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.