After the election of George Bush in 2000, Paul had been keeping closer company with the Catholics who had played such an important role in our pro-life work. I suspected my brother was thinking of “crossing the Tiber,” the expression for people who move from other forms of Christianity to Roman Catholicism; but when he accompanied Pope John Paul II as a Protestant observer during the pontiff’s pilgrimage to Bethlehem, I saw it was inevitable. Paul’s approach to living his faith always seemed more rigid than mine. He was drawn to the discipline, the hierarchy, and the strict liturgy of the Catholic Church. That was fine with me theologically. After all, Paul and I had both been influenced by Catholic spirituality at the very beginning of our Christian experience, but it made me terribly nervous for other reasons. When he transferred his clergy faculties to the Reformed Episcopal Church, a longtime and conservative splinter from the liberal Episcopal denomination, it was simply a first step toward taking advantage of a pathway for married Anglican ministers to become Catholic priests.
My anxieties about this transition were tied only to the fact that I had spent the last ten years building a network of fundamentalist-leaning supporters, both individuals and churches, whose attitudes toward “papists” ranged from cool to hostile. Catholics were seen by many evangelicals as being prisoners of the pope in Rome, obsessed with complicated ceremonies at the cost of a personal relationship with Jesus. Some bridges had been built in the pro-life arena, but the suspicion toward this church was deep and stubborn.
Paul’s embrace of Catholicism would spell trouble with our biggest donors, who considered it a false religion that would eventually become an agent of the Antichrist to dominate the world. In a phone conversation, I asked him to reconsider taking a leap that would alienate many who had supported us for years, but he dismissed my concerns, arguing that the fundamentalists never fully backed the pro-life movement, and I was giving them undeserved deference. I was so angry, I hung up on him. I hoped he could just quietly disappear into the Catholic world, but that’s not what happened.
In 2005, Paul formally entered the Catholic Church as a layman for a transitional period, before he could be ordained a deacon and subsequently, by special papal dispensation, a married priest with eight children. In an hour-long interview on the Eternal Word Television Network, Paul told his story of how he came to realize the Catholic Church was the true church of Christ and the bishop of Rome the true successor to Saint Peter. I was besieged by phone calls, emails, and letters from distressed financial backers, some of them furious and others in tears. They felt Paul had not only apostatized from the faith, he had betrayed them after they had given our organizations their money. Even our mentor, Pastor Tommy Reid, called to express his complete befuddlement. Many of our pastor friends felt Paul had put them in a terrible spot, because they had led many former Catholics to evangelical conversion.
I wasn’t wedded to the narrow doctrinal concerns of my fundamentalist friends, for which they playfully scolded me, but I did think Paul’s move was a strategic blunder. It caused a deep rift between us that set us toward separation. I began to understand more fully my father’s reaction when he faced our conversion so many years before. This was my flesh and blood, my twin brother, defiantly repudiating what we had been and what we had built over nearly a lifetime. It was not just a professional affront to me, it was a personal one. Paul’s move was a statement that the Christian faith of our supporters—and my Christian faith—were both deficient, much as my father must have thought when we considered his Jewish faith and the faith of his family deficient. I was supremely insulted.
Paul’s conversion came at a time when we had enormous reach in the Christian community, so his actions jeopardized an otherwise hugely successful enterprise. By 2006 the parent ministry Paul and I had established in 1982 and its newer affiliates—Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, the National Pro-Life Action Center, and the National Clergy Council—had tens of thousands of supporters spread across all fifty states, and even a few substantial backers in foreign countries. Our ever-expanding universe of churches routinely sent to Washington hundreds of pastors, who joined me in making Ten Commandments presentations and in developing and executing plans to advance our moral agenda on a national scale.
My role in other organizations was expanding as well. One in particular, the Institute on Religion and Public Policy, caught my attention with its effective track record of bringing an unlikely mix of religious leaders to the same table to tackle deeply entrenched conflicts between cultures and civilizations. The founding president of the IRPP, Joseph Grieboski, viewed religion as a little-used but effective tool for international diplomacy, an idea that aligned with my own about the efficacy of politics and religion working hand in hand. I was honored to join its board, but when Joe asked me to serve on a delegation to examine religious freedom issues in the North African Islamic nation of Morocco and to work toward an ongoing dialogue between religious leaders there and evangelical representatives from the U.S., I was more than a bit unnerved.
In the years following the 9/11 attacks, I joined many Americans in being afraid and mistrustful of Muslims. The hijackers had taken so many lives while invoking the name of their deity. It seemed clear to me then that Islam not only approved of such violence but that the Koran obligated adherents to undertake terrorist jihad against nonbelievers, especially Jews and Christians. Now I was being asked to visit a Muslim country, and it seemed a terrible idea. After all, the other members of the delegation wouldn’t be conspicuous the way that I felt I was with my more Semitic appearance and Jewish last name. Plus, I possessed an Israeli-stamped passport. Was I really expected to risk martyrdom in Casablanca?
With great trepidation, and after a lot of pressure, I finally acquiesced. Our nine-member team flew through Paris to Morocco’s royal capital of Rabat. To my surprise, from the moment we stepped out of the plane, we were treated with the warmest hospitality I had experienced in over twenty years of international travel to more than forty countries. Our Muslim hosts were kind, respectful toward other faiths, and open-minded. In a five-day whirlwind itinerary, we met with the prime minister, regional governors, and representatives of various nongovernmental organizations, including the U.N., as well as Jewish and Christian clerics. At times our commission strongly criticized the Moroccan government for its limitations on religious freedom, such as its laws against conversion and proselytizing—cornerstones of my evangelical faith—and at other times commended them for their expansive policies on religious worship relative to other Muslim countries.
The visit was such a success, I returned several times over the next few years and developed a warm friendship with the Moroccan ambassador to the U.S., Aziz Mekouar, an extraordinarily gifted, Westernized man raised in Portugal and married to an Italian-Catholic woman. I began to see my wariness of Muslims as unfounded and replaced it with an appreciation for the surprising similarities between American evangelicalism and Moroccan Islam. Both emphasized prayer and reasonable modesty in dress and behavior and shared a predilection toward assimilation without compromising religious convictions. They, too, respected the sanctity of the unborn and disdained homosexuality, two beliefs I held strongly then. I also witnessed the power of human-to-human contact and the wonders it can do to foster friendship, opening hearts and minds to new ideas. My Moroccan experience lowered my Christian defenses.
In fact, many of my other highly cultivated defenses were in the process of being dismantled at that time. Cheryl had become more deeply involved in therapy, and together we went to couples’ sessions. For the first time I was examining closely my behavior: how it had dominated our lives in ways that worked against intimacy with Cheryl, and how it had alienated me in many ways from my children.
Over time, Cheryl was drawn to working as a psychotherapist and began attending workshops. One in Seattle was with Dr. Dan Allender, a prominent Christian therapist, author, and founder of what was then called Mars Hill Graduate School. Allender had created a community in Seattle that incorporated Christian spirituality with psychological healing. Cheryl wanted me to benefit from what she was learning under his tutelage, but I was hesitant. Dr. Dan Allender’s avant-garde methods and sometimes provocative style challenged my sensibilities. In many ways he represented an emerging form of evangelicalism that my universe viewed with great suspicion. It was big on blending what I thought of back then as pop psychology with theology—a noxious mix—and it was soft on social issues like abortion and homosexuality. It also tended to favor the Palestinians over the Israelis when it came to the conflicts in the Middle East, rendering them an anathema to my hyper-Zionist brand of evangelicalism.
One day I asked Cheryl, by then my wife of thirty years, if she could do anything at all to make herself truly happy, what it would be. Without hesitating, she said she would like to study at Mars Hill with Allender. I surprised both of us when I told her she should—that we were at a place in our lives when we could do such a crazy thing. Allender’s operation would never be my first choice for anything, but I was at a place where I felt a great debt of gratitude to my life partner; she had put up with my drama for so long, and I really wanted to do something for her now. I explained I would need to remain in Washington, but we could figure out a way to live bicoastally; it could even be an adventure for us. We had never done things conventionally, so her plan to go off to grad school on the other side of the country seemed tame in comparison to some of my antics.
With a joy she should have known at a much earlier stage in her life, Cheryl applied to Mars Hill and was accepted in the counseling psychology program. She was elated and eagerly mapped an exit plan from her job as an occupational therapist with the school district. We went on several scouting missions to Seattle, figuring out how we would live simultaneously on two ends of the continent. To balance the budget, we’d rent out our home in Manassas for the three years it would take for Cheryl to complete her degree. I planned on going west about every six weeks and staying for various stretches of time, and she would return east on holidays, for the summer, and during other school breaks.
We were both excited about our crazy midlife escapade, even as I knew that if it had been complicated for me to explain Cheryl attending college to some of my supporters, this situation might be impossible. But something was shifting for me—another turning. What would have set me off into a hive of anxiety five years before—the specter of her independence, her higher education, our separation—no longer bothered me. In fact, I found it all rather exhilarating. By this point I was more secure. Maybe it was the result of my spiritual exercises, maybe therapy, maybe just age and greater maturity, or probably a combination of all of them, but it was a good time in my life and in Cheryl’s. We had worked hard to resolve some big issues between us. And for once, probably for the first time in our marriage, I was letting her take the lead, perhaps for the first time in our marriage. In the end, it would require a little more than a year for us to get our act—and money—together and get her out to Seattle. But first, there was a president to elect.