Back when I saw Tony Campolo speak in person, he got the crowd laughing right off the bat. In his characteristically animated and rapid-fire diction, he practically yelled that physicists tell us that the faster to the speed of light an object travels, the more mass it obtains. Then, mischievously looking over at the corpulent pastor, pausing for comedic effect, he added, “Pastor, you’re not fat! You’ve just been moving too fast!”

All these years later, it is admittedly a little surreal reflecting on a book that Campolo has written with his son who’s lost his faith. Last time we made brief mention of the foreword that had been written by Peggy Campolo, Tony’s wife and Bart’s mom, which reminds me of a humorous anecdote about her too from a long time back. When she was staying at home raising the kids, she would grow weary of being asked what she did for a living, so rather than keep answering that she was a homemaker who had elected to stay home, she took to giving this for an answer: “I’m socializing two Homo-sapiens in Judeo-Christian values so they’ll appropriate the eschatological values of utopia. What do you do?” They would often blurt out, “I’m a doctor,” or “I’m a lawyer,” and then wander off with a dazed look in their eyes. 

Nobody was laughing, though, Thanksgiving evening in 2014 when Bart, in his old three-story house in an “at-risk” Cincinnati neighborhood, told his parents that he no longer believed in God. The first chapter of Why I Left, Why I Stayed is Tony’s poignant account of that evening. Bart had long served in ministry, doing outreach to the poor and proclaiming the Christian gospel alongside his famous father, and had exerted a significant impact in the lives of many. This made all the harder for his dad to reconcile what he was hearing. It was overwhelming and painful, leaving Tony reeling, feeling “bewildered and unsure.”

After the excruciating conversation, Tony and Peggy spent a lot of time praying, determined that they would love their son unconditionally just as he was. Of course, though, this didn’t mean Tony wouldn’t try to get to the bottom of some things. He had questions. What had led to his son’s decision? Could he get Bart to reconsider? Had Tony failed somehow as a father? Before long an editorial in Christianity Today suggested that if Tony hadn’t focused so much on social issues and concerns for the poor, Bart might not have departed from the faith. Tony admitted this was painful to read because it made him doubt he had been a good father. In subsequent posts we will take up this topic in some detail.

Soon after that fateful Thanksgiving, Tony booked a weeklong speaking tour in England, and Bart happily agreed to tag along so they could spend time in substantive conversation. And so, in a succession of English parks and cafes, they shared with one another their innermost feelings and most deeply felt convictions. In our cultural moment, such candid, caring conversations are often hard to come by, riddled as it is with so much divisiveness and animus, tendentiousness and acrimony, among those with conflicting worldviews. But this is a father and son determined to forge such conversations.

This very dynamic is one of the features of the book—that came out of those conversations—I find most compelling: the model it provides for such challenging but valuable discussions. In both its spirit and execution the book is an eminently attractive picture of familial commitment despite deep differences, the diametric opposite of and efficacious antidote for our reigning, pervasive, and far too unimaginative “cancel culture.”

At this juncture and on this note, I might anticipate an objection among some of my evangelical friends. Tony Campolo himself, though respected greatly by many, has been fairly written off by others, including by some close friends of mine. The reasons are various, and some of the concerns altogether legitimate—from Campolo’s rabid commitment to the Democratic party, to the change of his stance on gay marriage, to what was likely a fair bit of dissembling and disingenuousness on the matter of homosexuality for quite some time before officially “changing his mind.”

We will have occasion to discuss all of these matters in subsequent entries. Bird by bird. For now, though, we might ask readers to suspend some of those judgments, hold them in abeyance, and simply empathize a bit with an evangelical father who had to come to terms with a painful situation, and who then had to think hard about how best to show his son love despite a crushing turn of events. It is a situation the vicinity in which any of us is liable to find ourselves, and it would do all us all good to give it some thought.

The penultimate paragraph in Tony’s opening chapter struck me as especially interesting. He began it this way: “The world doesn’t need any more theological polemics or debates about the truth of Christianity, and this book certainly isn’t trying to be either of those.” That said, though, he immediately admitted he’s always trying to make his best case for following Jesus. This introduces a fertile topic for an entry of its own, so the next blog will pick it up here, exploring this matter of what the role of arguments for the truth of Christianity realistically is and isn’t. By way of a tantalizing preview of coming attractions, for some assistance we will appeal to a few insights from none other than the inimitable John Wesley.