Group Promotes Image of Christians as Political Moderates

For Elizabeth Parker, the president of the Orange County Board of Education, the call to action came when a conservative Christian activist called her a “Nazi lover” for attending an abortion rights meeting.

Father Brad Karelius of Santa Ana’s Episcopal Church of the Messiah decided to get involved after noticing the increasing discomfort of his middle-of-the-road congregants with the Christian Coalition’s fundamentalist views on social issues.

And Tim Carpenter, a Catholic activist for Orange County’s homeless and poor, joined because he believes that the biblical values of compassion, equality and generosity have been overlooked for far too long in an area that prides itself on its religiosity.

All are participating in an ecumenical experiment in Orange County--a drive to create a Christian voice that doesn’t conjure up images of Ralph Reed, right-wing politics or Pat Robertson.

They are helping launch a local branch of Call to Renewal--a national movement started last year by evangelist Jim Wallis, the progressive editor of Sojourners magazine, based in Washington.

Call to Renewal follows in the footsteps of the national Interfaith Alliance, founded in 1994 to provide a “grass-roots mainstream counter voice to the extreme religious right.” The Los Angeles-based Progressive Religious Alliance has similar goals.

But Call to Renewal is alone in establishing a chapter in Orange County, a stronghold of the Christian Coalition, where moderate voices have often spoken in isolation--if at all.

Wallis, the author of a recently published book, “Who Speaks for God?: An Alternative to the Religious Right--A New Politics of Compassion, Community and Civility,” has crisscrossed the country since February holding seminars for those craving what they consider a more humane approach to the nation’s social problems.

His local stops have included San Diego, Pasadena and Los Angeles. But organizers said nowhere has the fledgling movement resonated as it has here, on what might be expected to be the most unfriendly turf.

“I went out and got a friend of mine to organize the initial meeting and he started by saying, ‘The first thing you need to know about Orange County, Carol, is we don’t call ourselves Christians out here anymore,’ ” said Call to Renewal’s Washington spokeswoman, Carol Fennelly.

“I had this distinct feeling that I was sitting in the catacombs in the 1st century with Christians hiding out. There was just a feeling of fear out there that was really pretty shocking. To think that Christians are causing that feeling in one another is pretty pathetic.”

Call to Renewal sees itself in part as a counterweight to the Christian Coalition, founded by Robertson, headed by Reed and known for its powerful support of right-wing political candidates and conservative social stands.

Wallis agrees with the Christian Coalition that the nation is suffering a spiritual crisis. But solutions won’t spring from rhetoric or political crusading, he says. He believes the nation will heal only by people working together to treat the root causes of poverty and youth violence, and by pushing for a respectful dialogue in the political arena.

Organizers are quick to add that Call to Renewal also aims to offer an alternative to the secular Left.

But Sara DiVito Hardman, the Christian Coalition’s chairwoman for California, said recent efforts to counter the coalition have been “self-defeating.”

“The more of those [groups] that spring up, the more members we get, and the more we are energized,” said Hardman, whose organization distributed 5 million voter guides in California alone this election cycle--twice as many as it circulated in 1994.

Hardman nevertheless said she welcomes the call for civility in the political process, pointing out that her own organization is often the victim of vitriol.

“I’m as tired of it as . . . the rest of Americans,” she said. “I tell our people that we, as Christians, espouse to be more Godlike, and the Bible says that God is love. And that is love toward your enemy as well.”

Other conservatives are more skeptical about Call to Renewal.

“They’re not kissing cousins who have an alternative voice. It’s a totally different set of values and beliefs,” said the Rev. Lou Sheldon, chairman of the Orange County-based Traditional Values Coalition, a national organization of 32,000 churches.

“They’re pro-gay rights, they’re pro-abortion. Any way you skin the cat, that’s what you get. The public that they are appealing to is not our public, so it’s apples and oranges.”

Sheldon said Call to Renewal springs from a long-standing tradition of social gospel ministries, and poses no threat to the Christian right’s position in American politics.

The nascent organization has nevertheless struck a chord with Christians who consider themselves mainstream. An Orange County conference featuring Wallis last month drew 160 people, many of whom vowed to keep working with the group.

About 40 of those participants reconvened for a planning meeting on Nov. 9 at the St. Joseph Justice Center in Orange, holding a spirited discussion of the group’s mission and as-yet-undefined goals.

“It’s not the political right or political left we’re supporting,” said Sister Kathy Stein, of the Sisters of St. Joseph. “It’s Christian spiritual values.”

Participants shared a concern that the terms Christian and Christianity, in the minds of a large segment of the public, have been appropriated by a small group.

“I’ve got non-faith people on campus who, as soon as they hear ‘Christian,’ they think we want to do away with the separation of church and state and ram Christianity down everyone’s throat,” said Don Will, a professor of peace studies at Chapman University.

Asked Arlene Amorino, a nurse who plans to stay involved with the group: “How can you say, ‘Love thy neighbor’ and then say, ‘We don’t want welfare’? Our good God would not say, ‘Don’t give food and money to these women and children.’ He would say, ‘Give them fish, then teach them how to fish.”’

Countered Sheldon:

“We love our neighbor, and we do take care of our neighbor. We just don’t believe illegal aliens should be given millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money when hard-working citizens aren’t getting that help and they’re paying the taxes.”

The Orange County group plans to meet again in January to further define itself. So far, the group has adopted an idealistic set of guiding principles that advocate food, housing, clothing, health care, basic education and equal rights for all.

“Of course, this asks for a perfect world,” said Jan Chantland, an Orange County businesswoman and one of the few evangelical Christians who participated in the planning meeting. “But we work toward that.”

Another reminder of the challenge ahead came when the Orange County activists sent out a Code of Fair Campaign Practices to candidates before the Nov. 5 election calling on them to adopt “principles of decency, honesty and fair play.”

They received one signed response, Chantland said.

“The religious right tends to be better organized right now,” acknowledged the Rev. Steve Mather, of First Presbyterian Church in Anaheim. “They tend to speak in more monolithic terms, and in the appropriate theological language to say, ‘This is what God wants.’

“It globalizes their constituency very effectively . . . and I think it scares the bejesus out of non-Christians, or people who don’t know how their faith translates.”

A former local board president of Planned Parenthood, Mather saw his church picketed by vocal opponents who deemed him unchristian--spotlighting the need, he said, for more education on the history and range of Christian views on social issues. Mather subsequently met with several groups that had angrily questioned his views.

“It just blew their minds that in the 1950s most of the directors of Planned Parenthood were ministers,” he said.