Baptist lobbyist walks a fine line

Second of three parts on key evangelical leaders

NASHVILLE -- In the early 1970s, Richard Land, the Southern Baptist son of a Houston welder, took up his calling as the pastor of a storefront church in the heart of New Orleans' French Quarter. ''We had a gay bar next door, and a drag queen costume shop across the street," he recalls.

He had just graduated from Princeton, where '60s liberalism and student pot smoking provided one level of culture shock for a young man weaned on daily Bible studies and his parents' evangelical confidence in the word of God. Bourbon Street, on the other hand, was like another universe.

Land and his classmates at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary were required to double as street preachers, ministering to alcoholics, addicts, hustlers, gamblers, runaways, and other assorted lost souls. His contact with a large gay community at the height of the counterculture era would shape a lifelong interest in combating what Land calls ''the homosexual lifestyle," a mission that he combines with an equally intense determination to denounce the hate-mongers within the Christian right.

''Jesus would never use a derogatory term to refer to a human being," says Land.

For 18 years, Land has walked this fine line as the Southern Baptist Convention's influential point-man in Washington, where he uses his close ties to the White House and congressional leadership to promote a deeply conservative social agenda on behalf of the nation's largest non-Catholic denomination. But he carefully distances himself from the far right, whether he's arguing that Christians should minister to gays and lesbians rather than condemn them or openly criticizing fellow evangelicals who refuse to follow court orders from ''liberal activist" judges.

And at a time when the political right is fracturing over Supreme Court nominee Harriet E. Miers, Land is emerging as an avid Bush loyalist. Land, 58, has personally known the president since they both lived in Texas in the 1980s, and still meets with him three to four times a year. Unlike others on the right, Land didn't require convincing when Bush nominated John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice -- despite an unclear record on abortion and other social issues -- and now stands apart from critics of the Miers's nomination. Yesterday, Land appeared on NBC's ''Meet the Press" to defend Miers, predicting she will disagree with Roberts ''only one percent of the time."

To his liberal foes, Land is easily the most confounding of religious right leaders. At least as steeped in Western history as biblical verse, this fan of Jane Austen and Thomas Wolfe boasts a doctorate of philosophy from Oxford and readily slips out of Southern Baptist vernacular into the language of the media elite.

He frequently quotes Winston Churchill and tops the guest call-list when the subject on Washington's Sunday TV talk shows turn to faith and values. Last year he logged 160 media interviews. He counts Democrats among his best friends.

''He doesn't play to stereotypes," says Joseph R. Crapa, a former Clinton official who runs the bipartisan US Commission on International Religious Freedom, where Land has served as a commissioner since 2001. ''He's adept about knowing what hat he's wearing at any time. He really does thread that very carefully."

Land helped direct a far-flung Southern Baptist rescue effort for victims of Hurricane Katrina just weeks after returning from China, where he lobbied authorities to grant more religious freedom to the country's citizens.

But his critics know him as an unyielding proponent of banning abortion rights, gay marriage, and embryonic stem cell research. His public statements on social issues, says J. Brent Walker, executive director of the centrist Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, ''can be very acerbic. He's more likely to take a very hard-edged position."

On issues involving separation of church and state, Walker says, ''I think in his heart [Land] is more moderate than many would suppose. But my perception is that his support for the Bush administration and pressure from right-wing forces within the Southern Baptist Convention push him in the other direction. He tries to have it both ways in many cases."

Land, whose official title is president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, was instrumental in the Southern Baptist Convention's sharp swing to the right more than a decade ago, including the adoption of a resolution encouraging wives to obey their husbands. Last spring, he urged President Bush -- a friend since 1988 -- to step into the Terri Schiavo case and sign unprecedented legislation throwing Congress and the White House into the center of a family's dispute over an end-of-life decision.

Gay leaders are particularly alarmed about Land's promotion of ''reparative therapy" to transform sexual orientation. At the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting in June, Land unveiled a video in which former gays and lesbians attribute their life paths to childhood sexual and physical abuse. (The men and women also condemned the intolerance of many religious figures they encountered.) More than 300 copies were distributed to churches as instruction on how to minister to gays and lesbians.

In addition to Bush, Land enjoys close ties to Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, where Land now resides.

Last year he ran an extensive get-out-the-vote operation and takes some credit for Republican victories. ''I'm Richard Land, and I vote my values, and from what I can tell and what pollsters found out last year you vote our values too," he declared during a June speech to the Southern Baptist Convention.

Land's parents were married at the First Baptist Church in Weymouth in 1943. His Navy father was briefly stationed in Boston during World War II, serving as a welder on the USS Boston, and his mother grew up in Braintree. She followed her husband back to his hometown of Houston, where Land was born and his father rose to become the foreman of a welding group for the gas company.

Land describes his mother as a Henry Cabot Lodge-style Republican and his father as a yellow-dog Democrat ''who still thinks that FDR was not only the greatest president but perhaps the greatest human being who ever lived and is quite disappointed that both of his sons identify themselves as Republicans." His mother was a staunch Baptist, and his father, originally a casual Methodist, was born again at a Billy Graham crusade when Land was 6 years old.

Raised in a two-bedroom frame house in the shadow of Houston's skyscrapers, Land attended Princeton on scholarship and thrived on the Ivy League campus, where he wrote a thesis on the pre-Civil War split between northern and southern Baptists over slavery.

James E. Harris, son of a Democratic congressman and the only other Southern Baptist in their class, described his classmate as ''very, very interested in religion and politics." On the Vietnam War, Land combined his readings of religion and philosophy to support his pro-war stance, Harris recalls. ''Richard was very interested in Christian ethics: Are there biblical parameters to the question of just and unjust wars? He had a very strong philosophical approach," Harris says.

Land graduated from Princeton magna cum laude before entering the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, where he ministered out of the storefront church in the French Quarter. The runaways he encountered typically had no place else to go, he recalls, and faced sexual or physical abuse if they returned home, so Land's church became a refuge.

The large number of gays fitting this description convinced Land that ''homosexuality is a choice, but it is a choice that is often conditioned by a lot of circumstances. Who among us could say how we would respond if our first sexual experience was to be molested as a 10- or 11-year-old?"

Land carefully parses his position, condemning what he calls ''a sad and depressing lifestyle" while berating those -- such as the preacher who often shows up to Southern Baptist meetings with a ''God Hates Fags" sign -- that he compares to the bullies that he used to stand up to on the school yard while defending smaller children. ''I never had the kind of visceral reaction that a lot of heterosexual males have," he says. ''I never felt threatened by it."

To critics, these are distinctions without a difference. How does Land respond to gays who were never abused? And how many of those troubled teens he encountered become runaways precisely because of families who refused to accept their difference?

''I disagree," he says. ''The runaways I encountered -- whether heterosexual or homosexual -- were from dysfunctional families. It wasn't that they were different -- it's that their families were different." He adds, ''I love homosexuals, but I don't accept their lifestyle. Homosexual behavior is contrary to biblically acceptable moral lifestyle."

At Oxford, where he earned a doctor of philosophy, Land served as pastor of a small British Baptist church. He then began an academic career as a professor and dean at the Southern Baptist-affilliated Criswell College in Houston, but was soon lured into politics. From 1987 to 1988, he served as Texas Governor William P. Clements Jr.'s senior adviser on church-state and values issues. During this period, he also befriended the son of a US president -- George W. Bush.

After his 1988 election to the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention's public policy arm, Land forged common ground with liberals on race when he orchestrated the convention's apology for its forebears' involvement in slavery. ''It occurred to me that it's one thing to denounce racism," says Land, who considers Martin Luther King Jr. a hero. ''It's another to apologize. There's an empowering when you ask for forgiveness."

As presidentially appointed commissioner on the bipartisan US Commission on International Religious Freedom, Land has taken part in efforts to stop religious persecution, sex trafficking, and other global human rights violations.

But Land also provided much of the intellectual underpinning for the Southern Baptists' shift toward fundamentalism and hard-right political views, a trend known as the ''conservative resurgence" that in the early 1990s prompted moderates to leave in droves. In 2000, former US President Jimmy Carter left, despite being a three-generation Southern Baptist, complaining that the convention had adopted policies that ''violate the basic premises of my Christian faith."

One of those policies was a 2000 denominational statement that women should not become pastors; another was a 1988 revision to church doctrine stating that a wife should ''submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband."

Land, whose wife Rebekah has a Ph.D. from Texas Women's University and is in private practice as a marriage and family therapist, defends the convention's stance. He says critics of the family relations statement fail to note that a husband is biblically bound to exercise patient love and to put his wife's needs above his own.

''There is no room for a husband ever to say, 'submit, woman,' " he says, insisting that people are wrong ''to read into it some kind of chauvinism."

Land was also linked to the Southern Baptists' 1997 decision to boycott The Walt Disney Co., a move designed to punish the entertainment giant for gay-friendly corporate policies. But Land now says the action was pushed by local churches in California and Florida -- the sites of theme parks that sponsored gay-themed visitor days -- and that convention leaders were not strong supporters. In June, the Southern Baptists voted to end the boycott.

While Land became increasingly visible in the national media, splitting his time between Nashville and Washington, his family remained rooted in a Southern culture of faith. Land's eldest daughter, Jennifer, teaches math at a Nashville Christian school; his son, Richard, works in a youth ministry in Florida; and Rachel, the youngest, recently received her masters of arts and biblical counseling from the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Land has a preacher's charisma and a professor's loquaciousness. And like any good politician, he's a man constantly in motion. ''Inertia is not leadership," he scolds a sweating aide as he strides into the room for an interview.

He's eager to advertise his friendships with liberals, and says he relishes being the ''token conservative" on panel discussions. ''It's always interesting to be around people with whom I disagree to see what they think," he says.

Land's positions can take surprising turns. During last year's elections, he castigated the Republican Party for asking people to help secure church directories for get-out-the-vote efforts. ''I said that's just beyond the pale. It's a violation of fellow church members," he says.

More recently, while Land encouraged the White House and Congress to step into the Schiavo case, he distanced himself from far-right voices calling for extra-legal action to keep her alive.

Land draws a sharp distinction between challenging laws and challenging the rule of law. ''We are a rare country where there is enormous consensus behind the rule of law, even if we disagree with it," he says. ''A federal judge's law is the law, until it is overturned by a higher authority, which means appeals court or the Supreme Court."

He condemns the actions of former Alabama chief justice Roy S. Moore, who refused to remove a Ten Commandments monument from his courthouse, despite court orders. Moore received a hearty welcome from Southern Baptists at their June meeting, but Land says it was ''offensive" for Moore to compare himself to Martin Luther King Jr.

Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington think tank that studies religion in public life, says Land has helped conservative evangelicals overcome the poor image they suffered when they were associated with such divisive figures as religious right founder Jerry Falwell and televangelist Pat Robertson.

''There is a new type of evangelical leader -- more sophisticated and more learned, with softer edges, " Cromartie says. ''Land represents that new generation."

Tomorrow: A purpose driven life