Touring Rwanda on the presidential helicopter. Chatting with George Bush in the White House. Receiving a standing ovation at Harvard. Whose head wouldn't swell?

Success has created unexpected problems for Warren. He has to manage his ego (not easy) and his wealth (easier, because he's giving 90% of his income away—riches have clearly not spoiled this guy). But he has come under intense scrutiny. Toughest of all is the political task he has taken on: He wants to get a broad swath of Americans to use churches to fight poverty at a time when the nation is divided along religious lines by issues like abortion and gay rights.

Warren is grappling with a question familiar to anyone with political ambitions: Once you have made a name for yourself by appealing to a core constituency, how do you broaden your appeal without alienating your base? He wants to win over two radically different constituencies. Many evangelicals, despite their political clout, see themselves as an embattled minority, under siege from liberal judges who want to drive religion out of the public square and a Hollywood culture that promotes extramarital sex and gay rights. Secular opinion makers, meanwhile, fear that conservative Christians want to impose their values on everyone else by, for example, banning the use of embryonic stem cells in research or forcing public schools to teach "intelligent design."

"There is a great deal of anxiety, whether it's among secularists or Jews or Roman Catholics or evangelicals, about whether their values will be respected and whether they will ultimately prevail," says John C. Green, a senior fellow with the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. "Everyone feels beleaguered and persecuted. And with some justification."

Warren has attracted flak from traditionalist evangelicals, who accuse him of winning followers by toning down what they say is the core message of the Bible about hell, sin, and the wrath of God. Two books attacking his ideas have been published by Christian presses. "He has been called a wolf in sheep's clothing, a liar, deceiver, a poison dispenser, a follower of a false god, a compromiser, an occultist, a huckster, and a money-grubbing preacher," says Richard Abanes, a former staff member at Saddleback who has written his own book, a defense of Warren.

This is so even though Warren is entirely orthodox when it comes to the culture wars: Like other evangelicals, he opposes abortion, gay marriage, stem-cell research, human cloning, and euthanasia. What's more, on the eve of last year's Presidential election, he wrote that those five moral issues are "nonnegotiable" and "not even debatable." Leaving no doubt about his political leanings—Bush allied himself with evangelicals on all those issues—Warren urged pastors to "encourage every Christian you know to vote" and "pray for godly leaders to be elected." Today, Warren says the letter was an anomaly. "I've never done that in any previous election," he says. But he doesn't disavow the message.

What Warren would really like to do is change the subject. Before secular audiences, Warren distances himself from the rancor of conservative Christians like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who condemn gays, feminists, activist judges, Venezuelan dictators, and most politicians to the left of Tom DeLay. "Rick is not mad at anyone," says Michael Cromartie, a fellow at the conservative Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center. By putting the issues of poverty and social justice atop his agenda, Warren would like to cross religious and political fissures. "I'm a bridge builder, not a divider," he says. Last summer, working with Bono and his antipoverty group, DATA, Warren called upon his network of pastors to urge President Bush to spend more on foreign aid, cancel the debt owed by poor nations, and lower trade barriers that hurt farmers in the global south. What he's aiming for, says Geoff Tunnicliffe, CEO of the World Evangelical Alliance, is a "rebranding of American evangelism."

 
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