William R. Bright, 81; Evangelist Founded Campus Crusade

William R. Bright, who founded Campus Crusade for Christ on the UCLA campus in 1951 and built it into an Evangelical Christian movement with branches in 191 countries, has died. He was 81.

Bright died Saturday at his home in Orlando, Fla., of complications from pulmonary fibrosis, said Steve Chapman, a spokesman for Campus Crusade.

The dedicated leader’s religious fervor and a family tradition of supporting Republican candidates found expression in the Christian Embassy he established in Washington, D.C., in the early 1970s for prayers and Bible study.

Critics said it was an attempt to organize a Christian coalition. Admirers applauded Bright as a visionary.

His tightly run Campus Crusade was singled out in 1996 as the largest organization of its kind by U.S.A. Today and in 1993, ’95 and ’96 as the most efficiently managed of its kind by Money magazine.

“Bill Bright was a catalyst,” said David Neff, editor of Christianity Today magazine, “not only for Campus Crusade, but for other programs he launched.”

During 50 years as head of his organization, Bright expanded his empire to include a film and video division that created a feature on the life of Jesus. It was produced in 1979 and translated into 700 languages. He added more than 60 other offices to his original campus program, each one aimed at converting members of a special interest group, from executives to prison inmates. In 2000, his staff had grown to 26,000 and his annual budget was $450 million.

Bright built his organization with the help of a pamphlet he produced and freely handed out, starting in 1951. It contained four points that he referred to as the Four Spiritual Laws. They state that God loves you and has a plan for your life, sin separates you from God, Jesus is the only provision for your sins, and you must individually receive Christ as your Savior.

Members of a sorority at UCLA were Bright’s first target. From there he went on to train more than 1 billion young people at Campus Crusade rallies and conferences to memorize his laws and repeat them to anyone who would listen.

Critics charged that Bright’s four laws reduced Christianity to a superficial formula. Supporters described him as God’s entrepreneur.

“One thing that characterizes American Evangelical Protestantism is an entrepreneurial spirit,” Neff said.

“A person gets a vision, calls a few friends, drums up a little money and does it. He doesn’t wait for a church bureaucracy to approve the plan.”

Born in Coweta, Okla., one of seven children, Bright was the son of a prosperous rancher and Republican fund-raiser, and the grandson of a pioneer in the oil industry. He once recalled his early years as a time of ice cream and watermelon socials. After graduating from Northeastern State College in Tahlequah, Okla., in 1943, he moved to Southern California for business, not religious reasons. He saw growth opportunities for his California Confections company, which offered candy, jam and jelly.

At the time, Bright was 23 years old and a “happy pagan,” he later said. Along with building up a successful company, he worked as an amateur actor on radio theater, rode horseback to relax and socialized at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub.

All of that changed when he got to know Dan Fuller, whose father, Charles, was helping to found Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.

At the time, Bright’s landlord had been inviting him to church on Sunday, but he had resisted. One day when he was driving along Hollywood Boulevard, he happened to pass by the First Presbyterian Church.

“It was as though an unseen hand reached out and parked the car and led me in,” Bright said in a 1998 interview. By then he was accustomed to talking about his religious life in mystical terms.

That same force led him to Sunday school classes at the church and to a born-again religious conversion. At the time, Bright made a “contract” with God that promised, “I am your slave.”

The following year, 1946, he entered Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey. He soon transferred to Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, but kept his confections business going.

“I thought he was becoming a fanatic,” said Vonette Zachary Bright, his sweetheart back home in Oklahoma. He sent her letters expounding on his new faith and eventually he convinced Vonette to follow his lead. They married in 1948 and three years later they co-founded Campus Crusade. Bright dropped out of the seminary and closed his candy business.

Entrepreneurial talent and religious zeal joined forces in the Campus Crusade. “Bill Bright had a remarkable organizational ability,” Charles Colson once said. When Colson founded his Prison Fellowship in 1976, he consulted Bright about business concerns.

“He structured his Campus Crusade from nothing,” Colson said of Bright. “He was a visionary who surrounded himself with talented people to help him carry out the vision.”

As Bright’s crusade grew, he attracted high profile supporters, Johnny Cash and Dale Evans among them. He also drew criticism from high-powered voices.

Billy Graham, the leading Evangelical preacher, complained publicly in 1974 when Bright opened his, “Campus Crusade Christian Embassy” in Washington, D.C., that it was an attempt to organize Christians into a political bloc, a tactic Graham opposed.

In hindsight, Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourners Magazine for religious, political and social issues, told the Dallas Morning News in a 1998 interview that Bright’s “embassy” had been, “the first effort to form the religious right in America.” Soon after it was begun, Wallis published a magazine cover story disclosing plans for the embassy to include prayer, Bible study and active support for hard right Republican candidates.

Bright kept his Campus Crusade Christian Embassy open despite criticism, but he backed away from political activism. Some years later, he and Wallis reconciled.

Graham, whom Bright always described as a friend, said in a written statement Sunday that Bright “has carried a burden on his heart as few men that I’ve ever known. A burden for the evangelization of the world.”

Historian Mark Noll challenged an aspect of Bright’s work in his 1994 book “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.” In evaluating the Evangelical movement in modern times, Noll referred to the “crusader” approach of Bright and others as naive and inept.

He argued that the easy answers they propose gloss over the complexities of a life of faith.

Bright caused a stir in Hollywood in 1988 when he offered Universal Studios and its parent MCA $10 million to buy all copies of its film “The Last Temptation of Christ” to prevent the motion picture’s release. Like some others, Bright considered the film -- based on the 1955 novel by Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis -- an insult to their beliefs because it portrayed Jesus Christ (played by Willem Dafoe) as a vacillating, self-doubting character who once dreamed of making love to Mary Magdalene.

The studio rejected Bright’s offer and released the film.

Along with public controversies, however, Bright made news for his shining successes. In 1996, he won the Templeton prize for progress in religion, with a $1.07-million purse attached. He used the money to promote fasting and prayer around the world. “It will influence educated people to wake up to religion,” he told The Times of his plan.

Bright moved his headquarters to a new complex in Orlando, Fla., in 1989, after a slow growth initiative in San Diego County prevented him from expanding his long-time base in a converted resort hotel in Arrowhead Springs. He had wanted to add a 1,000-acre university and a 750-acre industrial park.

From Orlando, Bright continued to travel on business some 300 days each year. He and his wife lived in a luxury condominium donated by supporters, on a salary of about $48,000 per year.

He wrote his first novel, “Blessed Child,” after 100 or so books and booklets on Christian living. And in 2001, after his illness was diagnosed, he appointed his successor, Steve Douglass, who had been a Campus Crusade staff member for more than 30 years.

Close to the end of his life, Bright told his family what he wanted them to put on his tombstone: “Slave for Jesus.”

Bright is survived by his wife; two sons, Zachary and Bradley; a sister, Florence Skinner; a brother, Forest; and four grandchildren.

Services are pending. The family has asked that memorial donations be sent to the William R. Bright Legacy Trust, 100 Lake Hart Drive, Orlando, FL 32832-0100.