Irreverent Reverend

The Rev. Lester Kinsolving comes from one of the royal families of the Episcopal Church. His great-grandfather, Ovid Americus Kinsolving, was a Virginia pastor and a spy for the Confederacy. His grandfather, Lucien Lee Kinsolving, was a missionary bishop in Brazil. His late father, Arthur B. Kinsolving II, was chaplain at West Point and, later, Bishop of Arizona. His great-uncle George was Bishop of Texas. A distant cousin, Charles J. Kinsolving III, is currently Bishop of New Mexico. Yet probably no Kinsolving has ever been heard by a wider audience--and certainly none has gone after an audience more flamboyantly--than acerbic, peripatetic Lester, an Episcopal pastor turned religion columnist, whose angry newspaper crusades reach more than 10 million readers every week.

Kinsolving's hot-under-the-clerical-collar weekly columns, syndicated in 226 newspapers in the U.S. and ten other countries, are as much sermons as news. Though he has pet causes--liberal abortion laws, integration, Israel and theological freedom--his real enthusiasm is saved for his pet peeves, among them capital punishment, conservative theology and Black Power. His campaigns have led him into regular fulminations against the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the Southern Baptist Convention and, most important, his own church. Episcopal funding of militant (and separatist) black groups has led Kinsolving, who once warned of a rightist takeover of his church, into unlikely alliances with conservatives in attacks on Episcopal leadership.

Funding Capone. Nowhere has that attitude been more evident than at the Episcopal Church's recent triennial General Convention in Houston, where Kinsolving played the dual role of observer and participant. On the eve of the convention he wrote a column speculating that the meeting could erupt into violence. He appeared on Houston TV to criticize Presiding Bishop John Hines' administration. During the convention, he testified at a budget-committee hearing. And each day, wearing clerical garb at the typewriter, he wrote an outspoken column for the Houston Post. Reaction was angry. Twenty-three Houston priests denounced his preconvention column as irresponsible troublemaking. Black radicals within the church were so offended by Kinsolving's attacks (he has compared black caucuses to the Ku Klux Klan) that

Kinsolving was forbidden to ask questions at a black-caucus press conference. He was undeterred. When the convention voted new ground rules for church funding of militant groups (TIME, Nov. 2), he wrote a melodramatic piece arguing that under the new rules the Episcopal Church could have funded Al Capone in 1928.

Around the Neck. For most of his adult life, Kinsolving, 43, has been an advocate. His first career, before entering the seminary, was in advertising and public relations. Two years after his ordination, while rector of a parish in Pasco, Wash., he burst into national news in 1957 by preaching that "Hell is a damnable doctrine." Later he became a lobbyist for Bishop lames Pike in California, charged, among other tasks, with persuading the state's legislators to vote for liberalized abortion laws. During his career as a lobbyist, he began writing for the San Francisco Chronicle. After Pike left San Francisco and the abortion bill was passed, jobless Kinsolving sold his column for the Chronicle syndicate by traveling up and down the country and buttonholing editors.

Kinsolving is not the only ordained minister writing religious news for the secular press. New York Times Religion Editor Edward B. Fiske is an ordained United Presbyterian minister, although he does not advertise the fact. James Bowman of the Chicago Daily News was a Jesuit priest; Roy Larson of the Chicago Sun-Times was a Methodist minister. William Wineke of the Madison, Wis., State Journal was even specifically ordained by the United Church of Christ to the vocation of religious reporting. Many of the best laymen writing religion are personally devout. A.P.'s George Cornell and U.P.I.'s Louis Cassels are practicing Episcopalians, and the Minneapolis Star's Willmar Thorkelson is an active member of the American Lutheran Church.

None wear their religion around their necks like Kinsolving, though. What disturbs many, notes George Collins of the Boston Globe, is the fact that Kinsolving's column is just about the only religion reporting that is seen by many small-town readers. Others take issue with Kinsolving's hit-and-run methods and his breathless appearances at press conferences to ask rambling, often antagonistic questions that are unrelated to the main lines of discussion. Despite such reservations, most of Kinsolving's colleagues accept, more or less, his role as ecclesiastical curmudgeon. And Cornell, whose weekly column competes with Kinsolving's, graciously allows that "there's some solid work behind what he does. He asks questions like a prosecuting attorney."

Kinsolving's columns still produce enemies aplenty among churchmen. In one column about a conservative purge in the Missouri Synod, he wrote that "the headquarters of the Missouri Synod looks like a Parisian guillotine basket, circa 1793." Dissident clergymen, Kinsolving gleefully reported, were calling the denomination's president, the Rev. Dr. J.A.O. Preus, "Chairman Jao." Preus replied by likening Kinsolving's technique to that of Joseph Goebbels.

Kinsolving's training in the Chronicle city room, where Managing Editor Gordon Pates calls him "the smart-ass reverend," has prepared him to handle critics. When five Chronicle newsmen received mail-order ordinations from Kirby Hensley, president of the Universal Life Church, Inc. (which claims some 700,000 ministers, including two cocker spaniels), they posted a note: "If anyone can ordain Kinsolving, why can't our leader ordain a cocker spaniel?" Replied Kinsolving coolly: "The old Chron's department of religion has no more objection to Dr. Hensley's ordaining one son of a bitch than to his ordaining any others. Peace be with you."

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