Orange County by Gustavo Arellano

Author:Gustavo Arellano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Merely comforting the comforted wasn’t enough for Schuller to succeed. According to his Prayer: My Soul’s Adventure with God, Schuller was “politically neutral but quite possibly a liberal, at least in spirit,” when he began in California. The young man’s ideology changed, however, after hearing a lecture by Fred Schwartz, a self-proclaimed expert on communism who headed the Long Beach–based Christian Anti-Communist Crusade.

“I had no inkling,” Schuller recounted in Prayer, “that many leaders in mainline Protestantism were sympathetic to Marxism as an alternative to capitalism, which they saw as systematically evil.” As a result, Schuller pulled his Orange County congregation out of the mainstream National Council of Churches of Christ.

“I was now tempted for the first and last time to accept an invitation to go full-time into anti-communism and join [Schwartz],” Schuller wrote. Then, according to Prayer, God spoke to Schuller, saying, “Watch out for communism, and watch out for anticommunism, and watch out for anti-anti-communism.” Schuller’s God and my God might be the same Savior, but mine has a better editor.

After his revelation, Schuller claims in his autobiography to have forsaken politics. The truth, however, is more complex. According to Lisa McGirr’s excellent 2001 examination of 1960s Orange County politics, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, Schuller was active in anticommunist activities despite claims to the contrary. Suburban Warriors revealed that Schuller served on the religious committee of the Orange County School of Anti-Communism, a five-day celebration held in 1961 to lecture people on the Red Menace, culminating with a midday rally held in Anaheim’s Glover Stadium, where more than seven thousand elementary school students heard speaker after speaker.

Members of Schuller’s congregation at the time, McGirr wrote, were part of Orange County’s nutty conservatives and included Congressman James “Barefoot Africans” Utt. In addition, Schuller joined the Californians’ Committee to Combat Communism in 1962, a group formed to help pass the Francis Amendment, which sought to ban the hiring of people with communist “leanings” in the state. After the legislation’s defeat, McGirr says, Schuller left “controversial political activities.” By then, Schuller helped set a new template for Orange County religion. John Birch conservatism, while popular in Orange County, didn’t appeal to the nation at large, so Schuller quickly ditched the polarizing views and embraced the gospel of prosperity—“God wants you to succeed!”

The church expanded exponentially shortly after Schuller’s dabbles in McCarthyism. By 1961, he’d raised enough money to commission a Richard Neutra building that formalized his drive-in ministerial approach: while he preached inside a chapel, a glass door separated Schuller from his drive-in congregation hearing Schuller’s sermon on tinny radios, allowing him to walk toward them. In 1970, he started airing his church’s services on The Hour of Power, and the world was now privy to Schuller. Millions liked what they saw: a relentlessly optimistic man who ignored man’s Fall to emphasize one’s potential. It’s broadcast to this day from the Crystal Cathedral (opened in 1980), a playground for Christianity with a stream running through the worship

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