Samuel Rodriguez, Extremism, And The Oak Initiative

"Like" the Patheos Evangelical Page on Facebook to receive today's best commentary on Evangelical issues. I repudiate all vestiges of Islamophobia or any other platform that engages in fear-mongering . . . We must stay vigilant in order to protect the sanctity of compassionate and grace-filled outreach. My commitment stands without compromise. I will continue to advocate and engage a generation committed to sanctification and service, covenant and community, truth with love. ~ Public statement from Rev. Samuel Rodriguez on September 9, 2011

On Labor Day, I came across a story entitled " Samuel Rodriguez and the Oak Initiative—Marketing Religious Supremacism as Social Justice ." The author, Rachel Tabachnik, is a noted researcher on the religious right whose work I have grown to trust and admire, yet the headline for her story seemed extreme. Samuel Rodriguez is the President of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC). His track record as a key voice for immigration reform has won him audiences with President Obama and billing as a new leader for social justice by Jim Wallis. From CNN to Newsweek to the Washington Post , Rodriguez has been featured prominently as a moderate evangelical leader, "the voice for Hispanic Christians in America." Yet my experience has taught me this: the nexus between evangelicalism, Pentecostalism, and the religious right makes for strange bedfellows. I refused to dismiss the story out of hand and I read on.

What I discovered was clear evidence that Rev. Rodriguez was represented by the Oak Initiative as a key supporter of their project—indeed, according to their website, the Vice President of the group. And make no mistake: the Oak Initiative is troubling. For instance, the home page of the Oak Initiative promotes the book Islam vs. the United States , which is said to expose "the strategic plan of the Muslim Brotherhood for the USA." A major resource of the Oak Initiative is their report, "Shari'ah: Threat to America." Rodriguez's support of the Oak Initiative seemed more than nominal, especially since the NHCLC and the Oak Initiative each have Cindy Jacobs, one of the most controversial figures in American Christianity, on their leadership teams. So I contacted a well-known magazine that night with a proposal to do an article on Rodriguez's troubling allegiance.

Last Tuesday, I made contact with the NHCLC and arranged for an interview with Rev. Rodriguez on Wednesday. In the meantime, I found a lead article by Rodriguez in the new issue of Christianity Today on the legacy of 9/11. In a moving piece, Rodriguez made the case that "every extreme, whether ideological, spiritual, or political, carries potentially catastrophic destruction." Followers of Christ, he said, should live "not in the extremes or outskirts." These words stood in stark contrast to this warning on the Oak's home page: "The Muslim Brotherhood, with the complicity of the Obama administration, has infiltrated the U.S. government at the highest levels and is influencing American policy [in a way] that leaves the world's Christians in grave danger." These two contradictory quotes would play a key part in my interview with Rev. Rodriguez.

Although I received glowing testimonies to Rodriguez's character before the interview, I was skeptical. My decades of experience with evangelical and fundamentalist leaders had taught me to hope for the best, but expect the worst.

Yet I found that Rev. Rodriguez was genuinely troubled by Tabachnik's charges. He challenged some of the details of her story, but on the principal point—his relationship with the Oak Initiative—he agreed that there was cause for concern. He knew instinctively as I read to him the Oak Initiative's views about Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood that this was an affront to what he wished to stand for. While he pleaded ignorance with regards to the details of the Oak Initiative's agenda and website (he claimed he had barely been involved), he assured me that by the end of the day he would resign from the Board and make clear his regret. Five hours later I received an email with his letter to the Executive Board of NHCLC responding to Tabachnik's article and detailing the steps he was taking to denounce extremism, steps that include his resignation from the board of the Oak Initiative. It was, as a mutual friend of mine and Samuel's put it, the most that could be hoped for.

Some critics of Rodriguez immediately questioned his motivations and focused on further steps that Rev. Rodriguez should take but that they doubted that he would. I took a different tack. I believed that motivations are not for us to judge, and that Rev. Rodriguez was making a step consistent with his long-stated values. I hoped that beyond his decision to resign from the Oak Initiative, Rev. Rodriguez would take further steps to distance himself and his ministry from the damaging taint of religious extremism. By Friday, Rev. Rodriguez had issued the truly significant statement quoted at the start of this article.

From this experience of reporting on religious extremism and advocating for its end, I see five lessons for the broader religious community:

Take media reports of religious extremism seriously . Far too often, particularly in the Catholic and evangelical circles in which I travel, leaders dismiss secular media reporting on conservative Christians as inherently suspect and riddled with distortion. Their reflexive response is to view it as "more of the same" paranoia and ignorance of religion. The Rodriguez story challenges that reflex and invites deeper self-analysis. Many reporters and researchers know movements and theologies far deeper than the average layperson, and are themselves disturbed by the ignorance of many national news media.

Rethink the "evangelical center." In the weeks leading up to this story, I was engaged in strenuous debates with evangelical leaders over the radicalization of evangelicalism. Time after time I was told that extremist ideology was, as one friend put it, "truly and enduringly marginal" within evangelicalism. Clearly that assumption is false. Rev. Rodriguez is anything but a marginal figure within mainstream evangelicalism. The NHCLC that Rodriguez heads is a sister organization to the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), and he continues to sit on the board of the NEA, Christianity Today, and Gordon Conwell Seminary. Even if one accepts, as I do, that Rodriguez was not fully aware of the Oak Initiative agenda, it speaks volumes to the radicalization of the evangelical movement that one of its bright young stars was until now featured prominently in the propaganda efforts of an organization riddled with conspiracy theories and distortions.

Give "truth in love" a chance . The fierce rhetoric of the culture wars has left many of us doubtful that persuasion is possible. We assume, often with past personal experience to justify it, that truth is not relevant to our opponents. But in this case, the truth won out. Whether out of embarrassment at "being caught" or (in my view) genuine remorse over what he learned, Rev. Rodriguez made a significant change as a result of truthful reporting communicated with respect for his intelligence and character. When we give a perceived opponent the chance to change, the worst that can happen is that the person remains stuck in his or her beliefs, but at least we will know that we have treated someone the way we would want to be treated. Sadly, reporters and researchers, especially those affiliated with groups with a clear stake in the culture wars, seem to have given up on the possibility that the truth they discover might actually lead to change. I was discouraged to see that some reporters have such a firm view about the groups they are covering that they have stopped dealing with the subjects as full-dimensional people capable of good as well as the evil they believe they have caught them committing.

Stop condescending to Pentecostals . As the global church becomes increasingly charismatic, those of us outside of that tradition are going to need to overcome stereotypes about Pentecostal thinking. I believe that one of the reasons Pentecostal extremism goes unchallenged in the broader Church is that non-Pentecostals assume that those extremes define Pentecostalism. There is a spoken and unspoken assumption that a group that engages in something as "odd" as speaking in tongues or prophetic utterances is anti-intellectual and immune from to persuasion that certain practices or beliefs are wrong. When I spoke with Rev. Rodriguez, I did so in the conviction that (until proven otherwise) he would share general Christian convictions about tolerance and justice, and that if he did not agree with my views then it was probably because of ideologies that have nothing to do with Pentecostalism. In saying this, I do not mean to deny or downplay disturbing tendencies in neo-Pentecostal groups like the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), for instance. Rather I mean to encourage confrontation of those tendencies with hope for change. After all, some of the fiercest critics of NAR theology and practice are themselves Pentecostals. We do those critics no service by silencing our concerns under the false assumption that "it's a Pentecostal thing, I wouldn't understand."

Be open to change in yourself. As we confront extremism with a hopeful spirit, we must also be prepared to grow ourselves. If we truly believe that our shared humanity and our shared baptism calls us to lovingly challenge our brothers and sisters, then we will also believe that we have something to learn from everyone's experience of life and faith. In our conversation, Rev. Rodriguez spoke movingly of his love for his 20-year-old daughter. He shared his desire to make the world a more compassionate one for her sake. His words spoke to me as a father and renewed my own commitment to my children.

If the Church in America is to play a constructive role in promoting and defending the common good, we must confront extremism within our own community and we must do so with genuine hope for reconciliation. We cannot give up on any individual or any group, or allow our past injuries to keep us forever alienated from the ministry of reconciliation that must happen within the Church. It will not be easy, but after my experience with Rev. Rodriguez I have hope that it can be done, one leader at a time.

Samuel Rodriguez, Extremism, and the Oak Initiative