If you read my openDemocracy column last week, you’ll know that US celebrity pastor Rick Warren, who is no political moderate, has a history of anti-LGBTQ zealotry. But he has also long seemed invested in his image as a popular Christian author and one of the ‘cool’ evangelical leaders of his generation. At least that’s how I read him and not only because of things like his willingness to pray at President Obama’s 2009 inauguration, for which he was criticised by fellow conservative evangelicals (while the Democratic base was upset with the Obama administration and Democratic establishment for inviting a vicious homophobe). Warren has also sometimes backtracked on things he’s said that might dent his “cool”, “moderate” image or his popularity.
For example, when his insistence that Christians should vote to ban same-sex marriage in California (under the 2008 ballot initiative known as Proposition 8) attracted public scrutiny, he denied that he had ever made statements to this effect – despite video footage of him stating emphatically: “If you believe what the Bible says about marriage, you need to support Proposition 8.”
Even the name of the southern California megachurch that Warren founded back in 1980 hides its less-than-cool affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) – the largest Protestant denomination in the US with about 13 million members. Warren’s Saddleback Church, which has tens of thousands of members spread across 15 campuses and was the SBC’s single largest church, omits the word ‘Baptist’, which carries uncool cultural baggage, from its name. Many other supposedly ‘hip’ American evangelical churches behave in a similar way, striving to obscure some of their less inclusive positions from the public.
