Costly Grace

An Evangelical Minister's Rediscovery of Faith, Hope, and Love

Rob Schenck

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780062687913
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062687920
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

An evangelical minister recounts his journey from the religious right and American politics back to the loving messages of Jesus as seen in the gospels.
"A searingly honest view of two sides of America's culture wars. Costly Grace is both an indictment of religiosity and a testimony to the power of redemption. If only all our spiritual and political leaders were as courageous, and as faithful, as Rob Schenck." —The Rt. Rev. Marian Edgar Budde, bishop, Episcopal Diocese of Washington
Rob Schenck has been at the intersection of evangelical Christianity and conservative politics for his entire career. Attacked by partisans on both sides of the aisle, he has been called a "right-wing hate monger," the "ultimate D.C. power-broker," a "traitor," and a "turncoat."
As a teenager in the 1970s, Schenck converted from nominal Judaism to born-again Christianity and found his calling in public ministry. In the 1980s, he became an activist leader of the most extreme wing of the anti-abortion movement and entered the political mainstream inside the Beltway's religious right, brazenly mixing ministry with Republican political activism to advance his movement's crusade in the culture wars.
But after a deep reckoning with the texts of both Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Bible itself, revisiting the lessons Jesus imparted and regaining an understanding of the essence of the gospel, Schenck had an epiphany: he realized that he had strayed from his deepest convictions—that all are worthy of love, acceptance, and forgiveness, and should be free to live outside human judgment and exclusion. Reaffirming his core spiritual beliefs, Schenck today works to liberate the evangelical community from a politicized gospel, and to urge partisan conservatives to move beyond social battles and forsake the politics of hate, fear, and violence. 
In this moving and inspiring memoir, Schenck reflects on his path to God, his unconscious abandonment of Christian principles in the face of fame and influence, and, ultimately, his return to the abiding beliefs that guide him in his work and ministry in Washington today.  Costly Grace is a fascinating, sometimes shocking, and redemptive account of one man's life in faith and politics.

Part I
My First Conversion

In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich. It is very easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements in comparison to what we owe others.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

1
Coming to Jesus

All our young lives my identical twin brother, Paul, and I had searched for a place to belong. We were two Jewish kids who knew no other religious identity but, at the same time, were no longer practicing the faith in which we had been raised. Marge, our mother, was a convert and our father, Hank, had lost interest in continuing our religious education when the social and financial demands of temple membership exceeded what he thought was fair. And so our bar mitzvah preparations ended abruptly.

Our hometown of twelve thousand, Grand Island, New York, was literally an island, smack dab in the middle of the Niagara River, just three miles upstream from the famous falls. When I rode my bike along West River Road, I could see Ontario, Canada, and when I hitchhiked to a friend’s house on the East River, I would look across to the Buffalo suburbs of Kenmore and Tonawanda. We were the youngest of four, our two sisters, from our mother’s first marriage, were six and eight years older. We all loved each other but our ages, different families of origin, and respective cultural experiences—they had started out in life as Christians, my brother and I as Jews—not to mention the unique bond that is twinship, left Paul and me in our own world.

So many times in my life, Paul was the catalyst for momentous change. And none of the biggest moments—not the years of ministry, not the arrests for our acts of conscience in anti-abortion protests, not the move to Washington, D.C., or the work with elected officials, the publicity, or the politics—would have happened if Paul had not forged a friendship with a Methodist minister’s son, Charlie Hepler. Charlie was an intense, withdrawn, and troubled boy, but Paul drew him out in long conversations about God, about the Bible, about Christianity and prayer. My brother would come home and share those conversations with me in the basement room we claimed as our private space. I listened with genuine interest and curiosity, but also skepticism—even worry. I could not ignore all the stories about the Manson Family murders, or how Hare Krishna devotees had left secure middle-class lives to wear strange robes and sell flowers in airports and on sidewalks. It was a time when weird cults ensnared vulnerable young people and turned them into zombies.

My brother was a levelheaded guy, so all this talk about Christianity felt unsettling to both my Jewish and secular sensibilities. Our father was not a pious man, but his ethnic Jewish identity was strong and predicated as much in family tradition as in suspiciously viewing any majority religious group as potential persecutors. For me, all Christians were pretty much alike, and I knew nothing about Methodists, much less their founder John Wesley, who emphasized not the busy, endlessly rationalizing mind but touching the heart of the believer.

As Paul talked about Jesus, I remembered when, as a six-year-old boy, I went to play at the house of a Portuguese-Catholic neighbor. In my little friend’s bedroom hung a crucifix, the image of a bloodied man, with jutting ribs and a crown of thorns, dangling from nails. I was transfixed by it, yet frightened into a sleepless and fitful night. Years later, when I was a pot-smoking thirteen-year-old, I went to the Buffalo Memorial Auditorium and encountered the man on the cross again—this time earnest but still tragic—from a very different perspective in the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar.

The musical was consistent with who we were back then—too young to have been involved in the counterculture of the sixties, but just old enough to indulge in its lingering messages and music and challenges to authority. Our father set the tone and the direction—more accurately the lack of direction—for our lives. He subscribed to the “hands-off” school of parenting with spasms of explosive rage. In general, our early adolescence was remarkably unsupervised. This comported with the way Dad grew up in the thirties and forties, with a working mother and a chronically ill father who was often hospitalized. For us, though, coming of age during the tempestuous post-Vietnam era meant exposure to the youth culture of the day, but without the existential stakes of being drafted. We protested the bombing of Cambodia, Nixon, and napalm. Jesus as countercultural rebel fit nicely into those times. We challenged everything, our hair was long, and we wore army fatigue jackets and provocative T-shirts. Our bedroom was festooned with beads and plastered with iridescent posters, including one of Popeye and Olive Oyl having sex—all bathed in the glow of a black light and the haze of marijuana smoke. In those days the life of Christ was not completely alien to me, but the Christian religion Paul was exploring seemed a bridge too far. And yet, slowly, I began to venture across it. At least to see what might be on the other side.

One day Paul told me Charlie had invited us to go to church with him. Not his father’s prestigious church, Trinity United Methodist—a large, established institution, located prominently in the center of the Island—but the Emmanuel Evangelical United Brethren. This group, which had recently merged with the Methodists, had colonial-era German roots. Emmanuel, known among locals as the other Methodist church, had a relatively young minister and a slightly bohemian vibe, and Charlie liked the motley group of young people who gathered there. We joined him for the Friday-night prayer meeting.

Charlie escorted us into the simple sanctuary that reminded me of our childhood temple, Beth El, in Niagara Falls. A prayer service was under way and Pastor Fred Dixon came down off the platform to be with the people, a stark contrast with our rabbi’s remote behavior. Emmanuel felt more like being in somebody’s living room than in a religious ritual. I looked around at the pews: older men and women sat with young parents of small children, and there were many teenagers, most a few years older than Paul and me. It was the unseen presence, though, that affected me. My brother and I sensed something more than simple human companionship in that place—a presence outside and above the people collected there. I would later call it “the Spirit of God,” but I had no such language then. Whatever it was, I was transported to a new realm, one that was permeated with love and an overwhelming, palpable, and almost visible energy.

After the service, Charlie led us to the adjoining fellowship hall, where about fifteen kids were sitting on the floor in a circle. They looked like us: boys with shoulder-length hair, T-shirts, torn-up jeans, and weathered army jackets. Two older girls strummed guitars and led the group in singing as Paul, Charlie, and I found spots in the circle. I was unsure about being a Jewish kid in a Christian church. I found out only later that everyone was delighted Charlie had managed to bring the two Jewish Schenck boys to the meeting; they had never spent time with Jews before. To show us how much they accepted us, one of the girls told us the Jewish people were “the apple of God’s eye.” We had grown up with regular infusions of the “Chosen People” narrative but never imagined that, for these Christians, Jews would have a special place in God’s plan for the world. Christians had always been portrayed as anti-Semites. To have our Jewishness celebrated, rather than shunned, came as a gratifying surprise.

When the group sat on the floor, leaning against each other, swaying back and forth to the music, I tentatively joined them as they sang, “I’ve got peace like a river / I’ve got peace like a river / I’ve got peace like a river in my soul.” Some of them had their eyes closed; others looked at each other and exchanged smiles. We all rocked gently in the candlelight, and gradually I got the hang of the chorus. I didn’t expect to be moved or to feel as if I had caught a glimpse of something I had longed for. But in that room, for the first time in my life, I knew a profound feeling of comfort and connection as peace flowed like a river in my own restless, troubled, adolescent soul.

* * *

Paul and I returned to the Friday-night meetings, but not because I had come to a personal belief in God—not yet. We have always been seekers, and we were looking for something more meaningful than the cultural and religious netherworld we inhabited at the time. Untethered to a synagogue or religious study, classic rebels without causes, we experienced what I now realize was spiritual hunger. We read the Hindu Vedas, books about the search for extraterrestrial life, and what was known as the Aquarian Gospel—an early-twentieth-century manuscript that was a potent mix of astrology, Christianity, and philosophy. We went to meetings at Emmanuel because we liked the kids who were there, the feeling of community, the introduction to Jesus—it all felt harmonious. It was a new kind of family.

Charlie told us a special speaker was going to lead a combined Lenten service at Trinity Methodist, his father’s church. I had no idea what Lent was but knew it came around the time of Passover, which somehow made it less alien. The fact that Dr. Peter Bolt would be coming all the way from England was a big deal in our small town. Plus, I had never been inside a formal Methodist church and I was curious. I envisioned there would be hooded monks intoning Latin prayers, but Charlie reassured us it would be a lot like Emmanuel. The rest of our Friday-night group was going and Paul and I didn’t want to be left out, so we accepted Charlie’s invitation. Before the event, my brother and I planned our strategy. We worried the ushers might throw us out if they discovered we were Jewish. What would we say? Argue or just get out as quickly as possible? We decided we would leave peacefully.

I was a nervous wreck, but the people were warm and loving, accepting and welcoming, just as the young people at Emmanuel were on Friday nights. And once again I felt a presence in the sanctuary. We were instantly at home and our sense of comfort and safety only increased as the service wore on. No guitars this time, but instead a strenuous organ nearly drowned out the voices of the congregants. Then Reverend Bolt preached the sermon and invited us to “meet here the living Lord Jesus Christ.” I wanted to respond, but I hesitated as I thought of my father’s disapproval. Our bedtime stories were often about the Holocaust and the crimes against humanity, mostly against Jews, that had been perpetrated by Christians. Part and parcel of this was his emphasis on not believing the tenets of Christianity, because he saw them as being intrinsically hostile toward Jews. (That didn’t stop him from falling in love and deciding to marry my mother, who was a Christian. But she had to agree to convert.) Now Reverend Bolt was encouraging us to step forward and embrace those Christian beliefs—and change our identity in the process. The implications were enormous.

As Reverend Bolt waved people forward, the organ played, first softly and then gradually building to a crescendo that reflected the experience in my soul. As I saw others leave their pews, it was as if an external power was forcing me to join them. I recognized more fully than I had ever before that Christianity, in all its grandeur and simplicity, was the true and even ultimate belief. Paul and I glanced at one another, then simultaneously rose and made our way to the ai...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Preface
• Part I: My First Conversion
• 1: Coming to Jesus
• 2: Faith of Our Fathers
• 3: End Times
• 4: Pastor and Father
• 5: Missionary Evangelist
• 6: Los Pepenadores
• 7: Our President, Our Prophet
• 8: FaithWalk
• Part II: My Second Conversion
• 9: Joining the Movement
• 10: Spring of Life
• 11: Conventions and Courtrooms
• 12: “A Mighty Threshing Instrument”
• 13: A Reprieve and a Draconian Sentence
• 14: Planting and Replanting a Church
• 15: Faith and Action
• 16: Rev. Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network of Western N.Y.
• 17: Christmas with the Clintons
• 18: Family Matters
• 19: Murder and Impeachment
• 20: The Providential Election
• 21: 9/11
• 22: A Friend in the White House
• Part III: My Third Conversion
• 23: Amish Grace
• 24: Family Journeys
• 25: Obama and Hope
• 26: My Pilgrimage
• 27: Reentry
• 28: Guns
• 29: The Armor of Light
• 30: Donald Trump and the Moral Collapse of American Evangelicalism
• 31: Holy Week, 2017
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher