Effort to surmount polarizing debates backfires on pastor

Rick Warren has angered gays.

Rick Warren arrives in Washington this week in the midst of the culture war he has spent years trying to transcend.

The California pastor, who wrote the best-selling hardcover book in US history and built up from scratch one of the largest churches in the nation, is widely considered the most visible and successful champion of a new form of political engagement for evangelicals, one that is less partisan, and concerned about more issues, than the abortion-and-gays-focused religious right associated with Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson.

But in the weeks since he was tapped by President-elect Barack Obama to deliver the invocation at tomorrow's inaugural ceremony, Warren has become a lightning rod for criticism because of his opposition to same-sex marriage. This genial, Hawaiian-shirt wearing preacher, whose website describes him as America's Pastor and whose utterances have appeared on Starbucks cups, finds himself for the first time being scrutinized and attacked.

"Warren ultimately has been hurt by accepting the invitation," said Alan Wolfe, the director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. "He was on a clear path to be the compassionate conservative evangelical, but what he may not have realized is that once you get the exposure, they're going to start picking up everything you've said, and some of the things he's said are not all that pleasant."

There is considerable irony in the controversy over Warren, who has spent a career trying to distance himself from the polarizing debates that have often pitted liberals against evangelicals.

Although he has never hidden his opposition to abortion and gay marriage, he has actively courted Democrats as well as Republicans, and has repeatedly asserted that evangelicals need to care about a much broader policy agenda, throwing himself, and the considerable wealth generated by his congregation and his book sales, into the fight against AIDS in Africa.

But he was also a supporter of Proposition 8, the measure approved by California voters in November to overturn same-sex marriage in that state, and in an interview last month he compared same-sex marriage to "a brother and sister being together and calling that marriage" and to "one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage."

His most controversial comments are now available on YouTube, and the specifics of his AIDS work, his lengthy and readily available video record, and a battle he once had with the IRS are being criticized by bloggers and journalists.

The Huffington Post, noting that Warren has cited the success Hitler, Lenin and Mao had at energizing followers, ran a piece last week headlined "Follow Jesus Like Nazis Followed Hitler, Rick Warren Tells Stadium Crowd," while the Daily Beast ran a piece called "Rick Warren's Africa Problem," noting that some of Warren's African partners have opposed condom use and homosexuality.

"The culture wars are not over," observed Michael Cromartie, director of the evangelicals in civic life program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington think tank.

"He's tried very hard not to be seen as a cultural warrior - I know when he comes to Washington he meets with Democrats and Republicans, and he tries hard not to be seen as someone ideologically tainted, and potentially as someone who, like Billy Graham, could be friends with [John] McCain or Obama, despite their disagreements," Cromartie said. "But he's a very gregarious talkative guy who will say more sometimes than necessary. [And] the culture is less forgiving for mistakes that are made, because mistakes are shown far and wide more quickly."

Among Warren's critics was Bishop V. Gene Robinson, the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, who is openly gay and was invited by Obama to give the invocation at a pre-inaugural event yesterday. In an interview last week with the Globe, Robinson said that asking Warren to speak during the inauguration "sent the wrong message."

But Robinson said he was also hoping to open a dialogue with Warren, saying, "Amongst evangelicals, he's not the worst of the bunch. He's taken quite a lot of heat from his allies for his compassion around AIDS and his work on poverty in the world, and I think he's been really good on some of those things. It's just that on the issue of gay and lesbian relations, the stuff he has said is appalling."

In his invocation yesterday, Robinson called on God to "bless us with anger" at discrimination against gay people, among others, but he also prayed for "a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger."

Warren, 54, who last week declined interview requests, is widely known and admired in evangelical circles for having founded Saddleback Church, in Orange County, and built it into a megachurch of 22,000.

His book, "The Purpose Driven Life," has sold more than 25 million copies, and was preceded by another popular tome, "The Purpose Driven Church," that was used widely by evangelical congregations to encourage participation and growth. Last August, Time magazine put Warren on its cover and called him "America's Most Powerful Religious Leader."

"He's very well known, extremely, mainly because of his books, which caught the attention of churches and pastors," said F. Bryan Wilkerson, pastor of Grace Chapel in Lexington, which was one of many local churches that used Warren's program to reexamine their church's mission and reengage their membership.

And R. Judson Carlberg, the president of Gordon College in Wenham, said many of his students have read Warren's book, and all of them know who he is.

"He's listening with one hand on the Bible, and the other hand on his Internet connection, and trying to bring the two together," Carlberg said. "He takes seriously the teachings of Christ, but he also is trying to figure out how do you convey what Christ said?"

Warren represents the most recent stage in a shifting relationship between evangelicals and American politics. In the early 20th century, many evangelicals withdrew from political life as the fundamentalist movement embraced a cultural separatism.

Graham, who rose to prominence with widely attended crusades beginning in 1949, helped lead evangelicals back into the public square, and famously befriended a long string of American presidents until recently, when his failing health limited his public activities.

Starting in the late 1970s, the religious right emerged as a major political force, with organizations such as the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, and since that time evangelicals have been a major Republican constituency. Warren represents the next possible trend in evangelical engagement - a diverse religious movement with a broad social justice agenda and greater distance from political parties. He invited Obama to speak at an AIDS conference at Saddleback in 2006, and last year Warren hosted a campaign forum in which he questioned Obama and McCain.

Warren, like Graham before him, is also known in part for his willingness, even eagerness, to engage with the non-evangelical world; a few weeks ago, in the midst of the gay marriage flap, he talked about the issue with Melissa Etheridge, a lesbian singer-songwriter, at a conference of Muslims.

But there has been minimal impact on voting behavior from the shift away from partisanship by Warren and others - exit polls suggest that 73 percent of white evangelicals voted for McCain, down only slightly from the 79 percent who voted for Bush in the 2004 election. Nonetheless, many scholars believe Warren is emblematic of a broader shift under way in evangelicalism.

"Rick tends to be wise, measured, and centrist, and he has a broader agenda than the religious right. Even though he's been tarred with this whole thing, he has refused to make those his only or even the most central things," said Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary in California.

Michael Paulson can be reached at mpaulson@globe.com

Correction: Because of a reporting error, a front-page story in yesterday's Globe about the Rev. Rick Warren, who will give the invocation at today's presidential inauguration, gave the wrong date when he invited Barack Obama to speak at an AIDS conference at his church. Obama's speech was in 2006.