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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.