The Rev. Tony Campolo, one of the most influential evangelical preachers of the past half century, who urged Christians to resist the strong political tug of the religious right and to affirm that their faith called them, first and foremost, to fight poverty and racism, died on Nov. 19 at his home in Bryn Mawr, Pa. He was 89.
The cause was heart failure, his son, Bart, said.
With a mesmerizing speaking style that combined humor, passion, worldliness and Scripture, Dr. Campolo in his prime addressed 500 or more audiences a year, at churches and conferences, often challenging the hegemony of the Christian right that aligned white evangelicals with the Republican Party.
He was a founder of Red Letter Christians, a movement that urges evangelicals to turn away from politics in favor of the values of charity and love preached by Jesus, whose words are printed in red in some editions of the Bible.
His lodestar was Chapter 25 in the book of Matthew, which warns that Christ will judge his followers by the compassion they showed to “the least of these” among humanity.
“While you were sleeping last night,” Dr. Campolo would tell audiences, “30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition.”
“Most of you don’t give a shit,” he added.
“What’s worse,” he’d say, building on the shock value, “is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said ‘shit’ than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.”
Unlike some prominent evangelical preachers, Dr. Campolo had neither a widely viewed television show nor a megachurch. He was an itinerant speaker, a prolific author of some 35 books, a sociology professor and the founder of a Philadelphia-based ministry that supported programs for the poor there and abroad. One offshoot operated 50 schools in Haiti.
Dr. Campolo’s home church was Mount Carmel Baptist Church in West Philadelphia, where he was an associate pastor. He was one of the church’s only white members. His parents had joined in the 1950s, when white flight upended the population of their neighborhood but the Campolos chose to remain.
In 1998, Dr. Campolo was one of three ministers who served as spiritual advisers to President Bill Clinton after he admitted a sexual relationship with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky and faced impeachment.
Dr. Campolo insisted that he did more than provide political damage control for the president.
“We want him to understand what went wrong with him personally that led to the tragic sins that have so marred his life and the office of the presidency,” he said in a statement at the time.
Dr. Campolo consistently criticized the drift of white evangelicals toward Republican politics, which began in the 1980s as the issues of abortion and same-sex marriage came to the fore.
With the rise of Donald J. Trump, who won more than 80 percent of white evangelical voters in 2016, Dr. Campolo grew increasingly outspoken.
In 2018, he and Shane Claiborne, a founder of Red Letter Christians, held a revival in Lynchburg, Va., to challenge Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, one of the dominant figures in the alliance forged between evangelicals and Mr. Trump.
“Their ‘Red Letter Revival’ revealed the state of the evangelical church in 2018,” The New York Times, which covered the sparsely attended event, wrote. “The loudest voices and institutional power and money are with Mr. Trump; the dissenters are fired-up, underfunded and scattered; and the vast majority of pastors are silent for fear of dividing their congregations or risking their jobs.”
In 2015, Dr. Campolo announced his support of same-sex marriage ahead of the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that states must recognize such marriages.
He said he had changed his mind after holding the conservative view that gay men and lesbians, to remain good Christians, would have to remain celibate. But marriage, he decided, was not just about sexuality and procreation; it was also about spiritual growth.
“When we sing the old invitation hymn, ‘Just as I Am,’” he wrote on his website, “I want us to mean it, and I want my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters to know it is true for them too.”
Anthony Campolo Jr. was born on Feb. 25, 1935, in Philadelphia, the youngest of three children of Anthony Campolo, a Sicilian immigrant who worked as a cabinet maker, and Mary (Piccerelli) Campolo, whose family came from Naples and who worked as a caregiver at a retirement community into her 70s.
Tony graduated from West Philadelphia High School and Eastern Baptist College (now Eastern University) in St. Davids, Pa. After earning a B.A. in 1956, he was ordained a Baptist pastor the next year.
He went on to Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary (now Palmer Theological Seminary), earning a Master of Divinity in 1961. At the same time, he also took sociology courses at the University of Pennsylvania, where he later taught.
He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Temple University in 1968.
In 1964, he was hired as a professor of sociology at Eastern Baptist College, where he taught until 2012.
Along with teaching, Dr. Campolo recruited undergraduates to volunteer in struggling neighborhoods of Philadelphia; to further that work, he founded the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education in 1971. It became the umbrella organization for years of ministry outreach, including helping to found schools in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He announced in 2014 that he was shutting it down, because he believed, “in accord with Scripture that ‘for everything there is a season.’”
In 1958 he married Peggy Davidson. Besides their son, she survives him, as does their daughter, Lisa Goodheart; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Bart Campolo, who began as an evangelical preacher and youth leader in his father’s ministry, announced in his late 40s that he had ceased to believe in God or an afterlife. He became a “humanist chaplain” at the University of Southern California. In 2017 he and his father collaborated on a book, “Why I Left, Why I Stayed,” about the issues around his atheism.
In 1985, Dr. Campolo was disinvited from a youth conference by the Campus Crusade for Christ and accused of heresy, because he had written that Jesus lives in all people, whether or not they are Christian.
A panel of theologians cross-examined him for six hours and concluded that, while he was not a heretic, he was unorthodox and guilty of an “unbiblical faux pas.”
Dr. Campolo told the magazine Christianity Today that the experience convinced him he was meant to criticize the church from within its traditions.
“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.”
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