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The Rev. Joel Hunter is part of a new generation of evangelical leaders
More articles on this topic: Joel HunterThe abortion question had to be asked. In a broadcast where the leading Democratic presidential candidates talked about faith, the preachers and CNN producers agreed, it was arguably the single most important issue to America’s evangelical voters.
So the Rev. Joel Hunter, pastor of the Longwood congregation at Northland Church and a strong opponent of abortion, volunteered. He acknowledged Hillary Clinton’s pro-choice position but asked whether she could envision any common ground with an anti-abortion community that seeks to reduce the number of abortions “to zero.”
Clinton leapt at the opportunity to give her standard response that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare. And, by rare, I mean rare.”
The nondenominational minister passed up the opportunity to attack a favorite evangelical target — and instead, reached out to an opponent.
“Our focus on arguments and opponents is not working,” said Hunter, 59, “and it prevents even incremental progress.”
It was vintage Joel Hunter. And that’s what made him the natural choice to ask such a tough question on national television. In the past 18 months, he has become emblematic of a new generation of evangelical leaders: younger mega-church pastors putting a kinder, gentler face on a conservative religious movement known for strident and sometimes divisive rhetoric.
Since the death of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Hunter has become a face in this emerging cohort. He has been cited in front-page articles in The New York Times and Washington Post, in op-ed columns in the Los Angeles Times, and he has been interviewed by National Public Radio, BBC programs, CNN and ABC’s Nightline.
Hunter’s provocative book — Right Wing, Wrong Bird: Why the Tactics of the Religious Right Won’t Fly With Most Conservative Christians, which was published by the church — has been picked up by a commercial publisher and will be rereleased next year.
But it will have a different title: A New Kind of Conservative.
“Hunter exemplifies the New Guard of American evangelical leaders,” said Jeff Sheler, author of Believers: A Journey of Evangelical America. “This is a group of successful pastors, mostly, who are more centrist and less partisan than the Old Guard of the Religious Right, and who present a more winsome and moderate face of evangelical Christianity.”
A wider range of issues
In Hunter’s church, there is no fire and brimstone.
Instead, the message and the presentation are the same: clear, practical, reasonable, upbeat and Bible-based. Hunter’s success in the Sunbelt is an anomaly in some ways. He is a funny, folksy Midwesterner in a congregation that is largely Southern. A Hoosier, he is a storyteller as much as a preacher, often using self-deprecating anecdotes.
“I don’t want to bore myself,” said Hunter, a compact, energetic man with a reflexive, sometimes impish smile. He reads widely and deeply, including publications such as The Economist and Foreign Affairs.
Hunter and others in this new breed of church leaders want to push the evangelical agenda beyond the traditional opposition to abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research. They endorse those positions but also want to be involved in the national dialogue about immigration, global warming, AIDS, war and peace, the genocide in Darfur, human trafficking and concern for the poor. Hunter also opposes the death penalty.
And, he does not want the Republican Party to take for granted the evangelical vote.
In the 2008 campaign, the conservative Christian vote will be a “jump ball,” Hunter said, especially if the choice in the voting booth is between faith and competence. “If it’s not possible to have both, you go for competence every time.”
Experts disagree whether mega-church pastors such as Hunter, T.D. Jakes and Rick Warren are leading their flocks or simply understanding that many worshippers now appreciate a more toned-down approach.
“Clearly Rick Warren and Joel Hunter are trying to put a new public face on American evangelicalism,” said Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based Ethics and Public Policy Center. “That is, a faith that isn’t predictably knee-jerk right wing, that wants to look at a wider range of issues.”
The Rev. Jim Wallis, of the liberal Sojourners community, said the pastors are responding to “dramatic changes in the evangelical world, especially in the younger generation.”
And that generation, more than others, cares about the environment, global warming and matters of war and peace.
Until recently, the national evangelical leadership included those who denied the scientific consensus that global warming exists. They rejected the notion that climate change is primarily a result of human activity and feared that significant remedies would cost too many jobs.
Hunter and his allies reject these notions and have adopted the term “Creation Care” as an evangelical euphemism for environmentalism. “We’re approaching it with a biblical agenda rather than a political agenda,” he said. “The church should be about replenishing as much as repenting.”
This should have been obvious, said the Rev. Fred Morris, former executive director of the Florida Council of Churches, who has long urged Hunter to become involved in environmental issues.
“Anyone who professes to believe in a Creator God has a moral and spiritual obligation to care for and defend God’s Creation,” Morris said. “I think he is going to get into hotter and hotter water with his evangelical colleagues, but he is willing to do that, because he knows it is a crucial issue.”
Making waves
If Hunter ends up in hot water, it won’t be the first time.
His most public misstep came in 2006, when he accepted an invitation to lead the Christian Coalition. It soon became apparent that it was a mismatch; the organization built by Pat Robertson was not willing to move toward a broader political agenda.
“The whole thing was a mystery,” said Cromartie, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, “that they asked him, and that he accepted.”
In any event, Hunter said, the experience was, for him, “a clear signal that there has to be a new voice for the evangelical community.”
Toward that end, Hunter works tirelessly in his church community.
In a typical week, he teaches a nighttime class on Creation Care, meets with a visiting Turkish minister who has been beaten for his beliefs, then swoops into Florida Hospital South to see two ailing parishioners.
His schedule is punctuated by frequent visits across the parking lot to Northland’s new 3,200-seat, state-of-the-art sanctuary, which will be dedicated in August. The hall will enable Hunter to move out of the converted skating rink where he now leads worship and reduce the number of weekend services from seven to five.
Those in the 7,000-member congregation seem supportive of their pastor’s higher profile.
“It wasn’t until we listened to Joel Hunter preaching that we were drawn back into the church,” said Marie Carling, 57, of Sanford. “I heard him addressing social needs. He was speaking as a leader of the church about working together with government, with civic organizations.”
Still, Hunter acknowledges that not everyone is pleased with his emergence.
“There is some push-back on issues,” he said, “from a very small but emotional percentage of the congregation.”
And Hunter is not blinded by his growing prominence.
“It could all go away tomorrow, and I wouldn’t miss it,” he said. “Things are only seductive if you’re not satisfied with what you have. I’m satisfied with my church, with my family and with my life. The rest is kind of icing.”
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