Father, Son and Holy Rift

He said he grew up as a true believer in his father's Pentecostal world, a world that could tilt and slide him into hell at any moment, or end with the thunderclap of doom. His earliest memories involve an overpowering sense of sin. "You can never be good enough if you're Pentecostal or if you're fundamentalist," Smith Jr. said. "Jesus may even be upset if you didn't make your bed or brush your teeth."

His mother mostly raised him, because his father was often gone, teaching the Bible, taking outside jobs, shuttling from pulpit to pulpit throughout Southern California. At Newport Harbor High School, Smith Jr. said, he found himself hopelessly estranged from his classmates, who seemed to guarantee their damnation anew every day with sex, drugs and parties.

One day, everyone was buzzing about a band called the Beatles and he was clueless; he had been in church when they appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show."

When he suffered his first bout of severe depression in his teens, his hearty, ever-upbeat father found the malady so alien he could provide little help. If you're sad all the time, he told his son, you won't have many friends.

Dad, for his part, was reshaping American Christianity. He opened the first nondenominational Calvary Chapel on a Costa Mesa lot with just 25 congregants in 1965. Soon he became famous as the strait-laced pastor who threw open his doors to the ragged counterculture and baptized thousands below the ocean cliffs of Corona del Mar. He became Papa Chuck, the smiling man in the Hawaiian shirt, a staunch-but-benevolent spiritual father to a generation of end-of-their-rope hippies, dropouts and drug casualties.

To his older son, he was more elusive: "He wasn't present emotionally, even if he was present physically. To hear him speak, you just get the impression this is such a warm and intimate person, but the closer you got to him, the more you'd realize he really didn't have those intimacy skills."

When he left high school, Smith Jr. was certain he would not follow his dad to the pulpit. But during his first semester at Orange Coast College, he found himself defending Christianity to his classmates. People kept firing questions, and, because he was Chuck Smith's son, he had answers right on his tongue. About the same time, a pretty coed invited him back to her apartment. Suddenly, he said, his choice seemed vivid. It was between Jesus and being "sucked into the vortex of the evils of the world." He politely declined temptation, dropped out of college and became a pastor, the only one among his parents' four children to do so, and by his mid-20s had founded two churches of his own.