WASHINGTON (ABP) — Just weeks after Joel Hunter’s appointment as executive director of the Christian Coalition of America signaled a broader and softer image for the organization, a dispute over that new direction has forced him to step down.
According to multiple news reports, Hunter, a megachurch pastor from Florida who had planned to serve the political-action group in a volunteer capacity, was to become president Oct. 1 and assume day-to-day control of operations in January.
He would have filled the role previously occupied by Roberta Combs, who presently is the chair of the coalition’s four-member board of directors. She has presided over an organization that was once the nation’s premiere advocacy and voter-organizing group for conservative Christians. But in recent years it has declined precipitously in influence, size and prestige within the conservative movement.
At the height of its prominence, led by political wonderkind Ralph Reed, the Christian Coalition was virtually synonymous with opposition to legalized abortion and gay rights and support for government endorsement of religious displays. Since then, other conservative religious groups — such as the Washington-based Family Research Council — have taken over as the main standard-bearers for such causes.
Hunter announced he would take the coalition in a new direction, emphasizing other moral issues that he believed younger conservative Christians found equally compelling. “I look forward to … expanding our mission to concern itself with the care of creation, helping society’s marginalized, human rights/religious issues and compassion issues,” he said in a press release announcing his appointment.
But that goal did not sit well with some rank-and-file supporters. Representatives of several statewide Christian Coalition groups that have separated themselves from the national body in recent years cited Hunter’s comments as emblematic of their tensions with the national organization.
Such tensions reportedly came to a head during a Nov. 21 conference call between Hunter, Combs and other board members. At the end of the call, they amicably agreed to part ways, news reports said.
Combs told the New York Times that Hunter’s agenda hadn’t been adequately sold to the Coalition’s grass-roots supporters.
“We’re a political organization, and there’s a way to do things, like taking a survey of your members and seeing what they need,” she said. “Joel had a different way of doing things, so he just went out there.”
But Hunter told Religion News Service he believed his positions were a natural outgrowth of pro-life views. “[I]f we are going to care for the vulnerable, we ought to care as much about the vulnerable outside the womb as inside the womb,” he said.
Hunter’s congregation, Longwood Church, has multiple campuses in the Orlando area. He recently authored a book criticizing the way the Religious Right has engaged in political tactics, titled Right Wing, Wrong Bird: Why the Tactics of the Religious Right Won’t Fly With Most Conservative Christians.
He also serves as the public face of the Evangelical Climate Initiative. That is an effort — launched earlier this year by a wide array of progressive, moderate and conservative evangelical groups and institutions — to combat global warming.
The Coalition was founded in 1989 by religious broadcaster and onetime presidential candidate Pat Robertson. During the peak of its power, in the mid-1990s, it had an annual budget of $25 million and a large Washington-based staff. But after Ralph Reed left its presidency in 1997, its influence, budget and presence in the nation’s capital declined significantly.