Ahmanson Heir Bankrolls Religious Right’s Agenda : Politics: Millionaire seeks to direct what he considers to be a wayward society back to free enterprise and God.

If the religious right succeeds in advancing its conservative, anti-abortion agenda in the Capitol, much of the credit would have to go to a publicity-shy multimillionaire from Orange County named Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson Jr.

Ahmanson’s father forged a financial empire out of the despair of the Depression and built what is today’s $38-billion Home Savings of America, the nation’s largest thrift.

His reluctant 42-year-old heir, a converted fundamentalist Christian, is using his part of that fortune to bankroll conservative politicians, initiatives and religious advocacy groups interested in redirecting what they consider to be a wayward society back to the wisdom of free enterprise and God.

Since January, Ahmanson and three other Southern California businessmen have coordinated efforts to pump more than $1.5 million into conservative campaigns, political action committees and causes, state records show.

At least two-thirds of the money, or $1 million, has gone to a slate of anti-abortion, anti-gay rights and pro-business Assembly candidates, a dozen of whom made political waves this June when they beat moderate opponents in the Republican primary.

Christian conservatives, along with gun owners and anti-tax advocates, are pinning their hopes on those candidates to give right-wing Republicans control of the Assembly’s minority caucus and, perhaps, enough seats to oust liberal Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco). Republicans hold 33 of 80 Assembly seats, but the religious right believes it can increase GOP clout to at least 38.

At stake for the conservatives is advancement of a moral and economic agenda that would outlaw abortion, curb the sale of adult magazines, counter the gains of gay rights advocates, cut taxes and repeal gun control.

But even if that ambitious plan fails, as many political experts predict, the magnitude of what Ahmanson and the others have poured into the campaigns has not gone unnoticed. By June 30, they had given more than all of Sacramento’s entrenched special interests except the California Medical Assn.

“Everybody’s talking about them, and I’m sure that’s what you’ve been picking up on,” said Orange County developer Buck Johns, a Republican donor and head of the Orange County Lincoln Club, an influential group of GOP political donors. “The work that (they) have done to get control of the Assembly. . . . I think they’re doing a marvelous job.”

In addition to Ahmanson, a Newport Beach resident, the contributors are Robert Hurtt Jr., whose family owns Container Supply Co., a Garden Grove manufacturer of decorative tins and plastic buckets; Edward G. Atsinger III of Camarillo, part-owner of 18 Christian radio stations throughout the country, including KKLA-FM in Los Angeles, and Roland and Lila Hinz of Mission Hills, whose Daisy/Hi-Torque Publications produces motocross and dirt bike magazines.

While these business people have donated some money directly to the candidates, records show that their full financial interest in the Assembly races has been obscured by coordinated giving through the use of seven anti-abortion, pro-business or Republican political action committees.

Case in point: Allied Business PAC, which by Sept. 30 had taken in nearly $800,000 and spent $547,000. The four businessmen were the sole contributors to the political action committee, which is run by Hurtt’s corporate controller. But only Allied Business PAC is identified as the source of the money on candidate reports.

Kim Alexander, who studies campaign contributions for the citizen-lobbying group Common Cause in Sacramento, said the tactic has “made it look like these candidates were getting their money from a lot of different sources when they weren’t.”

“This is something that people with an agenda, whether it be economic or religious, often do to conceal the nature of the donors to the candidates,” she said. “The real question is why are these people trying to hide their agenda from the public?”

Ahmanson and the other donors declined repeated requests for interviews. One of Hurtt’s employees said Hurtt’s political activism was motivated by concern over California’s hostile business climate--and not religious convictions.

But the employee said the “subject of religion does come up” when Hurtt interviews prospective candidates. And a letter sent to a Republican Party leader from the Christian Coalition in April identifies Hurtt as one of evangelist Pat Robertson’s nominees as a California delegate to the national convention.

As for Ahmanson, his wife, Roberta Green Ahmanson, a former newspaper religion writer, said in a recent interview with The Times that religious beliefs strongly shape their philanthropy.

“What my husband and I do, we do out of deep personal conviction, based on our faith, our study and our life experience,” she said. “We find it hard for anyone to argue with the principles set forth in the Ten Commandments: Love your neighbor. Don’t steal. Don’t murder.”

Gay activists and other opponents of the religious right say they fear that the donations are intended to help Christian conservatives seize control of government and impose a Bible-based society, where homosexuality, adultery and abortion are criminal offenses.

“I believe they are wolves in sheep’s clothing,” Jerry Sloan, a gay activist in Sacramento who monitors the religious right, said about the donors. “They are using the business issue as a facade for their religious views. They want to regulate people’s lives.”

The Lincoln Club’s Johns defends the “impressive and significant” donations by the business people as a product of political opportunity, not religious fanaticism. Last year’s legislative reapportionment created enough Republican-leaning Assembly seats to buoy right-wing hopes for gaining ground in the Assembly, where Speaker Brown and his liberal lieutenants have ruled.

“These aren’t zealots who are putting the money into the deal,” Johns said. “They are business people who believe they can make an impact.”

The impact takes place in the absence of any limits on contributions for state and local offices. California voters in June, 1988, passed Proposition 73, which put a lid on campaign contributions in the state for the first time. However, the measure was struck down almost in its entirety by a federal court. Reapportionment and an unprecedented number of open Assembly seats this fall have added to the state’s political turmoil.

The person picking up most of the tab for the religious revolution in the state is Ahmanson--a self-proclaimed Calvinist who has made it his business to serve God with Mammon. His political donations since January have amounted to $775,000.

Since his 1973 religious conversion--while living in a fraternity house at Occidental College--Ahmanson has used his money to help defend anti-abortion protesters who claimed they had been abused by police and, most recently, establish assistance for Romanian orphans, according to reports filed with the state’s Registry of Charitable Trusts.

His Irvine-based Fieldstead & Co.--a corporate alter ego through which Ahmanson does some of his giving--has funded a Christian book series, helped underwrite an anti-pornography film and recently paid for a poll to quiz evangelical Christians about foreign aid. In the past, Ahmanson has supported a number of homes for abused children.

Ahmanson is also a trustee and major donor to the Chalcedon Foundation, an influential religious think tank that has given rise to much of the religious right’s political activism in recent years.

Chalcedon President R. J. Rushdoony, a prolific author, is considered the father of Christian “Reconstructionism,” which holds that believers should actively remake America’s declining, secular humanistic society through adherence to biblical law. “Resurgent Christianity,” he preaches, should demand that family units reclaim control over children, welfare, property and education from the government.

Ahmanson, who believes in the inerrancy of the Scriptures, told a newspaper reporter seven years ago: “My purpose is total integration of biblical law into our lives.”

Ahmanson’s wife and a former employee, however, say the low-key mogul has mellowed considerably since then and is not a rigid ideologue with money to burn. They say he is an intellectually driven man who eschews the pretense of wealth and cares deeply about the poor.

“His is not some bourgeois tolerance of the disenfranchised,” said Rob Martin, who worked for Ahmanson’s Fieldstead company from 1983 to 1989. “This guy is down-to-earth, he’s real, he knows suffering, he knows pain in his own life and he’s a very caring person.”

Martin describes Ahmanson as a “tortured soul” who must constantly guard against greedy opportunists masquerading as friends. Ahmanson has admitted publicly that he “resented” his family background, did not regard his father as a role model and was never comfortable with a lifestyle that meant limousine rides to junior high.

Ahmanson was destined to take over the family business, but when his father died in 1969, the 18-year-old scion went into therapy while his cousins took over the boardroom.

Since then, he has sold all his stock in the family business and does not sit on its board, sources said, but cannot do much to control the blind trust that sends him money from more than $50-million worth of investments.

Friends say Ahmanson now has a wry sense of humor about his relentless wealth. As a commentary on his circumstance, Ahmanson likes to pass out copies of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” the story of an alcoholic philanthropist who has more money than he can give away.

At times, he also compares himself to the rich young ruler, whom Jesus admonished to sell his possessions before seeking the kingdom of heaven. “If I tried, I couldn’t because it keeps coming back to me,” Ahmanson tells his friends.

Yet it was Christianity that helped Ahmanson cope with his lot in life, say his friends. As the story goes, members of a Newport Beach Christian singles group slowly convinced him during the mid-1970s that the wealth should be viewed not as a curse but as a blessing from God.

That it could also be used as a powerful political tool became clear a short time later, when Ahmanson decided one night to slip into a church meeting at the Orange County Rescue Mission in Santa Ana.

After the service, Ahmanson learned from Martin, who was then the shelter’s director, that the city’s redevelopment agency intended to condemn the combination soup kitchen-shelter to make way for an office building parking lot.

“My husband was outraged by that,” said Roberta Ahmanson. “What it meant was that the public entity was taking away the right of private entities to care for the poor. . . . That politicized my husband.”

The incident, she said, launched Ahmanson--who voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976--into the realm of Christian activism, libertarian economics and right-wing Republican politics. His philosophy held that private property rights were essential for religious liberty; economic prosperity was required to take care of the poor.

During the Christian campaign to stamp out pornography in the mid-1980s, Ahmanson met a kindred soul in Hurtt. In 1987, they founded the private Capitol Resources Institute in Sacramento to lobby the Legislature and bring the Christian “shade of opinion” to hearings about pornography and family issues, Martin said. The Institute now sends out political newsletters to Christians, and its 1991 filings list both men as board members and primary contributors.

Ahmanson also contributed $62,500 in 1990 to the Western Center for Law and Religious Freedom. The center has filed suit against the Los Angeles Police Department for using pain compliance holds on anti-abortion protesters, and it filed a brief defending the Kern County school district for banning the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”--by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez--for profanity and vulgarity.

He is also trustee of the $465-million, non-religious Ahmanson Foundation, which was created by his father and ranks as the state’s 19th largest charity.

But the cause that’s drawing the most attention these days is Ahmanson’s political donations, which his wife said are motivated by desires to improve the economy, improve the plight of children and safeguard religious freedoms from the intrusion of the state.

A high-ranking Republican Party source said Ahmanson was one of the first people who conservative strategists approached for money after deciding which Assembly seats to pursue after reapportionment. And records show Ahmanson has responded with unprecedented generosity.

Overall, he has donated $670,350 directly to 30 Republican incumbents or candidates, including those running in the Assembly races. He and his wife have also given $65,000 to qualify the school voucher initiative for the June, 1994, ballot, and another $50,000 to defeat Proposition 161 in November. That measure would permit physician-assisted suicides or euthanasia for some terminally ill patients.

Most of the money candidates received from Ahmanson was through PACs, with $83,125 received directly from the mogul. On one day, March 12, Ahmanson wrote $26,625 worth of checks to 13 Assembly hopefuls.

The rest of his candidate donations have been through intermediaries, the largest of which are: Allied Business PAC, Family PAC, College Republicans, California Pro-Life PAC and Citizens for Responsible Representation.

All this giving, say Ahmanson’s friends, is not to buy an election or foist the Bible on society, but to make sure the principles of free enterprise and evangelical Christian morality have a fighting chance in the political process.

Martin, his one-time employee, said: “He’s not some guy who sits back and, like some Machiavelli, pulls strings.”