How the Mayoral Rivals Keep the Faith

At the Church of Christ in Redondo Beach, the sanctuary is unadorned save for two modest flower arrangements. There is not a musical instrument in sight, except for the voices of congregants raised in a cappella four-part harmonies. There are no elaborate creeds, just solid preaching from the Good Book.

It is plain. It is devout. It is the lifelong spiritual home of James K. Hahn, the city attorney who wants to serve as the next mayor of Los Angeles. Hahn’s quiet demeanor masks a profoundly strong faith that occasionally conflicts with his political views but that shapes his approach to public service.

It is the idea of servant leadership: that to lead, one must first learn to serve.

“I think it’s about making sure that you live your life, public or private, according to a set of values you believe in . . . that you don’t lie, you don’t cheat, that you understand that holding public office is a public trust,” he said.

“It’s an opportunity to live out, I think, the principles of Christianity: caring for your neighbor. That is central to my idea of Christianity, the idea of helping those who are less fortunate.”

Many of those lessons came in a concrete way from the late Kenny Hahn, the county supervisor who gave his children, Jim and Janice, a model of how to integrate service to God with service to humanity.

When you saw a woman with children stranded on a freeway with an empty gas tank, as the supervisor did, you invented freeway call boxes. When you heard about appalling conditions for incarcerated women, you started a commission that led to reforms and the Sybil Brand Women’s Prison. When you saw a pothole, you got it fixed.

In Kenny Hahn’s world, this was not just the people’s business; it was God’s work, that of the good Samaritan. He performed that work for decades on behalf of his largely poor and black district.

“Dad raised us to believe that two of the most noble professions we could go into were full-time preacher or public servant,” said Janice Hahn, who is running for the City Council. “These were the best ways to serve God and man. I knew he believed he was doing God’s work every day in improving people’s lives.”

A Formidable Religious Dynasty

The Hahn family--whose political strength has been compared to the Daleys of Chicago--actually is an even more formidable religious dynasty. They have produced more preachers than politicians, on both sides of the family. Hahn’s grandparents, Harry Robert Sr. and Pauline Fox, were Church of Christ missionaries in Japan; his mother was born there. His uncles started a Christian college on the outskirts of Tokyo.

Jim Hahn’s mother, Ramona, is a lifelong Church of Christ member, firmly and quietly devout, private in her convictions, except for a tune. As her children recall growing up, it is to the backdrop of their mother’s church hymns--over the dishes, in the car from the moment they left for vacation until the moment they got back, Janice Hahn recalled.

The Hahn side came from an entirely different Christian tradition: the rip-roaring, tongues-speaking, spirit-filled Pentecostal tradition of Aimee Semple McPherson and her International Church of the Foursquare Gospel.

The Hahn children remember their dad regaling them with tales of being on fire for Christ, with McPherson sending motorcycles roaring down the church aisle. But Kenny Hahn’s mother, Hattie, who was widowed with seven sons, took her children from church to church--one possible reason for what Janice Hahn calls her father’s religious “free spirit,” a sense of ecumenism he passed on to his children.

Kenny Hahn was baptized into the Church of Christ in 1942, according to family friend Walter King. The first time his father attended the plain service, Jim Hahn recalled, he thought congregants were broke because they had no piano. (The church, which tries to emulate original Christianity, uses no instruments because none are mentioned in the New Testament.)

“The idea is to keep the emphasis on the kingdom of God within you--not in the ostentatious display of materialistic wealth but in the quiet faith . . . in one’s own soul,” said George Hill, a minister of Hahn’s Redondo Beach congregation.

Such values led the Hahns to plain living: a modest three-bedroom house on West 78th Place near Crenshaw Boulevard and Florence Avenue and just one car.

They also formed the core of a close-knit community of friends. Seven of the families, all church members, began a monthly potluck group in 1947. Fifty-four years later, that tradition is still going on.

Hahn went to church three times a week: Sunday morning, Sunday evening and Wednesday prayer meeting. And then there was summer church camp. That religious training, combined with what some friends swear is a photographic memory, catapulted Hahn to Bible trivia champion at his church youth gatherings.

He was also the perennial winner of Name That Verse, according to Jim Youngs, his best friend in high school. A verse would be read, and you had to say which chapter and verse it was. Jimmy Hahn would get it more often than most of his friends.

Staying Out of Trouble

One of his favorite verses is Romans 8:28: “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose.” The older he gets, Hahn said, the more it comforts him to know that everything is working for eventual good even when things seem to be going wrong.

To this day, Hahn does not smoke. He rarely imbibes--though he jokingly blames state Sen. Jack Scott, his Pepperdine house master during a year abroad in Heidelberg, Germany, for turning him on to beer.

“I stayed out of trouble because I knew that being the son of an important person, if you did anything like that you’d get found out,” Hahn said.

One of his more traumatic moments, his friends say, came during his 1979 divorce after less than two years of marriage to his first wife.

Despite the anguish that attended that breakup, Hahn still had the grace to attend her mother’s funeral. To friends, the act demonstrated his Christian forgiveness, even temper and ability to “be pleasant, even when he disagrees with you,” as King put it.

Though his faith animates his political consciousness, Hahn stresses that he does not want to impose his views on others.

“I believe in the separation of church and state very strongly,” he said. “I never want to be in the position of imposing my beliefs on others.”

Indeed, his religious beliefs are not the only ones expressed in his home.

Hahn’s wife, Monica, is not a Church of Christ member. And unlike Hahn’s boyhood church schedule, his children, Karina and Jackson, attend much less frequently. The younger Hahns do participate in their faith, however. Jim Hahn calls on them to say grace at dinner, and he says Jackson’s prayer list rivals Kenny Hahn’s.

The family reads Bible stories together, and takes the time to talk about them. But, Hahn says, “I want this to be something that they choose and want to do on their own.”

Hahn himself has chosen to stay his religious course despite the tension he has sometimes felt between his relatively liberal politics and his conservative faith heritage.

Although the Church of Christ is a network of autonomous congregations with no central governing board, members generally shunned drinking, dancing, smoking, even coed swimming pools for decades.

They have loosened up on those fronts, but they remain on the whole socially and politically conservative, in contrast to the political philosophy espoused in one way or another by the various members of the Hahn family.

Years ago, the Hahns were the only members of their church with a John F. Kennedy bumper sticker and Lyndon B. Johnson campaign pins. Today, Hahn supports abortion rights, though many of his fellow congregants oppose abortion.

Despite a prevalent church view that homosexuality is a biblical abomination, Hahn voted against the Knight initiative that banned same-sex marriages, and supports civilly recognized relationships that confer equal rights and benefits on gays. And he says the church “needs to be enlightened” on opening up leadership roles for women.

(Such positions are not universally known. At a recent gathering of conservative evangelical Latino church members, Hahn was praised for his “pro-family views” and positively contrasted to Villaraigosa’s “pro-abortion, pro-lesbian” positions, in the words of the Rev. V. Martin Garcia of the La Amistad coalition.)

Doctrinal differences with the church have led some of Hahn’s relatives to opt out.

Hahn, however, says his church is changing and offers room for his views.

“The point about our church is that you find your own personal relationship with God,” he said. “You study what the Scripture speaks to find your own beliefs.”

And, differences aside, Hahn remains faithful to the religion in which he was raised.

“I’ve come to the realization that I do believe what I was taught,” Hahn said. “It’s my tradition. It’s my culture.”