CAMPOLO AND THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT

By Alison Hull  

'The God we worship loves the Palestinians every bit as much as he loves the Israelis.'

If you were asked to be the special spiritual advisor of the leader of your nation, you'd think your fellow Christians would be a bit pleased, wouldn't you? In Tony Campolo's case, many of them weren't. Tony Campolo is a respected scholar and international Christian speaker, who has seen many come to Christ following his preaching. But none of this mattered when he responded to Clinton's cry for help. In fact, there were those willing to consign Bill Clinton to the fires of hell - and Campolo with him.

Tony tells the story now with a shrug: 'I knew there would be some reactions but I didn't expect it to be as unthinking as it was. People were making such statements as, 'This man does not deserve the grace of God' - ludicrous, if you deserve it, it's not grace!

'There were people who were so upset with Clinton that anyone who had anything to do with him was immediately condemned. In their minds there was no desire for redemption, no sense of hoping to reclaim this man. There was a kind of glee; 'Ah - at last we've got him,' and that sense of glee was perhaps the most troubling. The Bible says rejoice not in iniquity but rejoice in the truth, these people were rejoicing in iniquity.'

But the backlash went beyond Campolo - it extended to the work he does with the poorest. 'I head up a missionary organisation that runs a network of 95 schools for slave children in Haiti and we participate in a programme of economic development in India as well as programmes in nine different cities across the United States with over 150 workers. A significant amount of fund raising goes on and when people found out that I was counselling the President, there were those who wrote and said they wouldn't be sending contributions to our work any more. It was a very depressing period. It was hard for me to understand why they would let very poor children in Haiti or the American inner cities suffer because they didn't like me. I take no salary from this organisation so it's not as though they were supporting me.'

Although the animus against Campolo as a result of his counselling Clinton has died down, he is still considered 'persona non grata' by many evangelical Christians in the States - simply because he votes Democrat. And it worries him a great deal that many Christians in the United States are becoming increasingly divided over politics.

'The polarisation between the parties is much more extreme - the majority of the evangelicals not only voted for Bush, which is fine, but demonised the Democrats and said that if you had anything to do with that party, you really were aligning yourself with the evil forces. I don't mean all the evangelical community but a significant proportion of that 80% who voted for Bush put this in very stark terms - if you weren't for their candidate, you were out of the will of God. I can understand part of it because they were very single-issue orientated people.

Kerry was overtly pro-choice and Bush was pro-life and there were people who said this is a big enough issue for us to ignore all the other issues, but some of us were saying, 'No, there are other issues.' What happens to the poor is our primary consideration; attitudes towards war matter at a very crucial time in our history. What's happening to our funding of education, what's being done for the elderly, the fact that 44 million have no health insurance or coverage whatsoever, that 13 million children have no health coverage and more and more people are slipping below the poverty line - all these things matter.

The US is engaged in unfair trade relations, and we are not doing what we should be doing for the poor of the world. Of the 22 industrial relations, in terms of what we give away of our gross national product to help the poor of the world, the US is dead last. We gave away less than two tenths of 1% of our gross national product. People will say that the American people give away a lot of money and yes, that is true, because our GNP is huge. But we consume 43% of the world's resources and we give away less than 2 tenths of 1% to help the poor of the world.'

Another issue that concerns Tony greatly is that of America's support for Israel. 'To be Christian, is to love the Jews and to wish for them secure borders and a peaceful way of life so that mothers don't have to worry about their children being blown up by a terrorist bomb on the way to school. If you love the Jews, you want them to have a secure country without fear but you have also to acknowledge that the God that we worship loves the Palestinian people every bit as much as he loves the Israeli people and that we should want the same thing for Palestinians.

'We should want them to have a homeland of their own and secure borders and yet we do almost nothing - nothing - about stopping the state of Israel moving thousands of Israeli citizens into Palestinian lands, stealing it from them and establishing settlements. Many evangelicals in our countries buy into a dispensationalist theology that has an erroneous belief that all of Palestine must be in the hands of Jewish people and only Jews should be allowed to inhabit Palestine if the Lord is to return. They see this as precondition to the second coming and hence become strong supporters not only of the present state of Israel but also the expansion of Israel. They don't necessarily care about the Israelis or Israel as a state.'

Are you still hopeful for America?

'I don't know about America any longer. I see us going down the tubes. I'm an old guy. I'm old enough to remember the British Empire. The idea that the British Empire could ever collapse was beyond our comprehension. But the sun has set on the British Empire. I'm sure that in 1935 the idea that the British Empire could collapse was unthinkable, but it did.

'The US right now is waging a war in Iraq that is costing a billion dollars a week. You can't spend more money than you are taking in as a government without eventually going bankrupt. In addition, our balance of trade is terrible. You cannot buy stuff from other countries and not sell stuff to other countries without it affecting your economic system and the deficit spending, together with the imbalance of trade is going to bankrupt America in a relatively short period of time. That is a very despairing reality and there doesn't seem to be anything going on right now to make us expect anything different in the future.

'In the book of Revelation, when Babylon falls, all the other nations fall with it and I think the ramifications of the collapse of the American economy are going to be frightening. We have ignored the poor, we have ignored justice, we have ignored a lot of things we should have been paying attention to, and the prognosis is not good. I pray for my nation and God is great, God is good, and I am hopeful that He will bless America but I don't see it happening in the near future because the sheer arrogance of the American people right now. That arrogance is very dangerous. I think America is getting drunk on power and the church is saying nothing.'