Hymers’ Fight--He Sees Sin All Around Him

The Rev. Robert L. Hymers was unhappy. He had just stepped down from the pulpit, having delivered yet another impassioned outcry against the Universal Pictures film “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

Now, facing a crowd of reporters in his Fundamentalist Baptist Tabernacle in downtown Los Angeles, Hymers took on the whole of society. The world, as he saw it, was coming apart at the seams: AIDS, drug abuse, adultery, youth violence, the destruction of the ozone layer.

“I could go on,” Hymers declared, gesturing with a forefinger, looking defiantly among the eyes of his listeners. “What about the earthquake that’s coming? The killer bees? People laugh about the killer bees. They’re 100 miles away now!”

He spoke and he paced in circles, a bald, portly man involved in abattle against a film, being released today, that conservative Christian leaders have labeled blasphemous.

Hymers has brought to the campaign a zealous, unrelenting style that has carried him into countless TV newscasts and talk shows and into Time and People magazines. He rants, he waves flags, he stages mock crucifixions of Jesus on the sidewalk. He says what he thinks--come hell or high water.

He stalked off one television talk show and lashed out at his critics on others. He talks of Christian love, of decency. But as he looks, he perceives sin all around him.

“Yes, sir, I’m mad,” he said. “I don’t like the way things are.”

Hymers has become an enigma of the protest movement, a player in the spotlight acting out his own unpredictable drama. The 47-year-old pastor, whose 250-member church meets each Sunday on South Hope Street, has a reputation for combativeness that dates back years, to earlier crusades and even to bitter defectors of his own organization.

Hymers from the beginning parted ways with other protesters of the “Last Temptation of Christ,” which Christians attacked for its non-Biblical depiction of Jesus. The objections have centered on a sequence in which Christ imagines making love to Mary Magdalene. Clergymen also have expressed opposition to the film’s “wimpy” or “deranged” characterization of Christ.

But unlike other Christian leaders, who directed their complaints to Universal, Hymers made a target of one man, Lew Wasserman, a Jew who is chairman of Universal’s parent company, MCA Inc.

In doing so, Hymers took a central issue of the protest--freedom of speech versus moral decency--and turned it into a campaign that many have seen as misdirected and anti-Semitic.

Hymers charged that Wasserman’s decision to finance the film amounted to a Jewish-paid attack on Christianity. He organized a march last month outside Wasserman’s home where protesters chanted about “Jewish money” while toting signs: “Wasserman fans anti-Semitism” and “Wasserman endangers Israel.”

The action--and several of Hymers’ subsequent protests aimed at Wasserman--have put Hymers under attack by Jewish and Christian leaders alike.

“He has been waving the anti-Semitic flag in such a way as to (demonstrate) that he is anti-Semitic,” said Rabbi Stephen M. Robbins of Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills. “I find such an approach to be tragic.”

A number of mainstream religious leaders have tried to distance themselves from Hymers, accusing him of hurting the protest movement.

Father Gregory Coiro, a spokesman for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, denounced Hymers by saying, “The fact that Lew Wasserman is Jewish has nothing to do with this film.”

A longtime friend of Hymers, executive director Moishe Rosen of Jews for Jesus, said he was saddened by a telecast of one protest. Rosen, who performed Hymers’ wedding, said he had never considered Hymers to be bigoted or anti-Semitic until he saw a television news clip.

“(But) I saw his mouth move, I heard the words and I’m heartsick,” Rosen said.

But Hymers has persisted.

“I think this movie is filthy! I think it is ugly! And I think it is going to bring God’s fiery judgment upon America,” Hymers declared in an interview. He said he has not seen the film but has read the novel, by Nikos Kazantzakis, and the screenplay--which, he said, made him cry.

“This film presents Jesus as a paranoid schizophrenic. There’s been no movie of Mohammed or Buddha or a leading Jewish rabbi or any (other) founder of a religion being portrayed as having mental problems. . . .

“And the thing is, this (film) is financed by Jewish people. Everybody knows it. It’s terrible.”

At the same time, Hymers admitted that early comments about “Jewish money” were a mistake.

“If it seemed anti-Semitic, I’m sorry,” Hymers said. “I love the Jewish people. . . . I don’t want to have anything to do with anti-Semitism.”

Critics paint Hymers as a stubborn, malicious attacker who lives to wage his righteous crusades. But his supporters include a number of conservative Baptists, including evangelist Bob Jones Jr.

“He’s willing to stand up and be counted,” Jones said, “and I appreciate that in a fellow.”

Church member John Barnes, 23, said Hymers’ ministry saved him from gang warfare in South-Central Los Angeles. “I love it . . . pulpit-pounding preaching,” Barnes said. “It’s spirit filled.”

“He’s a rouser . . . he’s very dogmatic,” said Harold Lindsell, a longtime and former editor of Christianity Today magazine and a friend of Hymers for years. “I think he’s probably to the right of Jerry Falwell. He’s always right there shooting a bullet if he possibly can.”

In recent years, those bullets have flown with machine-gun regularity. One target was San Francisco’s Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, a school that Hymers attended and publicly blasted in 1981 with allegations of liberal teaching. Proudly, he recalled chasing one professor out of a classroom and down a hallway.

Two years ago, Hymers gained greater notoriety by leading a prayer demonstration for the death of U.S. Supreme Court justices who favored abortion. Newsweek called it “Rambo Christianity.” Hymers called it an outcry for murdered unborn children.

Once again, last year, Hymers launched a crusade. His target this time, Christian-run Biola University in La Mirada, is being accused of tolerating liberal teaching of the Scriptures and dancing on campus.

The campaign, denounced by school officials, has continued with mailers to students asking for reports of co-ed pregnancies, liberal teaching and other transgressions.

“I’m so sad for our country and what’s happening around us,” Hymers said.

Los Angeles Resident

A lifelong resident of the Los Angeles area, Hymers has been a Baptist since he first found religion as a teen-ager, when a neighbor began taking him along to church. That neighbor, Henry M. McGowan, remembers Hymers as a “pretty wild” youth who had been raised in an environment of “bickering, drinking, swearing--just a home life that no child should be subjected to.”

McGowan and his wife, Joyce, who lived in Huntington Park, were devout Christians. They all but adopted Hymers. “He was very susceptible to a decent home, to decent people who did not swear, people who went to church,” McGowan said. “The Lord just took charge of his life.”

Today Hymers displays the trappings of a conventional Christian upbringing. His wife, Ileana, is a member of the church. His modest home in Glendale is decorated with his Scriptural plaques, wedding pictures and photographs of twin 4-year-old boys. An ink drawing of President Reagan hangs above the piano.

Away from the public stage, Hymers can be scholarly and gracious. He smiles and talks of better days, the old days, when kids weren’t into gangs and drugs. He likes old movies, John Wayne. He loved Pepsi the way it tasted before 1956.

“I’d give $50 for a glass right now!” he said.

At one time, in the early 1980s, Hymers dreamed of establishing in Los Angeles a network of 1,000 homes run and occupied by Christians. The fledgling organization, which grew to 32 homes, was known as Open Door Community Churches of Los Angeles (not to be confused with the Church of the Open Door).

But amid bitter infighting, the organization ultimately crumbled. Defectors say Hymers’ aggressive style displayed itself in hostile fits of anger. Former followers say Hymers regularly lashed out by striking them or humiliating them before crowds.

Tells of Slapping

Rafael J. Gomez, 33, who said he dropped out of UCLA after joining Hymers’ organization in 1978, recalled an occasion when he and one of Hymers’ pastors, Jeff Koenig, arrived for a meeting at an apartment that Hymers then rented in Westwood. Koenig was talking loudly outside and Hymers flung open the door to greet them, Gomez said.

“He swung the screen door out and just slapped Koenig across the face and called him a stupid Jew and a kike and practically dragged him in by the collar,” Gomez said. In the 3 1/2 years in Hymers’ church, he said, “I saw him hit people or push people more than 50 times. It’s just hard to catalogue them all.”

Hymers called the charges lies, saying he is nonviolent and never used anti-Jewish slurs in his life. “Let them document it,” he said. “I say, ‘Why did they stay? Why didn’t they prosecute me?’ ”

Koenig, 32, who was a top lieutenant for Hymers before quitting the organization in 1981, said he did not recall the particular incident cited by Gomez. However, Koenig said, Hymers “used that expression ‘kike’ many times. I remember being pushed, shoved and hit several times.”

Koenig said followers tended to forgive Hymers because they believed that his Christian message overshadowed the incidents. “We’d say, ‘Well, Hymers isn’t perfect, but who is? He’s a great man and it’s for a great cause.’ ”

At one point, Hymers’ following rose to reach crowds of 1,000 or more at some Sunday lectures when the group was meeting in Hollywood, West Los Angeles and downtown. He used sensational posters to draw visitors to a school auditorium in Hollywood. One said, “Sex deviants--live! Jewish community outraged!” Another featured an eye-catching photo of Marilyn Monroe. “Sex after death?” it asked.

Institutes Changes

The posters were an attempt at emulating the lurid fundamentalist flyers of years ago, Hymers said.

But Hymers changed the church name, changed his approach and moved downtown after much of the congregation left. Trouble in the church subsided, according to some members, but still there were moments of rage and conflict.

Shana Couch, 25, who left the church near the end of last year, complained that her salvation was questioned when she asked to give up her role as a church singer after her husband entered the hospital with a heart problem. “They said there was something wrong with me,” she said. “They put me into counseling.”

Earlier this year, a Glendale resident named Robyn Singer filed a court complaint against Hymers arising from an incident in 1987 in which Hymers was trying to pull his car out of a convenience store parking lot. Hymers’ car was blocked by Singer’s, leading to an argument between the two.

‘Slapped Me Across the Face’

“Hymers intentionally slapped me across the face and said I would burn in hell and damned me to hell,” Singer said in her complaint. “He said he was a minister and had the power to cause me spiritual hell. He also said God sanctioned his behavior and he could lie and deny his acts because he would be shielded by God of any liability.”

Hymers, recalling the incident, said he spoke angrily to Singer. “Wouldn’t you?” he asked. “Anything wrong with that?”

But he called the report “as wild and insane as it could be. Of course none of that happened. I wasn’t even near her. It sounds like something out of an old Boris Karloff movie or something. . . . It’s just something I think would be out of character. I can’t imagine myself saying that.”

Hymers, in a more reflective moment, allowed that he could imagine simply “telling someone to go to hell . . . because I’m a kind of gutsy and earthy person. I might say, ‘Listen, you, why don’t you go to hell.’ I might say that because in my background there was a lot of cussing. I wasn’t raised in primroses and with flowers in the house. I was raised in a rough background.”

On Thursday, as 25,000 demonstrators gathered at Universal Pictures to protest “The Last Temptation of Christ,” Hymers continued to travel his own path, meeting with an Italian television crew. He predicted that the film would bomb.

He spoke wearily of the turmoil he had stirred, like a cross he had to bear.

“Do you know how god-awful hard it is to be a pastor in this city?” he asked. “Try it. I think somebody should do it. I wish it weren’t me most of the time.”