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Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson, Jr (born 1950) is an heir of the Home Savings bank fortune built by his father, Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson, Sr. Ahmanson Jr. is a multi-millionaire philanthropist and financier of the causes of many conservative Christian cultural, religious and political organizations. He has been highly influential and generous with conservative Republicans and Evangelicals.
Ahmanson has recently joined a PCA Presbyterian church. Formerly he and his wife were members of an Anglican church under a Ugandan diocese. Ahmanson has stated that his departure from the Anglican church was not based on any disapproval of their joining the Ugandan diocese. He lives in Orange County, California. He has been married to Roberta Green Ahmanson since 1986. He is somewhat reclusive and has Tourette syndrome; his wife usually communicates with the media and others on his behalf.
Biography
Ahmanson is the son of the American financier Howard F. Ahmanson, Sr (1906-1968). His parents divorced when he was 10, and his mother died shortly afterwards. Despite the trappings of wealth, he was a lonely child. Ahmanson has said, "I resented my family background, could never be a role model, whether by habits or his lifestyle, it was never anything I wanted." Howard Ahmanson, Sr. died when his son was 18, and Ahmanson Jr. inherited a vast fortune.
Ahmanson Jr. went to Occidental College, where he obtained a degree in economics. He then toured Europe, but he returned because of arthritis. He earned a master's degree in linguistics at the University of Texas at Arlington and has fluency in several foreign languages. Template:Dominionism In the 1970s Ahmanson became a Calvinist and joined R. J. Rushdoony's Christian Reconstructionist movement. Ahmanson served as a board member of Rushdoony's Chalcedon Foundation for over ten years. In an article published in the Orange County Register on June 30, 1996, Ahmanson said he had left the Chalcedon board and "does not embrace all of Rushdoony's teachings." (Qtd. in Reason, Nov. 1998.) However, Max Blumenthal reported in Salon in 2004 that "until Rushdoony's death in 2001, Ahmanson served on the board of his think tank, Chalcedon, granting it a total of $1 million."
In the 1970s Ahmanson was instrumental in starting the career of conservative Christian intellectual Marvin Olasky who then became an important figure in the conservative Evangelical media and political scene where Ahmanson has also been a key behind-the-scenes player.
Ahmanson is a board member of the John M. Perkins Foundation and (along with his wife) the Claremont Institute. He was a member of the Council for National Policy in 1984-85, 1988 and sat on its Board of Governors in 1996 and 1998. He has written articles appearing in The Los Angeles Times, Philanthropy, Religion and Liberty, and other publications.
TIME Magazine covered the Ahmansons in their 2005 profiles of the 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America, classifying them as "the financiers."
Howard Ahmanson Jr. is a trustee of The Ahmanson Foundation, which was established by his father and is still operated by members of the Ahmanson family. The Ahmanson Foundation serves Los Angeles County non-profit organizations "by funding cultural projects in the arts and humanities, education at all levels, health care, programs related to homelessness and underserved populations as well as a wide range of human services."
Controversial Beliefs
Ahmanson was a lifelong friend of R. J. Rushdoony, and his ties to the Christian Reconstructionist movement continue to be a source of controversy. For example, in an article on the Episcopal Diocese of Washington website attacking the American Anglican Council, Jim Naughton emphasized Ahmanson's ties with Rushdoony. Ahmanson told the Orange County Register in 1985, "My goal is the total integration of biblical law into our lives." After a $3,000 contribution to Linda Lingle, a Republican running for governor of Hawaii, was returned in 2002, the Ahmansons admitted they had an image problem and let the Orange County Register do a five-part series on them in 2004 to give the public a more accurate view of their work and beliefs.
Ahmanson seems to have moderated his views to adopt a broader but still extremely far-right Dominionist political theology. He is reported to have "never supported his mentor's calls for the death penalty for homosexuals," rather(The Observer, March 6, 2005), but as the Orange County Register reported in 2004, "he stops just short of condemning the idea," saying that he "no longer consider essential" to stone people who are deemed to have committed certain immoral acts. Ahmanson also told the Register, "It would still be a little hard to say that if one stumbled on a country that was doing that, that it is inherently immoral, to stone people for these things. But I don't think it's at all a necessity." (Orange County Register, August 10, 2004) Also in 2004, when asked by Max Blumenthal for Salon if "she and her husband would still want to install the supremacy of biblical law," Roberta Ahmanson replied: "I'm not suggesting we have an amendment to the Constitution that says we now follow all 613 of the case laws of the Old Testament ... But if by biblical law you mean the last seven of the Ten Commandments, you know, yeah." (Salon, January 6, 2004)
In any case, Ahmanson was (at the time of Naughton's article) a member of an Episcopal parish, and in the 2004 Salon profile he distanced himself from some of Rushdoony's opinions on homosexuality. He has supported certain organizations of the ex-gay movement; these, quite naturally, do not promote the death penalty for homosexuals; rather they regard homosexuality as a condition to be dealt with similarly to alcoholism and drug addiction; certainly they oppose hatred and gay-bashing.
Political, Cultural, and Religious Financing
Howard and Roberta Ahmansons' personal philanthropic organization is Fieldstead and Company, AKA the Fieldstead Institute, an unincorporated entity which has never had an online presence or telephone number. Fieldstead's Senior Program Officer is Steven Ferguson, an expert in public policy funding and a member-at-large of the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies (OCMS). OCMS is part of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Mission Theologians network (INFEMIT), which previously shared its address with the Ethics and Public Policy Institute. At that time, between 2000 and 2004, the EPPI contributed $357,414 to OCMS and $262,000 to the Network for Anglican Mission and Evangelism (NAME) which was then supporting the secession of American Episcopal dioceses from the ECUSA over such issues as the ordination of a gay bishop. INFEMIT and OCMS, also a recipient of funds from the Ahmanson-funded American Anglican Council (AAC), aim to redefine missionary evangelism among Evangelicals, training them in missions as an activity that can include the normal professional activities of laymen. Ahmanson himself has written for an OCMS publication.
Fieldstead does not disclose its finances, but in 2004 they gave the Orange County Register a list of the top 20 organizations they support. In order of the total amount they had given up to that point: Fullhart-Carnegie Museum Trust, Perry, Iowa; Drew University, Madison, N.J.; Discovery Institute, Seattle, Wash.; Claremont Institute; St. James Episcopal Church, Newport Beach; Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Mich.; American Anglican Council, Washington, D.C.; Food for the Hungry, Phoenix, Ariz.; Mariners Christian School, Costa Mesa; Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington D.C.; Biola University, La Mirada, Calif.; Orange County Rescue Mission, Santa Ana, Calif.; The Chalcedon Foundation, Vallecito, Calif.; INFEMIT USA, Washington, D.C.; Hudson Institute, Washington, D.C.; World Vision, Federal Way, Wash.; Maranatha Trust, Washington, D.C.; National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families, Cincinnati, Ohio; SEN USA, Hobart, Ind.; InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Madison, Wis.
Ahmanson has funded the magazine Chalcedon Report, the magazine of the Chalcedon Foundation. He funds the Claremont Institute and has been an important donor to the Reason Foundation. He has donated to numerous political candidates and organizations associated with the United States Republican Party. Some of his donations have been returned because of his views and associations.
Ahmanson was the chair of the California Independent Business Political Action Committee (PAC) and later Allied Business Pac. Since the 1980s, he has successfully worked with a small number of conservative businessmen and multi-millionaires, principally Rob Hurtt of Container Supply Corporation, to organize political action committees and increase conservatives' control of the California state government. Ahmanson and Hurtt created the Capitol Resources Institute, which became a major lobbying force for Christian conservatives in Sacramento. The Ahmansons made political donations to the 1993 California school voucher initiative (which failed) and a 1992 voucher initiative in Colorado. Donations from the Ahmansons, Howard's former associate Rob Hurtt and the PACs they are involved with added up to almost $3 million split between 19 conservative candidates and various causes in 1992. Hurtt himself was elected State Senator in 1994 and became chairman of the Republican campaign committee for the State Legislature. At that time, the GOP was only four seats away from majority control in 1994. This political success has been seen as the result of planning undertaken at the Third Annual Northwest Conference for Reconstruction in 1983 by Wayne Johnson, who, according to The Public Eye, helped craft California's 1990 term limits initiative and "managed the campaigns of several Ahmanson-backed candidates in 1992." The Ahmansons supported Proposition 22, a ban on same-sex marriage in California. Howard Ahmanson contributed $62,500 to the Western Center for Law and Religious Freedom, which, among other things, aided the citizens and leaders of the Kern County school district defend their choice to ban One Hundred Years of Solitude, a book by Gabriel García Márquez, for its "profanity" and "vulgarity." (Other Ahmanson political initiatives and their results are discussed in Blumenthal's 2004 Salon article.) Since the year 2000 his influence on California politics and his spending of money on it has somewhat lessened.
Through Fieldstead, Ahmanson is a primary backer of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and has supported groups such as the American Anglican Council on projects to resist efforts to liberalize mainline Protestant churches, particularly with respect to issues concerning homosexuality.
Ahmanson is also a major backer of the Discovery Institute, whose Center for Science and Culture opposes the theory of evolution and manages a public relations campaign promoting Intelligent Design.
Ahmanson has been the major funder for the Capitol Resource Institute, the California political front of Focus on the Family; the Western Center for Law and Religious Freedom, and the California Pro-Life Council. Ahmanson helped found the Rutherford Institute and has been a major donor to Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation. Fieldstead has acted as co-publisher with Crossway Books to publish the "Christian Worldview Series" of books under the title Turning Point, in which some critics have perceived the influence of Reconstructionist ideas. The leadership of the Institute for Religion and Democracy and of the Discovery Institute, though both in the conservative Christian category, are not Dominionist or theonomic.
Through Fieldstead, Ahmanson's wife Roberta, a former religion reporter, has funded and been directly involved with some programs of the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities (now known as the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities). These include the CCCU's World Journalism Institute, its Washington Journalism Center, its Summer Institute of Journalism, and its Fieldstead Journalism Lectures. Fieldstead has funded other conservative Christian journalistic projects such as Gegrapha and Get Religion. A common thread in all of these organizations is a personal friend of Roberta Ahmanson's: Terry Mattingly (www.tmatt.net) who directs the Washington Journalism Center at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, teaches journalism, and writes a weekly column for the Scripps Howard News Service. Roberta Ahmanson is currently working on a book called They Got It All Wrong that covers major news stories she believes were "not covered accurately ... because they left out religion."
Fieldstead funded for a few years a summer seminar at Calvin College that started in 1996 with a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts. The Ahamansons also fund Christian scholars such as James Davison Hunter, a chaired professor of sociology and religious studies at the University of Virginia. The Ahmansons pledged support of $1 million through 2005 for Hunter's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, which publishes The Hedgehog Review. This journal received an award from the Modern Language Association in 2000 as the best new academic journal.
Ahmanson has funded a four-year series of conferences on holistic development co-sponsored with Food for the Hungry International, held in Thailand, Zimbabwe, Ecuador, and the Philippines, an international photo exhibit and book on the victims of war in Nagorno-Karabakh, support for music education for elementary students in public schools in Orange County, California, sponsorship of Stanley Spencer: An English Vision, a retrospective exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City, and the Palace of Fine Art in San Francisco.
Rev. John Perkins, an African American minister who promotes racial reconciliation and holistic community development, has been financially supported by Howard Ahmanson through the Christian Community Development Association, a coalition of inner-city ministries.
| There are several interrelated articles on Misplaced Pages about this subject, see: Phillip E. Johnson; Wedge strategy; Teach the Controversy; Discovery Institute |
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Notes
- Doward, J. Anti-gay millionaire bankrolls Caravaggio spectacular. The Observer. March 6, 2005.
- "Naughton, Jim, "Following the Money", part 1 from the Episcopal DIocese of Washington website
- Naughton, ibid.
- "Due to my association with Rushdoony, reporters have often assumed that I agree with him in all applications of the penalties of the Old Testament Law, particularly the stoning of homosexuals," Ahmanson wrote. "My vision for homosexuals is life, not death, not death by stoning or any other form of execution, not a long, lingering, painful death from AIDS, not a violent death by assault, and not a tragic death by suicide. My understanding of Christianity is that we are all broken, in need of healing and restoration. So far as I can tell, the only hope for our healing is through faith in Jesus Christ and the power of his resurrection from the dead." From Salon profile of January 6, 2004
External links
- The Ahmanson Foundation
- Patrons of the Evangelical Mind, by Michael S. Hamilton and Johanna G. Yngvason, Christianity Today (July 8, 2002)
- Rich in Faith, by Peter Larsen, a five-part series profiling the Ahmansons from the Orange County Register (August 8-12, 2004)
- 'A gold sewing machine in heaven' Orange County Register (August 8, 2004)
- 'The world is your oyster' Orange County Register (August 8, 2004)
- Giving generously to their causes: A list of the top 20 organizations the Ahmansons support Orange County Register (August 8, 2004)
- Conservative Group Amplifies Voice of Protestant Orthodoxy, by Laurie Goodstein and David D. Kirkpatrick, The New York Times (May 22, 2004) (Reprinted at The Yurica Report)
- Theocratic Dominionism Gains Influence, by Frederick Clarkson. Part three in a series, The Public Eye, a publication of Political Research Associates (March/April 1994)
- The Battle for the Mainline Churches, by Frederick Clarkson, The Public Eye, a publication of Political Research Associates (Spring 2006)
- Invitation to a Stoning, by Walter Olson, Reason (November 1998)
- Following the Money, by Jim Naughton, a two-part series from The Washington Window (April 2006), a publication of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington D.C.
- Avenging Angel of the Religious Right, by Max Blumenthal, Salon.com.
- Marvin Olasky responds to Blumenthal's Salon article in The Episcopal Forum of South Carolina and Blumenthal replies, noting Olasky's often unnoticed Reconstructionist intellectual sources. (February 2004)
- California's Education Alliance, by Jerry Sloan, Freedom Writer (May 1995), a publication of the Institute for First Amendment Studies
- CNP leads the way in California, by Jerry Sloan, Freedom Writer (January/February 1996), a publication of the Institute for First Amendment Studies
- Tide Ebbs for California GOP, by Jerry Sloan, Freedom Writer (December 1998), a publication of the Institute for First Amendment Studies
- Anti-gay millionaire bankrolls Caravaggio spectacular, The Observer
- From Genesis To Dominion: Fat-Cat Theocrat Funds Creationism Crusade by Steve Benen, Church & State (July/August 2000), a publication of Americans United for Separation of Church and State
- Who's Behind The Culture War: Contemporary Assaults on the Freedom of Expression by Mark Schapiro (New York: Nathan Cummings Foundation, 1994), a book excerpt published in The Public Eye
- Diebold, Electronic Voting and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (Common Dreams) Contains false and misleading information according to the Orange County Register
- Christian Reconstructionism (Political Amazon)