For six to eight hours a day, five days a week, for four months, I had been alone with my thoughts, with God, with my conscience, and yet I was distracted by my own anxieties. What was the meaning of the enormously consequential change under way at home? This was not just about Paul. I was worried that, during the four months I was gone in 1988, the community that had shaped me as a Christian and launched me as a minister was changing—and not for the better. It seemed to be morphing into something unrecognizable and malignant.
For years our church folks had listened almost exclusively to the local Christian radio station. The network’s most popular on-air personality had been the kindly syndicated afternoon talk show host Rich Buhler—a Mister Rogers type of gentle soul who translated the best of pastoral care to the radio waves, offering warm, avuncular guidance about trauma, sex, broken marriages, alienated children, alcohol- and drug-addicted teens, and emotionally wounded friends. Whenever Rich appeared at Paul’s church, the sanctuary was standing room only.
Now, instead of tuning in at noon to hear Rich, many of our constituents waited three hours for station manager Neil Boron’s show, LifeLine, where hot political topics such as abortion and gay marriage were sprinkled into an otherwise anodyne lineup of spiritual exhortation, reports of answered prayers, and personal testimonies of salvation. But other folks had become hungrier for cultural combat and moved to the secular WBEN, where they were drenched by Rush Limbaugh’s conservative fire hose. The migration from gentle Buhler, through the more topical Boron, to the inflammatory Limbaugh would portend an evolution in the church writ large.
After four months and two thousand miles, I finally crossed the last bridge and arrived in Mexico to an enthusiastic welcome with a mariachi band and a Girl Scout troop cheering me on. Thanks to the funds raised on the walk, Operation Serve was now poised to deploy even greater numbers of short-term relief workers to the most desperately poor people around the globe. I hadn’t come close to raising the promised $1 million—a source of some tension with my Mexican partners—but we had recruited record numbers of doctors, dentists, and other health and hygiene workers, built two facilities, and deployed several mobile clinics.
When I got home, I had to piece together what had happened while I was away, particularly concerning Paul’s involvement with Randall Terry. I thought back to 1987, when Paul and I joined thirty-five thousand other ordained and lay leaders at a church conference in the Superdome in New Orleans. In the exhibit hall, Cheryl and the kids manned a booth that showcased our work in Mexico, and our neighbor exhibitor was Randall Terry, whom I had first met at Paul’s introduction back in our Bible school days. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor atop a Berber rug, handing out tiny plastic dolls made to resemble sixteen-week-old fetuses. Cheryl thought he was nuts, and that impression was reinforced throughout our stay. Randall berated us for ignoring the “abortion holocaust,” and once followed my brother and me through the hallways demanding we “save these babies!”
We tried to avoid him, but when that didn’t work, we agreed to watch an amateur video he had produced about abortion clinic blockades in the Hudson Valley of New York. The earnest blockaders reminded me of the antiwar protestors we knew in our youth. After we watched that video, Paul’s opinion shifted—if not about Randall, certainly about the movement he was representing. When we got back to Buffalo, my brother spoke forcefully about abortion from the pulpit, even while many of his congregational leaders warned him about potential defections.
As Paul’s anti-abortion sentiment was growing, I was preoccupied by the preparation and promotional work surrounding my walk to Mexico, and Paul was similarly consumed with preparing for the upcoming Billy Graham Crusade. I had already been gone a few weeks when Paul’s office received a series of cryptic collect phone calls from Fulton County Jail in Atlanta. They were from someone who identified himself as “Baby Doe,” the name Randall instructed all of his clinic blockaders to assume in order to slow down police processing and buy time to keep the clinics closed. What Paul initially thought were prank calls were coming from Randall. He was in Atlanta, where his newly christened “Operation Rescue” was sponsoring massive demonstrations outside the Democratic National Convention.
The name “Operation Rescue” came from a passage in the book of Proverbs: “Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter.” Evangelicals had historically interpreted this verse to mean anything from a command to evangelize the lost on their way to eternal damnation, to a believer’s ethical duty to intervene when corrupt potentates mete out unjust sentences, such as capital punishment. But it never referred to the unborn—until Randall. Suddenly, the scripture had a novel and potent meaning. “Those being led away to death” were in the womb, the powerless and voiceless unborn.
Rescuers would assume the identities of “Baby Jane Doe” and “Baby John Doe” and sit at the clinic doors or lie down in clinic driveways, blocking entrance for abortion seekers, after which they were arrested. They then refused to provide names or identification, frustrating police procedure and consequently delaying the resumption of normal clinic operations. Randall Terry had called Paul from jail and urged him to come to Atlanta. Initially, Paul agreed to go only as an observer, but when he and a delegation of religious leaders flew down to meet Randall’s ragtag crew of pro-life champions, my brother was impressed. Prayerful groups of pro-life activists sat and knelt in front of clinic doors singing, chanting, and putting their bodies between the perpetrators and the victims. They had been spit on, pummeled, and even manhandled by cops. After a few days Paul flew back to Buffalo, resolved to participate in demonstrations. He returned to Atlanta a week later with his family and was detailed to be the jailed Randall’s surrogate, mostly recruiting regional pastors to the cause. Many pastors who would have avoided Randall as an embarrassing rabble-rouser now joined out of respect for my brother. As the days wore on, though, Paul felt he needed to practice what he was preaching, and so he participated in one of the demonstrations and got himself arrested.
The more I caught up with what had gone on in Buffalo in my absence, the more I worried about Paul’s involvement with Operation Rescue and Randall. My skepticism had mostly to do with Randall’s dubious reputation: he was something of a drifter, someone who never seemed to have a fixed address or a steady job. But there was also a theological dimension. I reminded Paul of Romans 13, in which Christians are instructed to be “subject to the governing authorities.” Weren’t Operation Rescue’s tactics a violation of this New Testament tenet? Blockading was a form of trespass, and trespass was a violation of law. I worried about both the spiritual and the legal implications of all of this.
I became more and more anxious about my reunion with a brother who sounded very different from the one I had left in Buffalo in July. To say our encounter was tempestuous would be an understatement. I scolded him for his absurd embrace of Randall’s extremism, rebuking him for violating Saint Paul’s admonition to obey authority, and for compromising our stature by becoming a common criminal. He shot back that I was deceived by the murderous spirit of a pro-abortion culture and too cowardly to risk my comfort by challenging child killing. It was the nastiest exchange we had had since we punched each other out as kids.
Arrests had become routine for Paul, and each experience further galvanized his commitment to the anti-abortion cause. He had even established a new organization called the Western New York Clergy Council, a collection of ministers and priests who attended the sit-ins. Hundreds of people had been arrested in the “rescues” at “abortion mills” in and around Buffalo. Demonstrating at abortion clinics—or “businesses,” as he referred to them—and “saving babies” by attempting to persuade pregnant women not to kill them had become part of his weekly work. The movement was primarily focused on doctors and the babies who must be saved.
A variety of tactics were employed with the intent of interrupting the ability of women to make appointments with abortion providers and of providers to carry out their work. Young women from our churches were recruited and coached in how to make appointments that would never be kept but would burden clinic calendars. Activists unwilling to risk arrest during blockades would be used to carry signs—often with gruesome photos of aborted fetuses reclaimed from medical refuse containers—outside the clinics, forming a sometimes impenetrable phalanx that would discourage timid patients. In rare situations, more experienced activists obtained jobs inside the clinics and surreptitiously destroyed equipment, shut off utilities, canceled supply contracts, and did anything else that would hamper smooth operations. The most effective technique, though, was to seal off the facility by placing large numbers of people against the doors, laying bodies across driveway entrances, and, on occasion, barging inside and chaining multiple activists to furniture, doorknobs, to whatever else was a well-anchored object. Later, women seeking abortions were targeted—as victims of a vast, profitable enterprise. To get an expectant mother to relent, rescuers only had to convince her she was about to murder an innocent child.
Paul had not only become more aggressive in his activism, willing to take risks that I considered unacceptable, he began focusing his energy on persuading me to participate in a rescue. I was ambivalent, to say the least, but all the ministers at our church and many members of clergy from other denominations joined the demonstrations. I couldn’t bear to be excluded and finally capitulated: I would take in a rescue at some time, but not risk arrest. I would, as Paul once resolved, only “observe.” I wasn’t sure when, but I told Paul I’d let him know.
When I met Randall again, he seemed transformed by the experience of having created a movement that was taking hold across the country. His entire being seemed on fire with this cause. A year younger than Paul and me, Randall appeared to have been defined by the search for some crucible into which he could pour his energies. In saving unborn babies, he had found it. Randall had become a national figure, a movement leader, and the embodiment of an emerging element in American evangelicalism: someone who was not just rhetorically questioning popular culture but physically challenging it. He brought together Catholics and evangelicals, groups that had previously been highly suspicious of each other, on the same team. They were now literally linking arms as they steeled themselves against forced removal by police outside abortion clinics. But most notably, Randall had become a media phenom, ubiquitous on television, radio, and in print—and it wasn’t accidental. His strategic operation included savvy young operatives influencing the shifting narrative around abortion for evangelicals.
In the early 1980s, many in the evangelical community felt as I did: abortion was not our key concern. Some denominations and national organizations even recognized a necessity for abortion access and supported the rationale of Roe v. Wade. I knew pastors who had recommended abortions to their congregants and, in some cases, had the church pay for the procedure. That was all changing as evangelicals—especially national leaders—were adopting a view of human life that placed its origin at the moment of conception, when sperm meets egg. Prior to the mid-1970s, the evangelical position on the beginning of life was murky. There were, to be sure, segments of the community that held conception as the beginning of life and therefore considered abortion immoral, but that was far from a widely held consensus. Once abortion became a principal concern, it was mostly because it was linked to promiscuity and feminism, not to morality or murder.
More than one evangelical leader made the case that the Nazis had proved a civilized society could sanction the heartless slaughter of the lame, the disabled, and the weak. Catholics had mobilized against abortion in the late sixties when states like California and New York first legalized abortions, but it was the high court’s 1973 finding in Roe v. Wade—and in its lesser-known companion case, Doe v. Bolton, which permitted abortion at later stages—that ultimately swept evangelicals into the fray in large numbers.
Then came a series of films produced by evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer with the future surgeon general Dr. C. Everett Koop. It connected biblical teachings about respect for human life with the scourge of abortion, euthanasia, and infanticide, because inevitably they led to the murder of “the least among us.” Inexorably, something shifted. Schaeffer’s books began flying off the shelves at Christian bookstores; they turned up in Sunday school classes and home Bible studies. Schaeffer himself was interviewed on numerous Christian radio and television shows, and even preached a sermon on Jerry Falwell’s hugely popular Old Time Gospel Hour TV broadcast. His prestige as a certified intellectual, not to mention his exotic looks—a long white mane, goatee, and Swiss knickers—commanded attention and loaned gravitas to his views.
Paul made sure I got a steady flow of Schaeffer and other new theological publications making the case against abortion. I was at first reluctant to read them, thinking they were so much movement propaganda, but I soon did and found them quite persuasive. Paul collaborated with a pastor I admired, Richard Exley of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in producing a short book that borrowed one of Paul’s pro-life sermon titles, “Pro-Life by Conviction, Pro-Choice by Default.” It made the case that if we believe abortion was the deliberate ending of human life, we must act as though it is and do whatever possible to end such a flagrant violation of God’s commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” I read it in one sitting and was pretty much convinced Richard was right.
Reminding me of my pledge to participate in a rescue, Paul urged me to accompany him to one in early December 1988. It would take place outside the clinic that had first come to his attention when members of our congregation exhumed fetal remains from a Dumpster in its parking lot. I acquiesced to Paul’s incessant pleading.
When the day of my initiation finally arrived, Cheryl was extremely unhappy about my taking this step, especially with the possibility that I might face criminal charges. I assured her my role would be on the sidelines, brokering possible problems with police but always obeying the law. I was not going to sully my record as a law-abiding, upstanding member of the community and responsible cleric. The sit-in was planned at the clinic at 666 Colvin Avenue in Tonawanda, a northern suburb of Buffalo with about sixty thousand inhabitants. The address was potent with meaning for Christians: the Book of Revelation described the three-digit sequence as the “number of a man”—a reference universally interpreted by evangelicals to refer to the Antichrist, the monstrous End Times character who would declare war against God.
My adrenaline started to flow when we arrived at the bland cinder-block office building. Well-trained “rescuers” emerged from every direction, some hopping out of cars, others approaching on foot. They sprinted to the doors, sat down, and slid backward until they created a sea of folded bodies, ten and twenty deep. Sometimes one of our sidewalk counselors would approach a patient and ask if she would reconsider her decision, tell her she was carrying a real baby and was about to kill her son or daughter. Then the prayers began. About an hour passed as demonstrators were methodically arrested. Women, feeling frightened, guilty, or uncomfortable, tried to enter the clinic with parents, partners, or friends, but couldn’t. After about an hour of this, police cruisers whipped into the parking lot. Radios crackled and officers consulted one another on how to handle the situation. I was on the periphery, ready to do whatever Paul needed. An officer warned me to stay off the property or be arrested.
Police draped yellow crime scene tape across the parking lot entryway. When Paul beckoned to me to come to him, I made my way across the lot and stood in front of a patrol car and was grabbed by a police officer who put my hands behind my back and handcuffed me. Another cop rifled through my pockets, pulled out my ID, read me my Miranda rights, and placed me in the backseat of his cruiser. I stared out the window and watched the rest of the action, thinking of how disappointed Cheryl would be in me, but riveted, as if a film were unspooling in a private screening. The rescuers prayed and held signs—“Abortion Is Murder,” “What About the Babies?”—and sang “We Shall Overcome” and other civil rights songs. I felt like I was really part of something, and the lingering guilt I felt about breaking my promise to Cheryl was eclipsed by exhilaration at having played a part in this experience. I began to see the pro-life movement as a battle for civil rights. Something deeply, morally wrong was taking place right in front of us, and we could not be among those “good people” who, my father had warned, “did nothing” when the Nazis were exterminating our people—the Jews.
Police custody was my initiation into the full extent of pro-life work. I now understood what had attracted Paul: the sense of purpose, the moral urgency, the community, the feeling of doing God’s work to correct a catastrophic injustice. The sense of solidarity with all the others was reminiscent of the days back at Emmanuel, when we sat and sang intimately about “peace like a river” in our souls. We were united in a common cause that combined full engagement in real-life moral problems with our religious convictions. I felt the shock of a realization that what Paul and Randall and all the others in the movement were doing consolidated all our work thus far and moved us into a new and important realm. We were saving souls and saving lives. It was the missionary evangelism I had carried out in the Mexican garbage dumps, only now it was to save the babies that were being thrown into garbage bins in my own hometown. In fact, one of the Catholic groups we were now working with was called Missionaries to the Unborn. How could any missionary work be more important? This was God’s work, this was God’s call, this was God’s heart for the most vulnerable children of all.
Paul wasn’t arrested that day, but I was—and that arrest was sacramental in its importance. It was another baptism, and I was converted.