By October of 2014, my decades-long public battles with my ideological foes was giving way to something new. Tackling the question of evangelicals and gun control had forced me to rethink my previous approach of sustaining and escalating conflict for the sake of scoring points. Instead, I had become more interested in seeing how a bone of contention in the public arena might give me an opportunity to be more reflective and, yes, even more Christlike in my personal life. Such a circumstance presented itself in Houston when the city elected Annise Parker, the first openly lesbian mayor of a major American city.
The shifting discussion surrounding gay rights in Houston had garnered attention first in May 2014, when the city council passed the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO), radically expanding legal protections for LGBTQ people. The most controversial part of the measure permitted transgender people to file a discrimination complaint if they could not access a gender-appropriate bathroom in any of the city’s public businesses. The ordinance exempted religious organizations, but nonetheless, those organizations mobilized for war, decrying the “bathroom bill,” warning that young girls would be at risk of predators masquerading as transgender women.
Several local mega-church pastors were key players in gathering signatures to force a ballot initiative in the fall, but the city attorney disqualified most of those signatures and said the requisite 17,269 had not been achieved. Church leaders sued the city, insisting they had counted 50,000 signatures and complained that the administration had been motivated by a hidden political agenda. The city attorney responded with subpoenas for the pastors’ sermons. In the words of the mayor’s chief policy officer, “Using the pulpit to do political organizing . . . is not protected speech. Our tax-exempt status depends on a bright line between the world of politics and the world of religion, even as that bright line is often blurred.”
Pastors across the country immediately condemned the subpoenas, arguing that long-standing protections of unimpeded exercise of religion were in danger if the actions taken against the Houston pastors became a precedent. The stakes for church leaders thus grew much higher than a question of LGBTQ rights in Houston. My colleagues and I felt the mayor had overreached, threatening the unique and privileged nature of pastoral communications. A bitter confrontation was not going to help anyone’s cause, but lots of the groups I had worked with over the years exploited the Houston uproar to gain attention and fund-raising dollars. As the court case between the pastors and the city continued, several of my past acquaintances—Senator Ted Cruz’s evangelist father, Rafael Cruz, and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council—weighed in heavily on the debate. Perkins, with whom I had shared many speaking circuits over the years, told Fox News commentator Todd Starnes, “Pastors need to step forward and challenge this across the country. I’d like to see literally thousands of pastors after they read this story begin to challenge government authorities—to dare them to come into their churches and demand their sermons.”
This was the latest version of the kind of fear- and anger-generating vehicle we had all long employed to galvanize our constituents, increase donor response, and score valuable points against our political opponents. I could no longer count the number of strategy sessions in which I was asked to identify which elements of an illustrative story were the most terrifying, offensive, or even obscene and would thereby inspire the most vehement and lucrative reactions. Mitigating and nuanced factors were deliberately ignored or exposed as ruses meant to dupe the inattentive multitudes. I had come to deeply regret my involvement in this kind of activity, realizing it was itself a serious breach of Christian ethics, not to mention a violation of the gospel itself. Jesus never deliberately exploited people’s fears and prejudices for his own gain. In fact, he rebuked the religious leaders of his day for doing just that. For the most prominent figures in American evangelicalism, winning political and ideological contests had become far more important than winning lost souls. It was all abjectly cynical and on full display in Houston.
While I was deeply distressed and disheartened by this kind of agenda-driven behavior, I was also just as deeply troubled, even alarmed, by the intrusion of government authority into the pulpit, the sanctuary, and the pastor’s study. A subpoena for not just sermons but private “notes” made by the pastors could violate confidential counseling, which would undermine the mutual trust at the heart of a pastor’s relationships with congregants. This issue needed to be urgently addressed and resolved, or, we surmised, other government entities might also attempt to breach those traditional limits.
I recruited five other clergy from around the country to travel to Houston to hold a news conference in front of City Hall. We had no other agenda except to publicly ask the mayor to voluntarily withdraw her demand for these documents in the interest of preserving both the unique relationship of pastor and parishioners, as well as the First Amendment rights of church leaders. We would make it clear that HERO, which all the members of my delegation opposed, should be left to the citizens of Houston to resolve. We had agreed that our responsibility was to present ourselves in humility and Christlike love, only appealing to Mayor Parker to do the right thing, showing her all the deference her elected office deserved.
After a prayer service on the plaza leading to the front door of City Hall, our spokesman publicly asked the mayor for a personal meeting. Her chief of staff offered to organize it. Later that afternoon we found ourselves in her sprawling office suite, far away from the cameras and reporters who had covered our earlier event. Over the years I’ve learned that physical presence can be as important as words when it comes to communicating with the opposition. When I was in North Africa facilitating a dialogue between American evangelical representatives and regional Islamic leaders, I found that bowing in just the right way, placing my hand over my heart, and looking down instead of at or over my audiences, conveyed a message of humility, engagement, and honest curiosity I just couldn’t get across verbally. My Moroccan hosts were astounded by the unexpectedly positive reception I got from a potentially hostile group and credited it to the way I averted my eyes and moved my body so as not to appear confrontational.
In Mayor Parker’s office, conscious of the lesson I had learned in Morocco, I sat in a way that communicated my effort to seek her understanding. We were not there to denounce her, as so many others had. On his national television show, speaking about the Houston crisis, former Arkansas governor and Fox News commentator Mike Huckabee had used the words “intolerant despot” and said the mayor was guilty of “hate-filled Gestapo-like tactics.” All that poison was in the room when I began by assuring Mayor Parker we had no political goals and weren’t there to discuss the HERO bill. Our focus was our deeply held concern over the sacrosanct nature of pastoral communications.
A Harvard-educated scholar, Russian Orthodox priest, and moral philosophy professor we had brought with us explained the historically unique status of the clerical role and the bond between a pastor and his flock. I expressed our concern that violating the confidentiality of the pastor’s relationship with his or her flock could unintentionally lead to similar actions, and maybe worse, across the country, putting in peril this timeless and universal bond between the people in the pews and the men and women God had given to them to shepherd them. For this reason alone, we hoped she would withdraw her subpoenas, we told her. The mayor sat looking at us pensively as we spoke, glancing occasionally at her staff. It felt as if the ice had melted and we were relatives trying to settle a family matter rather than activists on two sides of a political divide engaged in a bitter war to best the other. The mayor told us she appreciated our visit, especially the tone we had struck and the points we had made. I asked if she would mind if one of our members offered a prayer. She welcomed it and for a few moments we prayed together.
Our objective had been met; now it was up to her. As two of her staff members escorted us from the building, cameras and microphones were pushed in our faces from the elevator to the sidewalk. In one interview after another, our delegates thanked and even praised the mayor for her hospitality, her attentiveness, and her sincerity in considering our argument. This had been a rare moment for my side, a breakthrough really, when we found we could be conciliatory and congenial even with a seemingly extreme ideological opponent. In a group exercise, we had found what Abraham Lincoln had referred to as “the better angels of our nature.” We knew, of course, that, in the end, the mayor and her political advisors would make their decision with a view toward what best served their political priorities, but there had been nothing jaded or cynical about our interaction.
Not everyone agreed with us, especially some Houston mega-church pastors. When I arrived back at my hotel room, I returned an urgent call from Reverend David Welch of the Texas Pastor Council. In a tense voice, he asked if I could join some area pastors that evening to discuss our meeting with Mayor Parker. After thirty-five years of ordained ministry, visits to thousands of churches, and encounters with innumerable pastors, I could tell when I was being set up. Even though I suspected something sinister in his tone, I felt it was my obligation to accept his invitation. There is a certain ethic among evangelical ministers that all due consideration be given to the opinions of local pastors. I felt I owed that to the Pastor Council. Two members of my delegation, both longtime friends and confidants, would join me.
That evening we arrived at the giant Grace Community Church, a complex the size of a Walmart. I had never heard about its founding pastor, Steve Riggle, but everybody else we met in Houston seemed to know him. Once inside, I was escorted to a conference room where several area ministers sat around a large table. Riggle sat at the head, obviously to chair the meeting. His jaw and shoulders instantly communicated to me his displeasure. He demanded to know what I was doing in his town, as if I had neglected to seek his permission to visit. I explained we had asked the mayor to withdraw the subpoenas. He became more agitated, castigating me for parachuting into Houston, pretending I could remedy the situation, and then getting credit for it when I didn’t know what I was doing. Reverend Welch asserted Mayor Parker had been their “enemy” since she had been elected. He snapped some papers he held—presumably his sermons or other notes that could be subpoenaed—saying he could go to jail because of what they contained. He accused my team of being carpetbaggers coming in from high-and-mighty Washington to mess with their business.
It was clear what was going on. I could see that they were using every trick in the book to intimidate us, drive us out of town, force us to apologize—even backtrack—for our actions because this conflict had been a bonanza for the churches. But I was not going to follow his script. I feigned amazement that everyone around the table wasn’t pleased after hearing the late-breaking news that the mayor was likely to withdraw her subpoenas the next morning. Instead, Riggle charged, my group had robbed them of a powerful weapon they had planned to use to take down this mayor and her godless administration. If the conflict were to be resolved, they would be left without any leverage and would be forced into a mutual nonaggression treaty they had no intention of ratifying, robbing them of an extremely effective recruitment and, I was sure, a fund-raising tool.
I did my best to assure Riggle that the point of our meeting with Mayor Parker had nothing to do with the nature of HERO, but to no avail. He angrily told me it was time to get on the next plane out of Texas. If the subject and potential consequences of our encounter had not been so serious, I would have burst out laughing at Riggle’s Marshal Dillon–like pronouncement that it was time for me to “git back on my horse and git outta town.” Over the next few minutes the meeting degenerated into something between a roast and an inquisition. As I got up to leave, Riggle warned that we should not show up with the mayor in front of any cameras. I had no idea what he thought he was going to do to me if we did appear with her, but the three of us nonetheless decided to respect this demand. Again, it was incumbent on us to do everything we could to show deference to local church leadership; something Riggle was never going to do for the mayor, despite the Bible’s admonition to “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities.”
It had been a demoralizing experience. The three of us knew we had represented the gospel well, and because we had made a good case for the mayor to relent, she was likely to do so. This was great news not only for every pastor in Houston but for every religious leader throughout the country. But we had also denied Riggle his most effective promotional tool for his weekend rally and we had short-circuited his fund-raising plan. Taking the threat of the subpoenas off the table would be like denying oxygen to a fire, and it seemed Riggle’s group didn’t care much about the implications of the subpoenas beyond the political and financial advantages it gave them.
Less than twenty-four hours after we had met, the mayor’s chief of staff called to confirm she would withdraw the subpoenas. He asked if we wanted to stand with her when she announced her decision, but we respectfully declined: to appear would have been too provocative, only exacerbating the tension with Riggle and the other pastors. In her statement, Mayor Parker described our meeting: “They came without political agendas, without hate in their hearts and without any desire to debate the merits of the HERO. They simply wanted to express their passionate and very sincere concerns about the subpoenas.”
In my hotel room, I sat in front of the television as the rest of the story played on the news, but I was lost in a new feeling very deep inside of me. I had known it in the past, but I hadn’t felt it in decades. It was the connection with another soul—another human being—across a great gulf, across a seemingly insurmountable divide. It was also the cessation of a long and drawn-out conflict that I had spent most of my adult years stoking. In its absence, I felt peace. It made me think of a Bible verse I hadn’t preached about for years: “The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
* * *
The next month Abby and her film crew followed me to a benefit event for the Freedom Center, an organization established by conservative writer David Horowitz. “Restoration Weekend” at the tony Breakers Resort in Palm Beach promised to be a who’s who of movement leadership, and I was to deliver the opening prayer. Abby’s plan was to film my invocation and scan the crowd as a way of showing my stature in this community. Horowitz, a former liberal, described his organization in ways that were a call to arms for conservative isolationism, even xenophobia. The Freedom Center was committed “to the defense of free societies whose moral, cultural and economic foundations are under attack by enemies both secular and religious, at home and abroad.”
This was certainly not Abby’s crowd, and by now I had plenty of my own misgivings about them, too. I had been part of so many similar events over the years that I had almost become desensitized to the harsh, contemptuous, and narrow-minded messaging at these types of gatherings. But this time my perception was different. With Abby as a kind of external reference point, I was able to see these people and hear their speeches in a new way. Texas congressman Louie Gohmert was there; I knew him back in Washington as involved with the bipartisan House Prayer Caucus, but here he was the valiant crusader against what he called climate-change propagandists—something I couldn’t relate to. Michele Bachmann was a specialist on the economy, particularly the benefits of eliminating the minimum wage. And Texas governor Rick Perry was warming up for another presidential run. I looked around and wondered if I agreed with anything any of these people stood for anymore.
When it came time for me to deliver the blessing, I stood on the stage and waited for silence. I began by reading Psalm 15, which begins, “O Lord, who shall sojourn in your tent? Who shall dwell on your holy hill?” I then invited the room to bow their heads with me:
God, whose name and nature is true, help us always to act in truth—to love truth more than we love our own spin on it. Thank you for those in this room who are lovers of truth and who act on it at great personal risk, who have paid the price for their convictions . . . Keep us mindful of those who are deprived of the good life, especially those who suffer because of tyranny, dictatorship, corruption, and violence. Help us to help them. I ask these things in the name of the One who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Amen.
“Amen,” the crowd responded, before breaking into conversation and tucking into the salad. I socialized with those around me even though I was beginning to feel like a stranger among them. The speeches were filled with glib disparaging remarks about those with whom we differed on matters of race or religion or politics. Our enemies were ridiculed, but I had come to know some of them as decent, even God-loving people. The star of the program, the acerbic and often crude Ann Coulter, rounded up her usual list of liberal suspects and shot them down with remarks so coarse, I shuddered.
The Breakers was a reckoning for me. I couldn’t ignore that so many of my evangelical peers were violating God’s commandments for how we are to live—that the whole thing had become ideology and entertainment. This was my Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment. Doing what is right is, like grace, costly. But there was no longer any other option than to speak the truth in my heart. Soon the documentary would be distributed and my differences with members of my community, the people who were sitting in the banquet room at the Breakers, would move from private concerns to public ones. I had been pleased to receive this invitation, but it would be my finale on the conservative stage—and not a grand one.
After most people had exited the room, and the staff was cleaning up the post-gala mess, Abby and I found each other. She had eventually taken refuge in the ladies’ room when the venom became too much for her liberal sensibilities to bear. We talked for a long time about why the event was so upsetting. Abby remembered her southern mother and grandmother being flagrantly, unapologetically racist. She described the agonies of her own childlike inability to talk back to them, to speak the truth. I shared with her the struggle I felt in discerning if I was on the right side, God’s side, of the political and religious chasm. I told her that the event had brought to the surface the uncomfortable possibility that many of my comrades in arms, my funders and allies—those with whom I had created an important life—were agents of hate and discord. Fear was a profound motivator for evangelicals. We carried a vestigial memory of being the little ramshackle clapboard church from across the tracks whose congregation couldn’t pay its minister. We collectively carried a chip on our shoulders for being marginalized. Fear and revenge were far from the teachings of Christ, but we had practiced them so often in recent years. How had we gotten to this point?
A few days later, after we had returned to our normal lives, Abby called me. I was surprised to hear a tremor in her voice. She assured me that nothing was wrong, but she needed to tell me something that could jeopardize our collaboration. We had become close friends, and this meant she could no longer keep an important personal experience from me—even if that meant I would choose not to work with her any longer. When Abby was twenty-one years old, she told me, she had gotten pregnant and—not knowing what to do, and unable to tell her mother—she had an abortion.
I had dreaded the conversation we were having but somehow knew that it was inevitable; at some point in my life a close friend who was a woman had suffered, and I would have to face my own attitude and behavior toward others like her—not in a theoretical way, as an activist, but as a friend. I had a very strong conviction about the innate value of every human life but needed to fully understand and appreciate Abby’s decision: how she made it and why she felt she had to. She asked me what I would have done in her situation. I thought long and hard about it and faced my true self—not the public persona most people knew. I searched my heart of hearts, then answered her candidly.
“I think I would have had the abortion,” I told her. I have talked with many women who have regretted their abortions. I have comforted and counseled women who were afraid of being pregnant but then decided to go through with the pregnancy. But in none of these hundreds, maybe thousands, of conversations over the years has anyone ever asked me what I would have done as an unmarried twenty-one-year-old woman. In making all sorts of imaginative leaps in time and gender, I had a shocking but authentic moment of reckoning.
By characterizing women who had made this choice as a specific type of sinner—our movement labeled them “post-abortive women”—I was perpetrating exactly what I had spent much of my adult life decrying: the dehumanizing of others. The label diminished them and made them less threatening, less relevant to the discussion, easier to dismiss. To fully recognize the suffering of others, to feel Christlike compassion for human failing, was to recognize my own capacity for failure—for sin—and to put my head at the same level as Abby’s at the foot of the cross. It was essential for embracing and being grateful for the redemptive grace of God.
Several months later, Cheryl, Matthew, and I sat in Abby’s midtown Manhattan apartment, waiting to get our first look at the film that was the result of two of the most difficult and eventful years I had spent in Christian ministry. Abby had taken the name of her documentary, The Armor of Light, from a verse in the book of Romans: “The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.” The film officially chronicled my examination of evangelicals and our infatuation with guns, but for me the project had been much more personal.
Ever since I completed my doctoral work on the grave problem of political idolatry, I had carried my revelations of the moral failings of my community in the frustrated recesses of my own heart. I feared that by going public I would lose the relationships and organization I had spent most of my life building. But this film would soon be shown at festivals, in theaters, and in a prime-time television broadcast. There was no going back. My stomach was in knots, but there was some modicum of relief in knowing I would no longer be imprisoned in my own frustrated conscience.
Somebody cut the lights and the large screen on the living room wall glowed. The next thing I saw was old news footage from my Buffalo days. There was the younger Rob Schenck in a clerical collar, with the requisite oversized nineties hair and glasses. I held in my hands Baby Tia. There I was, being dragged by police on the day I was arrested for creating a “physically offensive situation.” It was just the beginning of ninety minutes of my deep and personal journey of faith, beginning at little Emmanuel Church, to when I confused submission to Christ with political fealty, to my pursuit of redemption in the rediscovery of Bonhoeffer and his concept of costly grace.
As I watched the film, my emotions ranged from fear to exhilaration. There would be a price to pay for airing my dirty laundry and that of my Christian family—I knew that—but there was no way to sugarcoat our surrender to political interests, to our fears, to our baser instincts. I wanted to lift the cloak of secrecy that allowed this disease in our collective soul to spread and threaten the future of American evangelicalism. We would need to deal with this deep moral failing or it would be the end of us. We faced a spiritual crisis that, depending on what we did with it, could either be our destruction or our salvation.
Over the previous five years, I had learned that the path to spiritual and emotional health, and healthy interpersonal relationships, involved integrating the public and the private, and living authentically. For too long I had suppressed my concerns about our church teachings, practices, and attitude toward outsiders while publicly giving my supporters and colleagues what they wanted to hear. Living this way had threatened not only my personal and spiritual well-being but my family and my marriage. It presented both a real and a symbolic danger. In contrast, The Armor of Light was a brutally honest, unvarnished peek at what was really going on: in me, in my community, in our country. I had taken big risks in not concealing or evading any of it, but it felt now that the reward would compensate for any losses I might experience.
When the film ended, I looked over at Cheryl to see her reaction. She reached out and squeezed my hand, and I knew that whatever might happen outside that room, I would be fine because we were together. Just as meaningfully, Matthew stepped up from the couch and put his hands on my shoulders, giving me a squeeze of approval. He had the most serene look of relief I had seen on his face in a long, long time.
After the release of The Armor of Light at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival, I traveled the country for screenings at other festivals, at colleges and universities, and in churches. I felt I was doing the work God had called me to do, and I became closer to Cheryl, Anna, and Matthew, who, for the first time in decades, commended me for exhibiting moral courage. Standing up for what I truly believed, without apology and despite the costs, gave me new beginnings in love and life and ministry. I needed to reassess how I was doing my work in Washington. My new model of ministry could not be directed by the expectations, demands, and threats of those whose agenda was to divide people and punish perceived opponents. My new approach would be an attempt to share the transcendent gospel of God’s love and the model of Jesus—God in human flesh—with all, bar none.
Bonhoeffer wrote a letter to the pastors he had trained during the worst years of the Nazi horrors, men who were eventually scattered all over war-torn Germany. Some were placed on the front lines of battle as part of Hitler’s design to rid his Reich of troublesome clerics. “Who stands fast?” Bonhoeffer asked. “Only the one whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God—the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God.” Bonhoeffer’s words challenged me to take the ultimate risk. I needed to live by a conscience informed only by the still-small voice of God in my heart, even if it flew in the face of every convention I’ve ever known. Perhaps especially if it did.
By July 2015, Abby and I had become a kind of traveling road show, visiting churches, student groups, and community organizations all over the country. Sometimes there were hundreds of people there, on other occasions maybe twenty or thirty. But each one was important in its own way. Some venues were familiar to me—mega churches, Christian colleges—but others, like Harvard and Yale, felt like going into enemy territory. I was still experiencing a residual animosity toward these institutions that had for so long been the bastions of everything hostile to the religious right. In the moment, I was having the time of my life, finally engaging in the frank, unedited public conversation about faith, morality, and humanity I had seen in Bonhoeffer’s vast personal correspondence with his family, friends, and colleagues. In those letters I read of his most private fears, feelings of failure and loneliness, his guilt, his modest pleasures and frustrated longings. In a word, Bonhoeffer was genuine. I had once envied such transparency and authenticity, but I was now practicing it, and I found it liberating.
A few days before one of these road trips, I was included in a conference call with Troy Newman, the head of Operation Rescue, and David Deleiden, a young pro-life activist who had rented space in our offices. Paul was much more involved in this community than I was, but I still maintained a close friendship with Pat Mahoney and even Troy, who had triumphed over Randall Terry in taking control of Operation Rescue. I was still respected as an advisor to the movement, albeit by this time an unofficial one, and I had no reason yet to decline the invitation to join this conversation. Besides, ending relationships of any kind has never come easy to me. I’ve always valued long friendships, even simply collegial relationships, and I wanted to do everything I could to preserve even the ones in a movement I could no longer unequivocally endorse.
By the time of this teleconference, the wing of the pro-life movement that Operation Rescue had once epitomized had become somewhat more sedate, working on legislative efforts to curtail abortion, exposing subpar practices at clinics, and pushing for prosecution of abusive practitioners—but it was no longer the central focus of pro-life activism. The subject of this call was going to put it once more in the spotlight. I don’t remember all the participants on the line, but my own board member, Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life, chaired the discussion, while Troy and David delivered the big news: David had been working underground, pretending to be a researcher, and had clandestinely recorded Planned Parenthood officials on video apparently negotiating the sale of “baby body parts.” Troy and David were triumphant. They explained their video images and crystal-clear audio showed two of Planned Parenthood’s top medical personnel haggling over the price of fetal organs and tissue—their sale is illegal—and admitting to altering the abortion procedure to better preserve fetal specimens.
We were assured the video was solid gold, 100 percent legitimate, and could do enormous damage to Planned Parenthood and its abortion business. Father Frank briefed the participants on how these videos would buttress the call for Congress to cut off public funding for Planned Parenthood and other similar groups. The conversation shed light on another aspect of the pro-life movement that had been so much a part of my life and how much I had changed in relation to it. I continued to believe that every human life, no matter how big or how small, how dependent or independent, is of equal value in the eyes of God and should be in the eyes of fellow human beings. I don’t think the termination of a human life should ever be done cavalierly—whether by abortion, by withdrawal of medical life support, or by execution. Society and even government should do all that it can to reinforce the value of human life at every stage of existence. But I no longer believed that this extremely difficult, extremely complex, and extremely sensitive subject could be handled as if it were two-dimensional—and most certainly not by politicians. It was not made up of zeroes and ones, and should not be a tool for political advantage. If David had captured a “Gotcha!” moment, at what cost did it come? I wasn’t sure what it meant for me then. What I did know was that I no longer had a taste for this kind of sensational activism.
The videos were as earthshaking as they had hoped, and the criticism of Planned Parenthood was swift and harsh. When the news broke, Abby and I and a few others were at an art gallery in Richmond screening The Armor of Light with a vivacious group of young evangelicals, just the sort who always responded positively to our work. Abby was preoccupied by the Deleiden story and the damage it was doing to an organization she cared deeply about, but even more so the danger it presented to her friend, Planned Parenthood’s president, Cecile Richards. After the screening, we went to dinner with our host and Pat Mahoney. Abby was on edge as headlines about the videos accusing Planned Parenthood of trading in baby body parts dominated the news. She seethed as she registered her feelings with Pat, who appealed to her to set up a meeting with Cecile Richards so they could talk about it amicably. Abby was not going to do that, because she wrongly blamed Pat for aiding and abetting a conspiracy that put her friend in mortal danger. (He had nothing to do with the videos.) I watched her grow quieter as the night wore on, and only later found myself on the receiving end as she vented her fury about what my friends were doing to her friend. After we parted, she texted me.
“Rob, I can’t contain my rage here,” she wrote. “As religious people, you claim moral high ground, and still you perpetuate these false impressions that can cause so much destruction for decent people. This was a horrible thing to do. I know what an extraordinarily brave and decent human being Cecile Richards is, and I don’t need anyone to prove that to me. People are going to die because of these tapes. There will be blood on your hands.”
Blood on my hands. I was much too familiar with that feeling—I experienced it after the Slepian murder. Of course, I knew what Abby meant and why she felt that way, but I was conflicted. What if this was an indication that some on her side, in her movement, had grown callous about human life? Was she open to that possibility? These were people I had been deeply bonded to over decades, just as she was bonded to her friend Cecile Richards. So much of this was personal, and I would need to address that dimension of the problem.
One of the greatest faults in the movement that I had been a part of for so long was our inability to appreciate others and empathize with them. We were sure anyone who allowed for abortion under virtually any circumstances—or permitted experimentation on the remains of the aborted for any reason at all—was evil, self-serving, morally bankrupt, and motivated only by financial gain. There just couldn’t be—and never would be—any other rationale for such abhorrent behavior. But the stark dichotomy that had worked so well for building a movement no longer comported with my understanding of reality. Human experience was too intricate; human lives were too varied; human conscience was too unknown.
A few days after the tense table encounter between Abby and Pat, when the effects of the videos were still reverberating in the national conversation, she and I appeared at the Aspen Ideas Festival for a screening. “Aspen,” whether the place was shorthand for convocations of the intelligentsia, or for skiing by the rich and famous, existed in an alternate universe for me. My people would have regarded those gathered at the Ideas Festival as archenemies from the left. Being at Aspen was as much of a leap for me as it had been for Abby to go to the fund-raiser at the Breakers, but not as big a leap as it would have been two years prior. I had lost some friends and associates in the past couple of years as I traveled with Abby and her crew to address gun violence, but new people had entered my life as I tackled the seismic question of political idolatry not only in our churches but in myself. In one of the first events at the festival, handpicked presenters are asked to take the microphone and speak for two minutes on a “Big Idea” that could change the world. It was like speed-dating for Mensa members; even the surgeon general of the United States was restricted to two minutes. I felt as if this might be the most important talk I would give in my thirty-five years of preaching.
The Aspen literature described me as an “anti-abortion activist and fixture on the political far right,” identities that would not appeal to this audience. My nervousness reminded me of my early days of preaching. When it was my turn, I grabbed my speech and raced to the podium. It had been a long time since I needed to take a heart-calming deep breath, but I did, and then began:
I am Rob Schenck, and I’m featured in Abigail Disney’s film The Armor of Light. My Big Idea is really a very small one, but with BIG potential to improve our psychological, social, relational, and community health: launch a micro movement called My Neighbor, Myself, an INTENTIONAL, INDIVIDUAL LIFESTYLE focused on each of us as individuals—privately, quietly, almost unnoticeably—identifying just one person, one couple, one family—and the key is that they are as different from you, as opposite of you, as they can be.
And that you and I work very hard, with determination, over time, over years, decades if necessary, to learn about that person, that couple, that family—from them, as your only source of knowledge about them, to spend time with them, to invite them into your life—and to be present in theirs; to suspend presuppositions, prejudice, and contempt toward them; to listen to them more than you talk to them—and to be thankful for them.
If you’re a person of faith, pray for them, or, if not, wish them well in every way and commit to stick with them until it’s no longer possible to do so, or until they dismiss you from their lives. The idea will transform you for the better—and it may transform them for the better—and either one can transform everything for the better!
This idea is about loving your neighbor as yourself, and there’s nothing on this earth closer to the love of God. As each of us does our little bit to become more relationally healthy, it will make the world we inhabit a healthier place—in a very BIG WAY. That’s my very little, very doable Big Idea.