Hunting for Heresy

Disagreement among Christians is as old as Jesus’ disciples, who, in a famous passage in Luke’s gospel, argued over who was the greatest. Strife among Christians persists, and, as often as not, such intramural disputes contain more vitriol than do disputes with non-Christians.

Now, in an era of nearly instantaneous worldwide communication, attacks by self-appointed heresy hunters have escalated through the use of radio, television, newsletters, e-mail, fax machines, handbills, and other low-budget means to rally an audience against specific Christian leaders or ministries.

The most recent instance of inter-Christian conflict has an unusual twist, because it involves questioning the orthodoxy of two prominent evangelical couples. Karen Burton Mains, 51, is accused of being a New Ager. Tony Campolo, 59, is upbraided for alleged false teachings on homosexuality. And both of their spouses have been dragged into the conflict.

Critics say they are defending the inerrancy of Scripture in calling Mains and Campolo to accountability.

Mains and Campolo, however, see narrow-minded, self-appointed arbiters of legalism sitting in judgment of their every word and deed. In separate interviews, they told CHRISTIANITY TODAY of their openness to compassionate correction when needed, but not widespread vilification. Mains and Campolo believe their critics are leveling unfair and personal attacks.

At the forefront of the public criticism of Mains and Campolo is a 57-year-old Milwaukee broadcaster, Vic Eliason, who has devoted several recent broadcasts to Mains and Campolo. Eliason says, “In both cases, it seems that some of the excursions and ancillary teachings of the wife have been bringing a shadow or a question over the ministries of the husbands.”

No mainstay for Mains

With host David Mains, her husband of 33 years, Karen Mains is active in the Wheaton, Illinois-based Chapel of the Air, heard on 185 radio stations; You Need to Know, seen on 64 television stations; and the 50-Day Spiritual Adventure, in which 3,700 churches participate annually. Karen Mains, author of 18 books, also is national chair of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship Board of Directors.

In a letter to supporters, David Mains says Chapel of the Air Ministries has “become subject to the most intense vilification campaign in its entire 55-year history” through guilt by association, deliberate fabrication of untruths, and misrepresentation.

At the heart of the controversy is Karen Mains’s self-exploring, introspective book Lonely No More (Word Publishing, 1993), which details her search for identity as a woman leader and her struggle with a “workaholic husband.” Mains describes dreams about Eddie Bishop—her “male-self,” to whom the book is dedicated. “This psychological concept of the male-within-the-female and the female-within-the-male was developed by Carl Jung, but it has always seemed exceptionally scriptural to me,” Mains writes in her book. She describes a seven-year-old, emaciated “idiot child” in her mind’s eye, who turns out to be “the Christ child that is within me.”

Mains told CTLonely No More is written in enigmatic, metaphorical language, with the “idiot” symbolism representing the “repressed, malformed” part of herself with which Christ identifies.

“We are concerned about the book because it deviates from Scripture,” Tom McMahon, executive director of the monthly 35,000-circulation Berean Call, says. The Bend, Oregon, newsletter, published by McMahon and Dave Hunt, coauthors of The Seduction of Christianity, says, “The route of psycho-spiritual self-therapy through which she leads the reader is a deadly swamp of subjectivity infested with Jungian dream analysis, symbolic imagery, shamanic visualization, interactive communication with dream entities, projections from the (Freudian) subconscious, and mystical contemplative prayer and fasting.” Critics also fault Mains’s affiliation with the Chrysostom Society, an association of Christian authors; Richard Foster’s Renovaré, a small-group ministry; and her spiritual direction from Catholic nun Lois Dideon.

David Mains says, “I, my wife, or my ministry associates have never and will never espouse any New Age philosophies.” Rather than expurgate Lonely No More, Karen Mains says Word has agreed to her request to declare the book out of print, which only allows remaining copies to sell. “If we would release it again,” she says, “there are things I would rewrite, because obviously there are some things that are puzzling.”

“Has Karen come to the place of recantation?” asks Eliason, head of VCY America Network in Milwaukee, which produces a daily talk show heard on 18 U.S. radio stations. “Or is she just embarrassed by what she wrote?”

Mains says she is guilty of a failure to communicate, not of any doctrinal error. While declaring the book out of print after last year’s first-run 10,000 copies is an attempt to assuage divisiveness, it has only increased criticism.

Organized conspiracy?

Eliason, after discovering Chapel of the Air was disseminating “confusing” material on his Milwaukee station, WVCY, says he sought a face-to-face meeting with David Mains, in accordance with the biblical mandate in Matthew 18 that requires fellow Christians to go personally to an offending party to work things out.

Mains says he has not met face to face with Eliason, but he has answered concerns by phone and letter.

Yet, in jeremiad fashion, Eliason took to the airwaves “because there were people who were getting false information” from Chapel. He removed Chapel from his station’s program offerings and also convened a meeting of 40 pastors on the matter.

Defending their analysis, Eliason and his daughter Ingrid Guzman, who produces their daily talk show, claim to conduct thorough research. For instance, Eliason accuses Mains of reading from psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace “on the air for several days.” Eliason and several newsletters around the country base their information on The Trojan Horse, a book by Samantha Smith and Brenda Scott. David Mains says copying information from a book does not make it the truth. He says Peck has never even been “quoted favorably” on Chapel, and he sent Eliason tapes of programs in question to prove it.

By airing special programs condemning Lonely No More and conducting a pastors’ forum to discuss Chapel, Eliason appears to be on a “rampage,” Karen Mains says. The Mainses have been flooded with phone calls and letters.

Randall Mains, the Mainses’ son, who is executive vice-president of Chapel of the Air Ministries, says the $5 million organization has lost about 35 of its 12,000 donors because of the controversy. However, only Eliason’s WVCY has dropped Chapel—after carrying the program for 30 years. Randall Mains says WMBI in Chicago, Moody Bible Institute’s flagship station, was on the brink of canceling the program until David and Karen Mains met with Moody president Joseph Stowell in April. In addition, three churches dropped the 50-Day Spiritual Adventure in midstream after reading about Karen Mains in the Berean Call.

Karen Mains speaks at about two-dozen meetings a year but says she is withdrawing for the next two years as a result of being canceled this spring as speaker at four retreats and conferences. She says sponsors besieged with calls opted to cancel rather than talk it through with the Mainses.

She was dropped as a speaker at a statewide Baptist General Conference women’s retreat last month. Judy Blake of Gilbert, Arizona, who chaired the retreat committee, has left not only her church over the cancellation but the denomination as well. “It looks like a modern-day witch-hunt,” Blake told CT. “I don’t want to submit to pharisaical leadership. I read the book and didn’t see anything New Age in it.”

Campolo controversy

Campolo, a sociologist at Eastern College in Saint Davids, Pennsylvania, and author of 23 books, speaks at 400 events a year. As one of the country’s most outspoken evangelicals, controversy is nothing new to him.

In 1985, Campus Crusade for Christ president Bill Bright used his influence to have Campolo yanked as a speaker at a national youth convention. Bright had heard complaints about Campolo’s A Reasonable Faith (Word, 1983), which contends that Jesus Christ is mystically incarnate in every human being. While clearing Campolo of heresy, a four-member panel headed by theologian J. I. Packer called A Reasonable Faith “methodologically naïve and verbally incautious” and said the book contained “some involuntary unorthodoxies of substance as well as some calculated unconventionalities in presentation” (CT, Dec. 13, 1985, p. 52). Campolo issued a clarification, saying “persons become Christians only by surrendering their lives to Christ.”

But Campolo says the 1985 controversy involved honest critics trying to be fair. Now he sees a deliberate attempt to misrepresent and smear him. “The Christian community should not allow people to speak out on controversial issues without being challenged,” Campolo says. “But I am upset by evangelical Christians who live by rumor.” Most of the heat steams from 20 Hot Potatoes Christians Are Afraid to Touch (Word, 1988). In the book, Campolo describes “homosexual covenants” in which males trying to alleviate loneliness vow to live together in celibacy.

“In our paraphrase, it means you can kiss, you can cuddle, just don’t do it,” Eliason charges. “Isn’t even the thought of lustfulness, according to Scripture, something that’s wrong?”

Campolo says, “I don’t see anything wrong with people not having sexual relations living together. If homosexuals are going to be celibate, what alternative do they have to loneliness?”

In 20 Hot Potatoes, Campolo urges the church to overcome its homophobia and work to stop discrimination that denies homosexuals their civil rights. And he says some Christians have a homosexual orientation, with the majority of them born that way. Critics also find problems with Campolo’s writings on the environment and the sacredness of animals.

Detractors spare no bombast. WVCY’s Guzman calls Campolo “a poster person for the evangelically correct college gab circuit” who “has long been at the cutting edge of neoevangelical apostasy.”

Rick Miesel in his Biblical Discernment Ministries newsletter in Bloomington, Indiana, says, “Campolo is a theological liberal, a New Age pantheist, and a radical political socialist whose teachings are heretical at best and blasphemous at worst.” The newsletter specializes in “exposés” of a wide range of Christian leaders, including James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, D. James Kennedy, Beverly LaHaye, Pat Robertson, and John MacArthur.

Guilt by association

Part of Campolo’s difficulties stem from his wife, Peggy, a writer who “enthusiastically affirms” monogamous same-sex relationships in a recent article in The Other Side magazine. Campolo says he has a “very, very strong” disagreement with his wife on homosexuality. John Lofton, who writes The Lofton Letter in Laurel, Maryland, published a phone conversation he had with Peggy Campolo in February. He said her views are “obviously loony tunes,” and she needs to repent of her “idiotic, sinful position.”

Compassion for homosexuals is tantamount to endorsement, according to Guzman. She draws that conclusion in an April Broadcasters United newsletter to 1,200 Christian stations because, when asked, Campolo’s office gave out the phone number for the prohomosexual group Evangelicals Concerned.

Organizations, churches, and campuses where Campolo is scheduled to speak have been inundated with packets of information and phone calls. This spring, North Central College, Gull Lake Bible Conference, Cincinnati Bible College, and Sports Outreach America all canceled talks. “There was no attempt made on the part of these brothers to contact us and say, ‘We have heard stuff, what is your reaction?’ ” says Campolo.

Campolo spoke at a Milwaukee Rescue Mission youth evangelistic meeting February 18. Six weeks earlier, WVCY began denouncing Campolo and the event. Campolo offered to withdraw to save the inner-city outreach embarrassment, but Milwaukee Rescue Mission remained steadfast, sending letters to 50 constituents who inquired about Campolo’s appearance.

Wisconsin Christians United picketed Campolo’s appearance and distributed leaflets. Ralph Ovadal, head of the group, says, “There’s no way in the world that Christians of conscience can stand by and see Christian youths perverted by the sort of theology Tony Campolo is peddling.”

Patrick Vanderburgh, executive director of the mission, says dozens of students made commitments to Christ at the event. “We took the allegations seriously, but we looked at his writings and felt there were no breaches in evangelical orthodoxy,” Vanderburgh says. “We may not endorse everything he’s ever said or written, but that’s an unreasonable condition for any speaker.”

Campolo sought a face-to-face meeting with WVCY personnel, but Eliason says the kind of meeting required by scriptural mandates was unnecessary because it was not an issue of hard feelings between individuals, but rather criticism based on Campolo’s writings.

The effort to criticize Campolo has erupted into a disinformation campaign to discredit him. The day of the February youth rally, a bogus press release, purportedly issued by Queer Nation, praised Campolo for his “loving voice of reason” and promised a counter rally, which never materialized. Another vaunted canard, supposedly from Evangelicals Concerned, was distributed at January’s National Religious Broadcasters convention in Washington, D.C. Campolo says Evangelicals Concerned does not back him because “I do not believe in same-gender sexual union or homosexual marriages.”

The controversy has been harmful to Campolo’s organization, the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education, which teaches literacy in 18 American cities, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. The program has a $1 million annual budget and 5,000 contributors, but Campolo says four major donors have pulled out recently because they “heard things” about him.

Youth for Christ, sponsoring Campolo as a speaker at the DC/LA conference this summer, may be next on Eliason’s hit list. He says, “One has to raise the question: Is Youth for Christ sympathetic toward this [homosexual] lifestyle?”

Milwaukee’s Christian voice?

Milwaukee-area pastors, as well as former WVCY employees and board members, consistently told CT that Eliason is a vitriolic and fomenting broadcaster.

One area congregation repeatedly criticized on the air is Elmbrook Church, led by Stuart and Jill Briscoe. Dick Robinson, Elmbrook senior associate pastor, says, “WVCY is a radio station, and nothing succeeds in drawing listeners like controversy.”

Harry Fritz, who now works at a Plymouth, Wisconsin, radio station, was a board member and later an employee at WVCY. “He feels he is under attack constantly,” says Fritz, who had been demoted to office manager from director of operations by the time he quit after eight years.

“He does what he believes is right, and he really doesn’t care what other people say as long as he feels he is scripturally correct.”

After he left in 1986, Fritz says the station became aggressively involved in politics. “We as a board would not have condoned that,” he says.

Wheaton College historian Edith Blumhofer says such attacks are hardly new. “Widely respected Christian leaders, such as Augustine, Luther, Wesley, were accused of various doctrinal and practical irregularities,” says Blumhofer, director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals.

“Historical precedence suggests the need for caution in the evaluation of criticism, whatever the source.”

Meanwhile, Campolo is encouraged because assiduous questioning of those who canceled appearances has spurred two reconsiderations and one apology.

Karen Mains longs for a system of accountability in such a controversy and says she will seek arbitration through National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) president E. Brandt Gustavson. Eliason has been on the NRB board of directors for 18 years.

But irenic reconciliation may be far away. During the preparation of this story, Eliason and Guzman took to the airwaves to convince listeners to deluge CT with calls because of the “yellow journalism” and “smear job” tactics sure to be employed in its writing.

By John W. Kennedy.

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