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Is this what Paul meant when he said to be all things to all men? Four years ago, John Whitehead warned fellow Christians—in speeches, articles, books, and videos—that their religion was under attack by Nazilike secularists. He called it "religious apartheid."

"From the removal of crosses and nativity scenes, to the prohibition of individual prayer in schools, religion is being systematically separated from American society," he wrote in a June 1994 editorial for Rutherford magazine, the house organ for his Rutherford Institute in Charlottesville, Virginia. Elsewhere he ominously informed us that "Clinton is quietly constructing a despotic government and a new society of intolerance to traditional values."

Today Whitehead says he likes Clinton and, if it weren't for the President's position on abortion, would vote for him. "No modern President has done more for religious rights than Clinton." He has also publicly called on conservative Christians to stop using antihomosexual rhetoric. In 1996 he criticized Colorado's Amendment 2 (an amendment prohibiting state and local governments from passing laws that ban discrimination against homosexuals), which Focus on the Family strongly supported. In 1997 he opposed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and is critical of the current Religious Freedom Amendment. His magazine has even run positive reviews of several violent and disturbing films, including The Last Temptation of Christ ("a sympathetic and reverent treatment of Christianity's origin").

With just this evidence, one would be tempted to conclude that a captain of the Religious Right has had a leftward political conversion. But factor this into the enigma: When First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton talked about a right-wing conspiracy to bring down her husband, many people saw John Whitehead and the Rutherford Institute sitting at the center of the web.

The Rutherford Institute is currently involved in 230 legal cases; but since last November, one case dominated all others. It alone changed the Rutherford Institute's moniker in media reports from "a religious liberties group" (USA Today, 1995) to "the conservative legal foundation paying Paula Jones' legal bills in her sexual misconduct case against President Clinton" (Salon Magazine, 1998).

That Whitehead would ally himself with such a controversial case alienated plenty of past supporters who were eager to support religious liberties but not a political vendetta. Other supporters have been turned off by the other changes the 52-year-old Whitehead (and thus his organization) has been undergoing.

John Wayne Whitehead almost seems to be deliberately antagonizing his supporters. If so, it wouldn't be the first time. In the 16 years since he founded his pioneering religious-liberty ministry, the Rutherford Institute, Whitehead has been arguing for Christians to engage "secular" culture. He pursued lawsuits to fight religious discrimination eight years before Pat Robertson founded his American Center for Law and Justice—back when Christians were quoting Paul's disdain for "ungodly" courts (1 Cor. 4:3; 6:1-11). He told evangelicals to be politically active six years before Robertson ran for President—when many conservative Christians still rejected politics as dirty. And now he is enjoining Christians to engage the most pervasive instrument of secular culture—popular culture—by encouraging Christians to produce art, film, and television—and this in a day when "engaging popular culture" for many evangelicals means boycotting Disney.

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December 7 1998, Vol. 42, No. 14