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Reverend Barry, Quite Contrary He's a minister who defends abortion, gay marriage and pornography. And he thinks conservative Christians are a menace to society? This article is reprinted from the April 2000 issue of Focus on the Family's Citizen magazine by Matt Kaufman You've heard people blast the "Religious
Right" before, but Barry Lynn really lets it fly. America, he says, is
threatened by "radical religious fundamentalists." These people are
"bullies," "dangerous zealots," "extremists who despise
pro-choice advocates, working mothers, gay-rights supporters and everybody else
who departs from their narrow views." They're "smug,"
"sneering," "arrogant," "tyrannical,"
"self-righteous," "bigoted," "hate-filled"
and-well, you get the picture. So just who is Barry Lynn, and why should you
care what he says? For one thing, he's the executive director of
Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU), a Washington,
D.C.-based group that fights anything it sees as governmental endorsement of
religion, from school choice to the posting of the Ten Commandments in
classrooms to the mere existence of a congressional chaplain. For another thing, Lynn is something of a
media darling. AU is not huge (a reported 60,000 members, a $3.7 million
budget), but its executive director may be the press's favorite source to call
when they're looking for someone to oppose Christian conservatives. A media
database search shows that he turned up in more than 600 stories in the last
year alone. Chances are that if you haven't seen him on TV, you will (assuming
you watch TV). But the main reason you should pay attention
is that Lynn, an attorney who spent seven years working for the American Civil
Liberties Union, also carries another title: Reverend. And that title, bestowed
on him by the United Church of Christ, isn't incidental to his job. Americans United has church roots dating back
more than half a century. It claims 3,000 "cooperating churches and other
religious bodies." To the casual observer, all this can lend an air of
credibility to AU's oft-repeated assertion that it has no quarrel with
Christianity, merely with a few "religious extremists." That credibility, however, doesn't hold up
under scrutiny. A closer look reveals a group steeped from its inception in
leftist ideology that clashes with the convictions of evangelical Christians-and
oftentimes with those of average Americans as well. OFF TO A BAD START AU was founded in 1947 as Protestants and
Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State (POAU). Protestants
were in the mix, of course, but so were some groups like the American Humanist
Association and the American Ethical Union, both of which derided Christianity
as "superstition." Leaders included leftist Paul Blanshard, POAU's
first general counsel, who claimed the church needed to "rise to the moral
level of socialism;" and Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, POAU's first
president, a former Planned Parenthood president and a fan of Stalin's Soviet
Union who once chaired the Massachusetts Council of American Soviet Friendship. When the avowedly atheistic Humanist
Manifesto II was published in 1973, at least 10 veterans of AU's executive staff
or governing boards signed on. The statement dismissed belief in the
supernatural as "either meaningless or irrelevant," declaring that
"promises of immortal salvation are both illusory and harmful" because
"they distract humans from present concerns, from self-actualization, and
from rectifying social injustices" (ignoring the role of Christians in the
abolition of slavery in both America and Britain). Problem is, many AU supporters don't realize
where their money is going. "Some people, including members of
churches that back AU, think it's a mostly Christian group that wants to protect
the church from the state," said Roger Moran, a member of the Southern
Baptist Convention's executive committee who has researched AU extensively.
"But there's always been a strong element in the group who regard
Christianity with contempt." THE STATE COMES FIRST AU waded into the abortion debate well before
Roe vs. Wade, campaigning as early as the mid-1960s to abolish what it called
"antiquated laws in regard to abortion." By the late 1970s, the group
had even filed suit arguing that laws preventing taxpayer funding of abortion
must be struck down because they imposed a "narrow theological view."
(They lost.) It's not the only time AU has shown a
disregard for the moral sensibilities of Christians. The group backed the National Endowment for
the Arts when that agency drew fire for funding works of art widely regarded as
offensive, including a crucifix dipped in urine. And when New York City last
year cut off funds for a museum featuring a dung-splattered painting of the
Virgin Mary, AU decried the move as censorship and filed suit against the city. Americans United is a frequent ally with
various groups whose cultural vision is both clear and disturbing. In the early
1990s, AU joined with more than 60 other groups in the Radical Right Task Force,
including the National Abortion Federation, the National Gay and Lesbian Task
Force, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood-and Penthouse
International, publishers of . . . well, you know. The Task Force's project, a 252-page
political training manual called How to Win: A Practical Guide to Defeating the
Religious Right in Your Community, offers a particularly subversive argument. It
urges readers to argue that "religious people support gay and lesbian
rights, and that religious people . . . support a woman's right to choose for
reasons rooted in their faith." In addition to what AU does, their social
vision emerges in what they don't-or won't-do. Though they frequently invoke the
First Amendment, AU's legal cases are weighted heavily toward those dealing with
what they consider government establishment of religion-with relatively little
attention given to actually protecting religious expression. It's not only AU opponents who've noted this
tendency. John Stevens Sr.-a former AU trustee who to this day considers the
group to have done more good than harm-resigned in 1993 over several issues. Stevens's resignation letter stated that, for
the most part, "AU's interest in free exercise [of religion] is virtually
non-existent." When Stevens asked at a trustee meeting if free exercise
would get equal emphasis with establishment, he wrote, "I heard some groans
in the room and Lynn stated that the problems were mostly in the establishment
field." Sometimes the group even opposes religious
expression. When the Federal Communications Commission recently tried to
restrict a religious TV station from devoting more than 50 percent of its
programming to "proselytizing," AU backed the FCC. Its reasoning:
Because the station wasn't originally religious (it started as an educational
station and later swapped licenses with another station), the FCC was free to
restrict its religious content. Barry Lynn told Citizen that the FCC was
"quite generous" even to allow 50 percent religious programming. The SBC's Moran says it's no coincidence that
a group stressing separation of church and state has also tried to expand the
realm of the state. "They're trying to create a society that
lines up with their ideology." BARRY'S WORLD At the center of Americans United is the
group's 51-year-old executive director, a smart and articulate man who, his
opponents say, is genuine in his beliefs. "There's nothing phony about
Barry," said Alan Sears, president of the religious-liberties group the
Alliance Defense Fund. "He really thinks we're in danger of seeing a
theocracy rise up in this country." It also should be said that despite Lynn's
often-bombastic rhetoric, he's been on the receiving end of some pretty strong
language himself, some of it unjustified. (One Christian conservative leader has
mistakenly suggested that Lynn would say a burning church shouldn't be able to
call the fire department lest it violate the bounds of church-state separation.) Still, there's plenty of reason for concern
about the things Lynn has said. As legislative counsel for the ACLU in 1985,
Lynn told the U.S. Attorney General's Commission on Pornography (of which Focus
on the Family President Dr. James C. Dobson was a member) that child pornography
was protected by the First Amendment. While production of child porn could be
prevented by law, he argued, its distribution could not be. A few years later
(1988), Lynn told the Senate Judiciary Committee that even requiring porn
producers to maintain records of their performers' ages was impermissible. "If there is no federal record-keeping
requirement for the people portrayed in Road and Track or Star Wars," he
said, "there can be no such requirement for Hustler or Debbie Does
Dallas." Lynn told Citizen that he urged his superiors
at the ACLU to modify their position, and that he believes that there are
"mechanisms by which child pornography can be controlled at every stage,
from production to distribution," so long as those mechanisms are not
overly "broad." Attorney Len Munsil, who has specialized in
fighting obscenity and child porn, finds it hard to accept the reverend's long
service at the ACLU (from 1984-91), given the group's questionable policies. "It's hard for me to understand how a
person of conscience can do that," Munsil said. "If you really
disagree, you tell your employer to find another mouthpiece." NOT YOUR AVERAGE REVEREND Lynn's church, the United Church of Christ,
is arguably the most liberal major denomination in the U.S., billing itself as
the nation's "most welcoming" mainline denomination for practicing
homosexuals. And indeed, across a range of sexual issues,
in particular, Lynn sounds like-well, not what you'd think a guy called
"Reverend" would sound like. He denounced the pornography commission's
report for "prudishness and moralizing." When testifying before the
commission, Lynn suggested it might be useful for "sexual
minorities"-he cited masochists as an example-to have access to
"material that depicts or affirms their lifestyle [as] a means of
self-affirmation." This isn't to say that Lynn was recommending
pornography, but he isn't all that bothered by it either. Asked by Citizen if
porn is in any sense a social good, he hesitated and said "not
particularly"-but hastened to add that the issue wasn't among the most
pressing, and "you can't let yourself get diverted into focusing on the
things that don't matter." Biblical proscriptions against homosexuality
apparently don't matter either. Lynn finds no fault with a theological stance
that thanks God for the "diversity" He created, including "gay
and straight." He recently signed a statement calling for homosexual
marriage and ordination into the clergy (see sidebar, p.13). Lynn also has a striking take on the 1996
events in East Stroudsburg, Pa., where nearly 60 girls ages 11 and 12 were
forced to strip in front of each other and submit to genital exams-at school,
during the school day and without their parents' consent. Some of the girls
testified in federal court last year that they were refused permission to call
their mothers or that nurses forced open their legs. One testified that a doctor
penetrated her with a finger. To most people this would seem exactly what
the court found it to be-a "substantial intrusion" of the girls'
privacy. As Philadelphia pediatrician Fredric P. Nelson, who testified in the
trial, told Citizen, "when it's during the day and other students know
where the girls are going, it doesn't respect their privacy or
confidentiality." But Lynn described the events in a 1996
fund-raising letter as "routine physical examinations." Omitting any
mention of the details above, he asserted that the school's actions were
justified because parents previously had been sent letters telling them to
arrange physicals, and that only girls whose parents didn't respond were
subjected to the exams. "I would maintain to this day,"
Lynn told Citizen, "that it was a routine physical examination." NOT WITH MY MONEY It hasn't happened often, but when AU's
positions are publicized in churches, plenty of parishioners make it clear they
don't want anything to do with the group. A decade ago, Moran-then just an active
layman in Missouri, not a member of the Southern Baptist executive
committee-learned that the 1,900-church Missouri Baptist Convention was funding
AU. The more he studied the group, the less he liked it. "I was one of these guys, naive as you
can be about some things, who thought all the problems were out in the world,
not in the church," Moran said. "When I started to learn otherwise, it
was a real wake-up call." Moran decided to share his concerns. With a
handful of others, he launched the Missouri Baptist Laymen's Association and
began campaigning for the state Baptist convention to defund AU. "AU has always had a number of prominent
Baptists in the forefront; they needed that because they get a lot of money from
Baptists," Moran said. "But we showed them that AU wasn't about free
exercise of religion for Christians; in the big picture, it was about the
suppression of biblical principles and values." Moran's campaign paid off. In 1991, the
Missouri Baptist Convention dropped its support for Americans United. And the
repercussions didn't stop there. Bob Terry, a member of AU's advisory council
and editor of the state Baptist journal Word & Way, left the council,
explaining: "I concluded that many of the charges of its critics were true,
that it was becoming a 'liberal' group." To Moran, whose conflict with AU was part of
a larger struggle against liberalism within the Southern Baptist Convention, the
bottom-line issue is preserving the integrity of Christianity itself. "The Christian community has been duped
too often," Moran said. "Lots of people want to create a Jesus Christ
they're comfortable with, approving of abortion and homosexuality and what have
you. But when they try to redefine sin so it's not sin any longer, we've got a
big problem." ?
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