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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
At the root of Ahmanson's quirky asceticism and ardent conservatism is his rocky path from cloistered rich kid to Bible-believing philanthropist. Ahmanson's father, Howard Sr., was a savings and loan tycoon whose net worth was valued at over $300 million at the time of his death in 1968. Howard Jr. was only 18 at the time he inherited the fortune. Ejected from his sheltered youth to confront a world suddenly in his palm, the reluctant heir feared that he would never surpass his father's accomplishments; at the same time, he viewed his inherited fortune as a wall separating him from humanity. After wandering the country and the world searching for peace of mind, he returned home in the mid-'70s still a lost soul.
It was then that he found his salvation in the church and in R.J. Rushdoony, a prolific author and an influential theologian of the far right. Rushdoony is the father of Christian Reconstructionism, a strange variant of Calvinism that stresses waging political struggle to put the earth, and in particular the U.S., under the control of biblical law. In his 30-some books, he advocated everything from the end of government-administered social welfare and public schools to the execution of homosexuals. For around 20 years, until Rushdoony's death in 2001, Ahmanson served on the board of his think tank, Chalcedon, granting it a total of $1 million. In exchange, Rushdoony acted as Ahmanson's spiritual advisor, imbuing him with a sense of order and a mission.
Today, Ahmanson says he is more mature than the card-carrying Reconstructionist who told the Orange County Register in 1985: "My goal is the total integration of biblical law into our lives." In brief, written responses to questions I e-mailed to him, he placed special emphasis on his disagreement with Rushdoony's opinion that homosexuals should be executed. "Due to my association with Rushdoony, reporters have often assumed that I agree with him in all applications of the penalties of the Old Testament Law, particularly the stoning of homosexuals," Ahmanson wrote. "My vision for homosexuals is life, not death, not death by stoning or any other form of execution, not a long, lingering, painful death from AIDS, not a violent death by assault, and not a tragic death by suicide. My understanding of Christianity is that we are all broken, in need of healing and restoration. So far as I can tell, the only hope for our healing is through faith in Jesus Christ and the power of his resurrection from the dead."
While Ahmanson was reluctant to speak, his wife clarified his views for me in a series of interviews that marked her first encounter with the press since 1992. In our talks, she recounted how she and her husband met in 1984, in their 30s, while she was covering religion and the San Bernardino square-dancing scene for the Orange County Register. As a dyed-in-the-wool Calvinist, raised Christian in Perry, Iowa, schooled at Calvin College, and a teacher at what she called "experimental Christian" schools throughout Canada as a young woman, she made a perfect match for Ahmanson. Two years later they were married. With her media experience and extensive theological education to go with a warm, refreshingly humorous personality that constrasts starkly with her husband's insularity, Mrs. Ahmanson has enthusiastically taken on the role of his able spokesperson and indefatigable guardian.
Roberta Ahmanson made pains to highlight her husband's charitable side, stressing his donations to the Nature Conservancy, the evangelical humanitarian aid group World Vision, and the Orange County Rescue Mission, a Christian homeless shelter that President Bush recently singled out for funding under his faith-based initiative. For her, Ahmanson is a complicated yet balanced man whose political activism and charitable giving are driven by a higher force.
"His goal is -- this is going to sound crazy -- his goal is to do with his money what God wants him to do," she explained.
And why does God want him to give to so many right-wing causes?
"The Christian view of man is that we're not perfect. You don't give to things that base themselves on the optimistic view that human beings are going to be doing it right," Mrs. Ahmanson explained. When I asked if this meant she and her husband would still want to install the supremacy of biblical law, she replied: "I'm not suggesting we have an amendment to the Constitution that says we now follow all 613 of the case laws of the Old Testament ... But if by biblical law you mean the last seven of the 10 Commandments, you know, yeah."
