*
In person, the elder Smith, a stocky, rosy-skinned man with kind eyes and snowy hair at the temples, is warmth itself. His office is attached to the low-slung, pavilion-size church at the border of Costa Mesa and Santa Ana where he still preaches to a weekend congregation of 15,000. On his desk: jars of candy for his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. On his shelf: a crown made of ferocious-looking thorns from the Holy Land.
He stresses how much he loves his son, regrets that he didn't spend more time with him as he grew up: "Surely he's not a clone, and I respect and admire him for that. There's nothing shoddy about his ministry at all."
He shrugs off the controversy as the result of critics who "get on and blog their ignorance," adding: "If you don't march to their drumbeat, they begin to pick at you, and once you put on that hypercritical mode, you can find plenty of things to criticize."
Reminded of the memo he issued cracking down on his son's views, the father replies, calmly and amiably, that he and his son are just aiming for different audiences, and he doesn't want to alienate the one he has. He says their relationship is stronger than ever, even deepened by the controversy.
"I don't feel that he's an apostate at all. If he would begin to question that Jesus is the son of God, then I would be concerned."
*
On a recent summer day, the younger Smith sat in the second-floor office of the Dana Point home he shares with his second wife, Barbara, a physical therapist.
The shelves overflowed with books, biblical commentaries fighting for space with Dean Koontz novels, a Bob Dylan scrapbook and texts on neuroscience. In just a few minutes, his conversation can veer energetically from Russian religious painters, to his upcoming visit to African orphanages, to his belief that Christianity and evolution are compatible.
It is no small irony, as he sees it, that his father, the biblical literalist whose chapel bookstore is full of anti-Darwin tracts, ignited his love of science. Equipped with a cheap telescope, Dad took him under the stars as a boy, rapturously pointing out the constellations and the distances between heavenly bodies -- all a reflection, he explained to his awe-struck son, of God's majesty.
"It's sad to me that a man passionate about God's creation should have his education stunted at some level by a narrow vision of creationism," Smith Jr. said. "Because the universe is no less fascinating for being 15 billion years old than being 10,000 years old."
