Clinton’s Impeachment as Parable at Chautauqua

In her sermon this morning at Chautauqua, former National Council of Churches chief Joan Brown Campbell preached on the Prodigal Son. She seemed to liken the parable to Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal and impeachment, when the nation ostensibly needed to forgive Clinton as the father in Christ’s story had forgiven his wayward but ultimately repentant son.

Campbell recalled being asked to preach on reconciliation to U.S. senators during the crisis when congressional and national acrimony was high. She lamented some senators had “no intention of letting the President off the hook” and didn’t admit “their own complicity in this event.” She said of Clinton, whom she vigorously supported when NCC head, “much as we love and admire that president, he had squandered” the trust placed in him.

But Clinton had been “adequately punished,” and the proper “discussion [was] about whether to forgive the president.” She recalled having challenged senators and others: “Were they in any way complicit,” which “they had to ask themselves.” And she remembered having urged: “Let us forgive ourselves for dividing the nation.”

After Campbell’s sermon, the congregation in Chautauqua’s New York lakeside amphitheater sang “Help Us to Accept Each Other,” which is a therapeutic modern rewrite of the far more stately and theologically venerable “The Church’s One Foundation.” It’s hard to picture Christ urging “acceptance,” as His focus was typically repentance and forgiveness. Likewise, it’s hard fully to fathom Campbell’s remembrance of the Clinton impeachment drama as a modern political parable illustrating the need for forgiveness and admission of universal guilt for dividing the nation. Maybe it’s difficult to view any political controversy through the lens of several Bible verses when the heated memories are still somewhat fresh.

In yesterday’s sermon, Campbell rhetorically asked: “Do you think Bible is true?” Answering her own question, she said: “I believe that for the ages it has been the truth. Its stories are just as appropriate as though they were written today.”

Campbell focused on the Pharisees’ plotting against Christ, who still “chose love and caring” over their self-serving rules, ensuring His own death at their behest. She warned of the “rules people,” who don’t realize there’s “something beyond the rules.” She cited Martin Luther King, Jr. and Desmond Tutu, whom she both knew, as notable examples of Christ followers who knew how “to live outside the rules and which rules matter.”

On Monday, Campbell preached on the Virgin Mary, implying that the historicity of Mary’s virginity was not important. (Here’s my article.)

Whatever her politics and theology, Campbell has had a dramatic half century of political and church activism that began when she first met King while she was a young Cleveland housewife and mother. She and my predecessor as IRD president, Diane Knippers, had an initially friendly association that later IRD-NCC disputes disrupted. After the controversial 1993 Re-Imagining ecumenical women’s conference, IRD under Diane led the critique of Re-Imagining’s rejection of Christian orthodoxy and embrace of goddess worship with eroticized liturgies. Campbell confided to Diane that she also shared theological concerns about Re-Imagining’s brand of radical feminist theology. Diane urged Campbell, as the nation’s then most prominent woman church official, to speak publicly. Campbell politely declined, saying she could not. The NCC’s subsequent trajectory may have been different had its chief then vigorously defended ecumenical Christian teaching at an important hour.