Land has never been afraid to speak his mind. In 1998, he championed the Baptist boycott of Disney over gay-themed events at amusement parks. “Do they expect Mickey to leave Minnie and move in with Donald?” Land told the 1998 Southern Baptist Convention, according to the Orlando Sentinel. “That’s Goofy!”

Richard Land stood on the steps of the state Capitol in Nashville in late March, surrounded by more than a dozen young Catholic nuns dressed in the long white habits of the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia.

He’d just given a speech denouncing the Obama administration’s contraceptive mandate for employers — accusing the president of trampling the rights of religious groups.

Now he stood smiling like a preacher shaking hands at the back door of a church. He greeted each nun in turn, asked her name and hometown, and had the whole group, known for their musical prowess, smiling and laughing.

“I was feeling down before I came here today,” he said. “Maybe I should have you come over and sing at our offices.”

For the past 24 years, Land, president of the Southern Baptists’ Nashville-based Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, has used his folksy charm and fiery rhetoric to become one of the leading voices of the Religious Right and the public face of Southern Baptists, the nation’s largest Protestant group.

Now Land’s future is in doubt. He’s being investigated by a Baptist committee for his remarks about the Trayvon Martin shooting and for alleged plagiarism.

The committee will issue its report by Friday, and there’s a possibility that Land could lose his job.

Lessons from mom

Land, a 65-year-old Franklin resident, is a study in contradictions. The son of a Houston welder, he’s an Ivy League graduate with a doctorate from Oxford University.

A proud Texan, he’s also a lifelong Boston Red Sox fan, who keeps an autographed photo and bat from his boyhood hero Ted Williams in his Nashville office.

He believes wives should obey their husbands but admires former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Land’s wife, Rebekah, has a doctorate in counseling and runs a private practice in Brentwood.

He opposes gay marriage and abortion. But he favors immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for people in the country illegally, and criticized the Bush administration’s support of waterboarding.

During the controversy over the construction of the new Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, he spoke up in favor of the mosque.

“It’s time for this nonsense to end,” he said in August 2010. “The First Amendment guarantees people the right to worship where they live.”

That’s a lesson he learned from his Baptist mother growing up in Houston. When he complained about Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons knocking on the door, she defended them.

If the government can restrict the rights of Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses, she told him, then it also can come after Baptists.

“That’s always stuck with me,” Land said.

Many battles

Land owes his interest in politics to his parents. His mom was a Republican from Boston; his dad a Democrat from Houston.

That made the 1960 presidential election tense at the Land house. Since the election was on a school night, Land and his younger brother Kenneth went to bed before it was over.

“The next morning, I remember my dad standing at the mirror, whistling the Tennessee Waltz while he was shaving,” Land said. “He only did that when he was in a good mood, so I had a pretty good idea who had won.”

Land knew he was going to be a preacher from the time he was 14. He hoped to attend the University of Texas before seminary but a school counselor insisted that he apply to Princeton University, too, lending him the money for the application.

At Princeton, Land learned to get along with people who held different beliefs.

That remains one of Land’s strengths, said Jim Wallis, a progressive Christian preacher and author who founded Washington-based Sojourners magazine.

Wallis and Land disagree on politics but often speak together at conferences, such as the Q gathering of evangelicals in Washington in April, where their talk was titled “What Can We Agree On?”

Read More

[Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced in this article is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]