The Reverend Rob Schenck was once one of America’s most powerful and influential evangelical leaders. He routinely lobbied legislators to adopt a Christian conservative agenda. Members of his anti-abortion activist group barricaded the doors and driveways of abortion clinics. He even trained wealthy couples to befriend Supreme Court justices in an attempt to persuade them to render judgments that would please conservative Christians.
But along the way, Schenck began doubting where the movement was taking him—and the country. His fellow activists seemed more interested in gaining power than advancing the tenets of humility and selflessness he remembers learning about when he first converted to Christianity. By the mid-2010s, he realized that he had been forging a dangerous, divisive path, one that was leading to a new Christian nationalism with Donald Trump as its figurehead.
“I’m afraid I helped build the ramp that took Trump to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” he says. “And that’s a very painful reality for me.”
Schenck has since left the movement and been ostracized by some of his former fellow activists for his opposition to Trump. In this podcast extra, Schenck sits down with host Al Letson to talk about his conversion into and out of Christian conservatism and what he’s doing today to rein in the very movement he helped to build.
Dig Deeper
Read: Confessions of a (Former) Christian Nationalist (Mother Jones)
Read: Former evangelical activist says he ‘pushed the boundaries’ in Supreme Court dealings (NPR)
Watch: Reverend Rob Schenck: Trump “Used the Bible as a Prop” (WETA)
Watch: Former Pro-Life Leader Reverend Schenck on Abortion Ruling (Amanpour & Co.)
Read: Costly Grace: An Evangelical Minister’s Rediscovery of Faith, Hope, and Love, by the Reverend Rob Schenck
Credits
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Production managers: Steven Rascón and Zulema Cobb | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson
Transcript
Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.
| Reverend Rob Sc…: | When I announced publicly that I was voting for Joe Biden in 2020, for many of my fellows in the evangelical church world, that was the final straw for them. I was gone. I was now banished, ostracized. There was no place for me in their world any longer. |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. In the weeks leading up to November 5th, we’re going to be popping into the podcast midweek to bring you some additional stories that look more deeply into the issues behind the election. If you missed it, we just did a really great episode about a small town pastor in Pennsylvania, who’s blurring the lines between church and state. It’s called In God We Vote. Be sure to check out that episode in the Reveal feed if you haven’t heard it yet. And today, I’m going to dig even deeper by talking with Reverend Rob Schenck, a former Christian nationalist who was instrumental in pushing elected leaders and even the Supreme Court towards a more conservative agenda. Here’s how he describes Christian nationalism. |
| Reverend Rob Sc…: | It’s a concept that America was founded as a distinctly white, and I might put that in parentheses, but let’s just say white Christian nation, a white Christian culture and civilization, and that it must be preserved and protected as such by custom and by law. And that’s what I preached, and I promoted, and I facilitated for many years. |
| Al Letson: | Until eventually, Rob had a change of heart and converted out of the movement, which he wrote about in his 2018 book, Costly Grace: An Evangelical Minister’s Rediscovery of Faith, Hope, and Love. |
| So, as a preacher’s kid, as I was listening to your book, and reading a couple articles and interviews preparing for this interview, the thing that struck me was your life story reminds me of stories that I was taught when I was a kid. And I’m thinking specifically the story of Saul becoming Paul. Now, I know that some theologians say that his name was always Paul, but I was taught as a kid that Saul was on the road to Damascus, a blinding light hit him, and then afterwards he transformed. He became a new person. He went from being a man who persecuted Christians to becoming a Christian, and spreading the word and love of Jesus Christ. And it appears to me or seems to me that you’ve had three or four moments that totally transformed your life the same way Saul became Paul. | |
| Reverend Rob Sc…: | Wow. Al, no one has ever compared my life trajectory to the great apostles. But no false humility here. I thank you for that. And I’d love to think of myself as maybe in the tradition of the great transformational figures. But here’s where my story might differ from that account that you just gave of Saul, the persecutor, and it’s this. In my first conversion from having been raised in a nonreligious, nominally Jewish home, my mother converted to Judaism mostly to marry my father. It was not really a religious transition for her. It was a cultural one, basically to make peace with his family. So that’s a complicated part of our story. But as a result of that, my parents raised all four of their children to go out and explore religion for ourselves and make our own decision whether to embrace a religious faith or not. And I’m very grateful for that today. |
| Back when I was a teenager, it created a sort of void for me that demanded to be felt. And I went searching spiritually and I heard the message of Jesus proclaimed in a small country church in the community I grew up in, and I was very attracted to this Jesus who preached peace. I was already an activist when I was 13, marching in an anti-Vietnam war protest. I was one of the first in my community to step forward and volunteer for what we used to then call the ecology movement, which was early environmentalism. So, I was really in a kind of liberal stream. | |
| And I sat and listened to the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, while he blessed the poor, and those who had suffered great loss, and those who were persecuted and ostracized, and so forth. And I said, wow, this is the kind of message I’ve always hoped for in a religion. And I heard an invitation given during a service where an evangelist from England extended what we sometimes call the Billy Graham invitation. If you want to accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, come forward, admit your sin, ask God to forgive you, and commit your life to following the model of Jesus. I did that. And my point here is just really that I am embraced a very different Christianity from the version I would actually live for the next 35 years or so. | |
| Al Letson: | Let’s just go back a little bit and talk a little bit about your first conversion, and the type of things you were doing, because you were going to Mexico and helping people down there. You were helping people who were addicted to drugs. Talk me through that part of it, that version of Christianity that you first fell in love with. |
| Reverend Rob Sc…: | Yeah, so my first ministry assignment, I took a job as a residential counselor for a home for recovering heroin addicts. And I lived with them, bunked with them, and that was a very, very meaningful, wonderful experience for me. I developed deep bonds with… it was an all-male program, so these were all young men. And from there, I went on to do Christian humanitarian relief work in Mexico, where I helped build clinics for the people they called down there, los pepenadores, the garbage pickers of Mexico. Was a terribly derogatory term, but it became a term of endearment for me because I came to love these people who live literally in on and off massive inhabited, refuse dumps in and around Mexico City. So, that was my whole orientation until the mid-1980s. It was then that I was introduced to a very different permutation of Christianity, a highly politicized one. And that would lead to what I call a second conversion in my life, which was not for the good. |
| Al Letson: | Was it about the teaching of the politicized version of Christianity, the politicized, and I think it’s fair to say, right-wing version of Christianity? What was it about it that attracted you away from doing the work that you were already doing? |
| Reverend Rob Sc…: | I’m going to say in a very amateur way, it was kind of ego. It was pride. As I look back on it now, I took my seat at the table of national evangelical leadership. I was one of those young bucks coming up. I was gaining quite a platform and preaching to very large congregations, speaking at very big national and even international conventions and so forth. And as a result of that, I was invited into some pretty influential spaces in the evangelical subculture. |
| And one of those was the National Association of Evangelicals, where Ronald Reagan became the first sitting president to address a body of evangelicals. And that was in appreciation for our support for him, which had been cultivated by figures like Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson and others who had marshaled evangelical support for Reagan and the Republican Party. When I was first born again into the Christian community, the vast majority of people I knew were Democrats. They weren’t Republicans. And they were very pro-labor. They were very pro women’s rights. They were very much for social safety nets and so forth. In fact, I cast my first presidential vote at age 18 for Jimmy Carter. And why? Because he seemed to exemplify all the attributes that Jesus espoused in his mission and ministry. | |
| Al Letson: | When you bring up Jimmy Carter, the thought that comes to mind for me as it reflects with Christianity. So, I was very young when Jimmy Carter was elected. He was the first president that I can remember knowing who the president was. But years later, looking back or whatever, I saw this clip of Jimmy Carter making a presidential conversation with the country. And basically he was telling America that we were headed down the wrong path, that we were just going to become consumers, and that we weren’t caring for each other and so forth and so on. And Ronald Reagan was telling everybody, it’s morning in America. And everything you’ve done is great and fine, and you’re good and you’re great. And it feels like Christianity, well, the version of Christianity that you were a part of, took that and said, “Yes, we are great.” And followed down that path. |
| Reverend Rob Sc…: | Wow. Wow. Al, today you’re my pastor because you’re really helping me to clarify even my own reflections on that period and what was going on. And that’s a very apt description of how I remember things. And what Jimmy Carter was telling the country was hard. That was difficult. It’s like we got a lot of work to do. We have to give of ourselves. We have to take care of other people, think about other people, marshal resources for other people. That’s very demanding. Well, as you say, there was an opposite message coming from the Republican side back then. And frankly, it sounded pretty good. It was like, oh, maybe this is a little easier, more comfortable path. |
| And I literally sat in the front row of a conference where Ronald Reagan preached that gospel to a room full of evangelical influencers. And I felt the wash of that affirmation and opportunity, and I took it. And I looked around and I saw people wielding political influence, social influence. They enjoyed all the comforts of a high life. I mean, people were flying around in private jets, staying in five- and six-star resorts, eating at the finest restaurants, flashing American Express Platinum cards. The overall effect, I think, was to eventually utterly corrupt the message and to turn the movement from a people-centered movement to a political enterprise, and one that became much more concerned about wielding power and influence than it was caring for souls. | |
| Al Letson: | So, that leads me to my next question, which is about a painful chapter in your life. You were a part of the National Pro-Life Religious Council, which had a close relationship with Norma McCorvey, otherwise known as Jane Roe from the Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade. In 1973, the court ruled on the case saying the Constitution generally protected a woman’s right to have an abortion. Can you talk to me about your relationship with Norma? |
| Reverend Rob Sc…: | Yeah, I really came to love Norma. She was the real Jane Roe in the famous or infamous Roe v. Wade case. And Norma was a very complicated person. Had lived a very rough, very difficult life. She had been sexually abused as a young teenager. She had been remanded to a girl’s home as they used to call them. So her whole life was all about survival. And when she became the famous anonymous Jane Roe, it only complicated her life more so. By the time I met her, she had come out as a convert to the anti-abortion movement. She was identified with the pro-choice movement for a number of years, but met a colleague of mine, a street creature, who baptized her in a backyard swimming pool. And she came out on a public stage. I brought her to Washington, DC. |
| It’s difficult to even tell this part of the story because Norma’s gone now. She’s passed on. And I can’t ask her forgiveness for this, but I used her as many did. She became a trophy for the anti-abortion, pro-life movement that I was very much part of in leadership. And she was rewarded. She was rewarded financially. She was given big audiences, she was feted and celebrated. And we knew, for example, that she was secretly in a same-sex romantic relationship. In fact, a long-term romantic partnership with a woman. And that was of course unacceptable in my world. So we kept that quiet, we hushed it up. We told her not to talk about it, to keep it a secret, but that was nobody’s business but her own. But we were managing her image for our movement. And I see that as another kind of abuse. | |
| Al Letson: | Yeah, because you’re not allowing her to be a whole human being. You’re just getting a small portion of her story, and packaging it up, and selling it to people when the story shifts, if you have more context in it. |
| Reverend Rob Sc…: | She was exploited by the movement that I was a part of, and I’ll carry that with me to my grave. I will say that she was, in her own way, amazingly resilient, and she had developed a means of survival. She was very strong internally. But she knew what she had to do to get along, and she did it. And then as she was literally dying, she announced to the world that it was a farce, that it was a role she felt she had to play. And I so badly wanted to get to her before she died. I never achieved that. To this moment, it’s an enormous regret for me because I really did want to hug her and say, “Norma, you were loved by God and you were a whole human all along. Neither of us had to do this.” I wish I could have said that to her. I didn’t, but I keep her in memory a lot. |
| Al Letson: | Staying on the topic of abortion, years ago, you worked with or were a part of Operation Rescue. That time around the issue of abortion became extremely volatile. As in like abortion doctors were arguing with anti-abortion activists. You yourself got into several heated arguments with people. From your vantage point, you are trying to save lives, infant lives. From their vantage point, they are trying to protect a woman’s right to decide what to do with their body. Would that be a fair way to look at it? |
| Reverend Rob Sc…: | Yes. Yes. Operation Rescue was one component of that. And it involved blockading clinics. We would block doors to clinics using our own bodies. We would lay down in driveways to prevent both medical staff and their patients from entering parking lots and so forth. In some cases, I never did this, but some people entered into even procedure rooms and handcuffed themselves to procedure tables. And of course then there had also been a number of years of fire bombings, other kinds of damage to clinic properties. And then there was shooting. |
| And I think though we haven’t had one of those episodes lately, I think we’re in a worse place today than we even were back then. I say that for a number of reasons. But yes, there’s no better dopamine hit in the brain than fear or anger. I would have fundraisers who raised millions and millions of dollars for the organizations I led during some of those years, who would tell me, literally. They would sit at a conference room table and say to me, We need more fear and more anger. We need to make people more afraid and madder than hell. If you give us a lot of fear, we’ll raise you a lot of money. You give us a little fear, we’ll only raise a little money. More fear.” And so, you learn to start generating- | |
| Al Letson: | [inaudible 00:21:26]. |
| Reverend Rob Sc…: | … language, yes, that satiates, that demand and that brings about predictable results. And it was. It was predictable. It would mobilize people like nothing else. And I see, for example, now the movement uses it on a scale that we never achieved. And they’ve done that largely for help of Donald Trump and his campaign who now, even though frankly, I think when it comes to this subject, Trump is a charlatan, but he knows how to use those devices, and he does it continuously. |
| Al Letson: | When we come back, Reverend Rob Schenck talks about how he and other Christian nationalists created a playbook that remade Washington politics. |
| You are listening to Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Reverend Rob Schenck spent his life doing what he thought was God’s work, trying to bend American society and laws towards a Christian nationalist ideology. To accomplish this, he needed Washington power brokers by his side. So, he set out to win hearts and minds in DC. | |
| Reverend Rob Sc…: | When I first arrived in Washington in 1994, I saw an immediate opening to begin sitting with members of Congress, and the House, and in the Senate. It was the year of the Republican Revolution, when not only did the Republican Party gain majorities they hadn’t had in decades, but there was also an influx of an enormous, relatively in our thinking, enormous, but certainly a very significant number of evangelicals who were elected to Congress that same year. So, I had immediate allies. And I went in, the first thing I did was I gave out what we call National 10 Commandments Leadership Awards with these very nice, lovely carved stone and wood plaques with the 10 Commandments displayed on them. And we asked House members and senators to display and obey them. |
| And Jesus once said, you must be as wise as a serpent and as harmless as it dove. And I would often put the second clause aside and concentrate on the first one. And I would tell my supporters, Jesus said you have to be as wise as a serpent, and sometimes you have to be downright snaky to get this stuff done. And I knew that very few lawmakers would want to be known for rejecting a plaque of the 10 Commandments. They were kind of obligated. They were stuck. They had to accept it. And it made for good photo ops back home in their voting districts and so forth. So, it worked for both sides. But it gave me a chance to sit with them and make my case, that the only way we would save America from becoming an atheistic, socialist, God-hating, immoral sewer was to embrace Christian sensibilities. And they would need to be codified, made into law because the law is both a teacher as much as an enforcer of right. | |
| And so, I made my case. And many of them signed on and said, that’s right. And we did lots of public events together. But mostly worked behind the scenes to craft legislation which began with laws restricting abortion and then restricting personal behavior, reinforcing restrictions on LGBTQ folks and same-sex relationships and so forth. And we tried more than once to get laws against same-sex marriage and so forth. Anything to stop what we saw as a cavalcade of immorality in our society. But it wasn’t enough to do that legislatively. Because no matter who was in the Congress, what laws were being passed, what president was signing them into law didn’t matter because we would come up against the Supreme Court. And it would be the brick wall that all of these efforts would eventually meet up against. So, we had to get to the justices and get them to render the strongest possible majority opinions. And even when they weren’t in the majority, we needed them to render very strong dissenting opinions to set the stage for a future revisiting of those questions. | |
| Al Letson: | You had a name for it, Operation Higher Court. Tell me about that. What was higher court? And how did you achieve those goals? |
| Reverend Rob Sc…: | The whole process was to inject trained, what I called, stealth missionaries into the private social circles of particular justices we thought of, I thought of, and my fellows thought of as low-hanging fruit because they were already conservative. And so, what I did was there’s a private society associated with the court called the Supreme Court Historical Society, which does a lot of good educating the public on the role of the court. But it’s a private nongovernmental entity, which made it more permeable, a lot easier to access than a highly defended bureaucratic government agency. But it was ensconced deeply within the court. It had been founded by the late Chief Justice Warren Burger. So, it was very tight with the court’s life and had ample access to the justices who patronized a lot of the functions. There was an annual gala held inside the Great Hall of the court, which is a mostly inaccessible space in terms of federal facilities in Washington, which was hosted by the chief justice and attended by most of the associate justices of the court. And it allowed for face time. |
| So I trained some of my wealthier constituents to go in and garner face time in these small, exclusive, invitation-only receptions. And it gave them opportunities to introduce themselves, and even to hint at some benefits that they might enjoy as a result of palling around with each other. They would mention their luxurious vacation homes and how lovely it would be for the justice to come with his wife and visit and enjoy the atmosphere. | |
| And over time, these couples would entertain the justices at high-priced restaurants and buy them endless glasses and bottles of very expensive wine, and trays of oysters, and giant 40-ounce steaks or whatever they wanted. And they showed him a good time. And frankly, the justices enjoyed it very much. And bonds were developed and the conversation always eventually got to the whole point of it. And that was, we need you to render the strongest, most conservative opinions you can from the bench. And eventually, we need a majority on this bench that will do the right thing for America. And that is return America to its Christian values. And I now live with a lot of regret that we were quite successful in that endeavor. | |
| Al Letson: | And of course, that success came during Donald Trump’s term in office when he appointed three justices who tilted the Supreme Court more to the right. How did Trump end up hitching his cart to the Christian nationalist movement? |
| Reverend Rob Sc…: | Yeah, when it comes to Donald Trump? By the time Trump emerged as a choice originally and then the choice of all my fellow evangelical leadership personalities around the country, I had already started a process of dismantling the frame I had built for my worldview, for my approach to politicized religion. Even the organization that I had built, which was substantial. I mean, we had a headquarters across the street from the Supreme Court. I had financial supporters in all 50 states. I was speaking to very large audiences, and doing lots of media and so forth, putting out millions and millions of pieces of paper mail, and then later, digital messaging all over the country. It was significant. But I had started to dismantle it because I was struggling so much internally and I had had my own kind of awakening, but it was still contained. |
| But when Trump emerged, it was a bridge too far for me for a couple of reasons. One is because I had grown up in New York state with Donald Trump playing in the headlines continuously almost through my entire life, or at least my conscious life. And when I was in Bible college being trained as a minister, I was in what we call a homiletics class or a preaching instruction, where my instructor said to the class one day in a sermon, “You always want to use a real-life illustration, if you can pick one, to make your point.” So, he gave an example and he said, “Let’s just say we’re talking about what it means to live opposite of Jesus’ model and message. Well, you might pick somebody like Donald Trump to illustrate that.” So, for me, from the very beginning, Donald Trump was the opposite of what it meant to live as a Christian. And having that in my long-term memory and then knowing what kind of character Donald Trump was, and I had even encountered him at a conservative convention, and just was repulsed by his personality, his braggadocious self-importance. | |
| And at one point, I had taken a leave of absence from my work, and I was finishing a late in life doctoral degree. And I flew back east to attend a tribute gala for Pat Robertson, one of the luminaries in Christian media. And his guest of honor was Donald Trump. And this was somewhere around I want to say 2010, ’11, and years before he would announce his serious Republican presidential candidacy. So, I was troubled by that from the get-go. And eventually, I would break with my fellows over their choice of Donald Trump as their champion. I found him repugnant. I thought he was a charlatan, a fake, a carnivilian. And I said, “I can’t go with you on this.” So, I parted company with my old gang when it came to support for Trump. And it would really become one of my final exits from that movement. | |
| And of course, when I came out against Donald Trump, I did not vote for a Democrat for any office for 40 years, from Jimmy Carter to Joe Biden. But when I announced publicly that I was voting for Joe Biden in 2020, for many of my fellows in the evangelical church world, that was the final straw for them. I was gone. I was now banished, ostracized. There was no place for me in their world any longer. So, in many ways, I see Trump as a kind of act of idolatry for my movement, that they’ve literally traded Jesus for Donald Trump. And for me, that’s nothing short of apostasy. It’s abandoning the faith. This is the first time, Al, I’m going to say this in a public forum. I don’t think you can be a Christian and embrace Donald Trump because I see him as the antithesis of everything Jesus stood for, everything he modeled, and in my theology, everything, he died for. | |
| Al Letson: | Far be it from me to push back on your assertions, but I think what I have heard in some Christian circles is the idea that he is a flawed vessel, but he will deliver to Christian nationalists what they want. And so, a lot of Christian nationalists and a lot of people who maybe don’t consider themselves nationalists, but just Christian, they hold their nose and vote for him because they are getting exactly what they want, like he delivers. I mean, and if you pull back and look at it, he actually delivers better than Bush ever did. Better than even Reagan ever did. As far as Republican presidential candidates go or presidents go, he’s delivered on everything that he said that he would give to the Christian right. They got everything they wanted. |
| Reverend Rob Sc…: | Yeah. My white evangelical fellows have gotten just what they demanded. I agree with you. He has delivered. There was a Faustian bargain made with Donald Trump. And when my fellows said, “We want this,” he said, “I’ll give you that. You want the end of Roe v. Wade. I’ll give you the end of Roe v. Wade. But you will give me your unqualified support. You will give me religious cover. You will sacralize me. You will sanctify me. You will protect me. That’s our deal. I give you the judges and justices you want, and you give me everything I want.” And that’s the deal we made. And I call that, Al, a deal with the devil. |
| Al Letson: | Okay. So, last question, and this is a really hard one. Do you think the work that you did created the runway for or helped create the runway for what we’re seeing now with Trump in Christian conservative circles? |
| Reverend Rob Sc…: | Yeah, I’m afraid it did. I’m afraid I helped build the ramp that Trump took to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And that’s a very painful reality for me. I don’t expect people’s sympathy. I don’t expect people to feel sorry for me in that. It’s my just deserts to live with that. But I will tell you one thing, I’m taking very, very seriously the task of dismantling that ramp. And I’m trying to do it literally every day. I don’t always succeed. I sometimes lapse, but I’m intent on helping to dismantle that apparatus. |
| Al Letson: | Rob, thank you so much for being so open and having this conversation with me. |
| Reverend Rob Sc…: | Well, thank you for giving me the safe space to do that, Al. |
| Al Letson: | Rob Schenck’s book is called Costly Grace. You can also read his essay, Confessions of a Former Christian Nationalist, on motherjones.com. That story was produced by Josh Sanburn. The editor was Kara McGuirk-Allison. Our production managers are Steven Rascon and Zulema Cobb. Music and engineering by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs, and Fernando, my man, yo, Arruda. Our interim executive producers are Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis. Support for Reveal is provided in part by you, our listeners. We are a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson, and remember, there is always more to the story. |