As far as I was concerned, we had fixed what needed fixing and we could all move forward.