Father, Son and Holy Rift
For Pastor Chuck Smith, the big issues are undebatable. For Chuck Smith Jr., also a pastor, it's not so crystal clear. Something had to give.
By Christopher Goffard, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, September 2, 2006

I found this story quite interesting. I don't think I attended Calvary Chapel more than once or twice in the early 70's but the tent and ocean baptisms have always been emblematic of the Jesus Movement for me.

Theologically, father and son were on roughly the same page. They preached damnation for the unsaved, the wickedness of homosexuality, and what the son, looking back later, would call "a general hopelessness about the world," one salved only by the promise of an imminent, cataclysmic Second Coming.

I was thinking there was a single paragraph that succinctly described the problems fundamentalists have with him but the list takes a while to recite. Right after talking about his divorce, comes this

Still, his condition alienated him further from his father's church, where depression is widely viewed as a spiritual problem bespeaking flawed faith.

William Alnor, a longtime Calvary congregant and former pastor, expressed the view in stark terms: "I don't believe any Christian leader should be flirting with depression."

Fundamentalists have also been troubled in recent years by gestures they see as a throwback to paganism, such as Smith Jr. giving the sign of the cross at services and hanging his sanctuary with paintings of Jesus in the iconic Byzantine style. In 2005, to make matters worse, he took several extended retreats to a Catholic monastery in Big Sur.

One of his most vocal detractors, William Alnor's wife, Jackie, denounced his "decline into Catholic contemplative mystical religion" and protested outside his church. "I could sense the darkness around that place," she wrote on her Apostasy Alert webpage.

The squall intensified with the 2005 publication of the elder Smith's book "When Storms Come," which Smith Jr. edited. Among many additions Smith Jr. made was a quote from a priest, Anthony de Mello, whose Jesuit affiliation alarmed evangelicals. And on Page 103, Smith Jr. inserted the suggestion that breathing exercises might put one in a spiritually receptive state.

This seemed, in the eyes of some, dangerously close to endorsing a Buddhist practice.

Buddhist! How horrible! This list would not be complete without...

The son: "I met homosexuals who were trying to live celibate lives or be heterosexual, and I heard all about their struggles, and I never wanted to exacerbate that. My heart went out to them. Listening convinced me that homosexual orientation is not something people chose."

One by one they fell away, the doctrinal pillars of the house his father built. Yet Smith Jr. remained under the Calvary Chapel roof, not wanting to embarrass dad by leaving.

This summary and analysis is quite interesting.

Donald E. Miller, a USC professor of religion and author of a book on American evangelism, calls the elder Smith a pioneer of "new-paradigm Christianity" — one who championed contemporary music and casual dress in church, jettisoned traditional church symbols and rituals, deemphasized theological sophistication and paved the way for the modern megachurch. But he remained an old-school biblical literalist, he said, and the contrast with his son is probably fueled by generational differences.

"While Chuck Smith was very much a culturally savvy guy in the 1960s, nevertheless he came out of the Depression period, whereas his son grew up in a completely different era," Miller said.

For Smith Jr.'s part, he believed he was carrying on the work of radical outreach his father started in the 1960s. Since its early days as "the culturally relevant, rock-n-roll worship, hippie church," he believed, Calvary Chapel had regressed into a "hunker-down mentality — ride out the vagaries of this evil world until Jesus comes to the rescue."