Tony Campolo frequently started his speeches to Christian audiences by telling them three things.
First, he would tell them how many children had died from hunger or malnutrition-related diseases the night before—a number in the tens of thousands.
And Campolo would say, “Most of you don’t give a s—.”
Then: “What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said ‘s—’ than the fact that thousands of kids died last night.”
Campolo, a progressive Christian leader who courted controversy challenging evangelicals to see caring for the poor as an integral part of proclaiming the gospel, died on Tuesday. He was 89.
Campolo popularized the term red letter Christian—a reference to the way the words of Jesus are printed in many New Testaments—as an alternative to evangelical. He felt an alternative was needed because evangelicals had turned their backs on the good news, embracing right wing politics and comfortable, middle class conformity. But the best cure for evangelicalism’s ills, he said, was Jesus.
As he traveled relentlessly, speaking to up to 500 groups per year, Campolo urged people to let their lives be transformed by Jesus. And he told them that if their lives really were transformed, it would be good news for people who were hungry and oppressed.
“I surrendered my life to Jesus and trusted in him for my salvation, and I have been a staunch evangelical ever since,” Campolo wrote in 2015. “I believe the Bible to have been written by men inspired and guided by the Holy Spirit. I place my highest priority on the words of Jesus, emphasizing the 25th chapter of Matthew, where Jesus makes clear that on Judgment Day, the defining question will be how each of us responded to those he calls ‘the least of these.’”
A Baptist pastor and sociologist, Campolo attributed this vision to John Wesley. In a 2003 interview with Christianity Today, Campolo said he studied the founder of Methodism in a class on “Christian classics” when he was a student at Eastern College (now a university). He realized Wesley’s social activism wasn’t distinct from his conversion but deeply connected.
“The Wesleyan vision was warm-hearted evangelism with an incredible social vision,” Campolo said. “Out of this conversion grows the great Wesleyan revival with all of its social consciousness, attacking slavery, championing the rights of women, ending child labor laws.”
Born a second-generation Italian immigrant in 1935, Campolo had his first taste of social conflict in the church while growing up in Philadelphia. His family attended an American Baptist congregation in West Philadelphia, but it shut down when white people fled the city and their African American neighbors for the suburbs. Campolo’s father, Anthony Campolo Sr., decided not to follow. Instead, he took his family to a Black Baptist church nearby, and they worshiped there.
As a young pastor in his 20s, Campolo faced racism in the church again. He was working in a congregation near Valley Forge, in Pennsylvania, when General Electric opened a new research headquarters in the area, triggering a housing shortage. Black people in particular had trouble finding places to live. Campolo started pushing local leaders to fix the problem and soon found himself the head of a council working on fair and affordable housing.
The backlash was quick. Campolo was sharply criticized by white people in his congregation, who said he was going to hurt real estate value and the reputation of the church.
It was eye-opening for the young minister. “I did not expect that Christian people could be so openly racist,” he said.
Campolo left the church to get a doctorate in sociology and took a teaching position at Eastern in 1964. At the school, Campolo started getting students to volunteer with children in Philadelphia, first with college resources and then with his own organization, the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education (EAPE). Shortly after it was founded, the EAPE helped start a school in the Dominican Republic and another in Haiti.
To recruit more students to spend a summer or a year doing missions, and to raise money for ongoing projects, Campolo started accepting speaking invitations large and small. His schedule sometimes put him in conflict with Eastern administrators, and his speeches often put him in conflict with conservative evangelicals.
In 1985, Campolo was accused of heresy. He was uninvited from a Washington, DC, youth rally organized by Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru) and Youth for Christ because he had written that Jesus is present in other people, that the fullest expression of God was in Christ’s humanness, and that while Jesus is the only savior, “not everybody who is saved by Him is aware that He is the one who is doing the saving.”
A panel led by theologian J. I. Packer reviewed the charges, grilled Campolo for six hours, and found him orthodox. He was “verbally incautious” and guilty of “unbiblical faux pas,” the panel concluded, but it was inadvertent and born out of his eagerness to evangelize.
Campolo, for his part, said the episode cemented his commitment to be a faithful critic of the church.
“I could have ended up as another career public speaker,” he said. “A career public speaker is not what I’m called to be. I’m called to be a critic. And this controversy has started the old juices flowing again.”
In addition to teaching, speaking, and running a missionary organization, Campolo was active in the Democratic Party. He ran a doomed campaign for Congress in 1976 and worked with President Bill Clinton on the development of AmeriCorps in the 1990s.
Campolo also became Clinton’s personal spiritual advisor during the scandal over Clinton’s sexual misconduct with an intern. He formed an accountability group for the president, along with evangelical pastor Gordon MacDonald and Methodist minister J. Philip Wogaman. When the pastoral counseling became public, Campolo was criticized for providing “spiritual cover” for Clinton and allowing him to feign repentance in order to avoid political consequences.
In 2008, Campolo worked on the Democratic Party platform. He was partly responsible for a plank committing the party to supporting programs that would “help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and thereby also reduce the need for abortions,” even as it remained committed to women’s right to choose abortion. Campolo told reporters the language did not go as far as he wanted, but that he thought social programs, including health care, age-appropriate sex education, and food stamps could cause a dramatic reduction in the number of abortions.
Campolo regularly clashed with Christian conservatives for what he saw as their misplaced priorities. He consistently argued that Christians should support a political agenda that would help the poor.
“There are 2,000 verses of Scripture that call upon us to respond to the needs of the poor,” Campolo said. “And yet, I find that when Christians talked about values in this last election that was not on the agenda, that was not a concern. If you were to get the voter guide of the Christian Coalition, that does not rate.”
Campolo launched Red Letter Christians, a network for Christians with left-leaning politics, with fellow Eastern alumnus Shane Claiborne. The network grew to include 120 affiliated organizations and churches, as well as a popular podcast, an annual gathering, and social justice campaigns, such as events where Claiborne and a Mennonite blacksmith invite people to turn firearms into garden tools in fulfillment of Isaiah 2:4.
Campolo also continued to urge young Christians not to turn their back on the local church, even if they were disappointed in its evangelical witness. In one of his more popular books, Letters to a Young Evangelical, Campolo said that much of the American church was more committed to a middle-class way of life than anything in the Bible. And yet, he said, Christians’ commitment to the church shouldn’t waver.
“The church is still your mother,” Campolo wrote. “It is she who taught you about Jesus. I want you to remember that the Bible teaches that Christ loves the church and gave himself for it (Ephesians 5:25). That’s a preeminent reason why you dare not decide that you don’t need the church. Christ’s church is called his bride (1 Cor. 11:2), and his love for her makes him faithful to her even when she is not faithful to him.”
In 2015, Campolo stirred new controversy when he came out in favor of same-sex marriage ahead of the US Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision. Campolo had long said that same-sex attraction was not a choice and that most people could not change their sexual orientation through prayer or counseling, but he had not taken an affirming stance.
He said he changed his mind after spending time with LGBTQ Christians in committed, monogamous relationships and reflecting on the fundamental question of what marriage is for. Campolo, grounding the argument in his faith, said he believed the primary purpose of marriage is sanctification. A same-sex marriage should be affirmed by the church, he said, if it encouraged people to grow in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and the other fruits of the Spirit.
“Obviously, people of good will can and do read the scriptures very differently when it comes to controversial issues,” he said. “I am painfully aware that there are ways I could be wrong about this one.”
Campolo said he hoped his most lasting legacy would be the people he inspired to go into ministry. He estimated that more than 1,000 people heard God’s call to evangelism and missions through their work with EAPE and that perhaps as many as 10,000 were inspired by the hundreds of speeches he gave every year.
Campolo told CT that he dreamed of having those people’s names on his tombstone.
He is survived by his wife, Peggy, and their children, Lisa Goodheart and Bart Campolo.
