The Rev. Herman “Buddy” Frankland, the magnetic evangelical leader who turned his Bangor church into a juggernaut before admitting an affair with a parishioner that led him into a career mostly out of the public eye, died this week at age 89.
Frankland is a seminal figure on Maine’s Christian right who mounted a credible independent run for governor in 1978. He began Bangor Baptist Church in his home 12 years earlier, building it quickly into a force that started Bangor Christian Schools four years later and had a congregation of a reported 5,000 people by the 1980s.
His fall made the front page of the Bangor Daily News. In 1985, a woman in his congregation came forward to church staff to say she had an affair with the married Frankland. He tearfully admitted that to the congregation and resigned. In a sign of his stature in the evangelical movement, the Rev. Jerry Falwell stepped in to run the church as it rebuilt from the scandal.
“I think before, people saw me as a holier-than-thou, self-righteous, could-do-no-wrong, never-made mistakes type of an individual,” he told the BDN in 1987. “And I think that my sad mistake, instead of offending a lot of people, has caused them to empathize because they walk, and found that I walk, in the same pair of shoes.”
Frankland died Feb. 2, according to his BDN obituary. He was born in 1935 in Lubec, and he grew up in Eastport. He told interviewers that he felt called to be a preacher at age 12. Frankland began a fishing business instead. He later went to a conservative Baptist college in Missouri, returning to Maine in his early 30s to set up a church in Bangor.
It was no small task in a part of the country dominated by Catholics and mainline Protestants. He parlayed a popular local radio program into an initial church building on Pushaw Road. They moved in 1969 to a new building on Outer Broadway that now houses the school. Four years later, it held its first service in a new church building that was needed because of growth.
Frankland quickly became a well-known figure. One of his first public fights was in 1971 against a touring production of the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar” at the Bangor Auditorium. He called individual city officials to try to stop the “blasphemous” production and then sent a letter to city councilors, including future U.S. William S. Cohen, who declined to intervene.
“If there’s no controversy, there’s no fun,” the manager of the tour retorted.
The pastor was hostile to gay rights, countering the liberation movement of the 1970s and into the following decade. After University of Maine students formed the LGBTQ+ group Wilde Stein, Frankland took out a BDN ad in the form of a letter calling a meeting of the club “a conclave of perverts.” It urged people to donate to the church and call Maine politicians.
“We’re opposed to the homosexual community using the Charles Howard tragedy to impose their lifestyle upon this city and us,” he said after Howard, an openly gay 23-year-old, was killed by three teenagers who threw him off a Bangor bridge in 1984.
Frankland’s 1978 run to succeed independent Gov. James Longley is perhaps the most prominent example of a Maine faith leader entering politics in the modern era. He said Longley urged him to get in the race. While the outgoing governor spoke at Frankland’s church the Sunday before the election, Longley never formally endorsed the pastor.
The BDN did, echoing its endorsement of Longley four years earlier, a surprising move that was widely credited with helping the dark-horse candidate win. But Frankland got just 18 percent of votes in a three-way race that was easily won by Democrat Joe Brennan. The Republican runner-up blamed the right-wing Frankland for carving off conservative voters.
“I lost because Buddy Frankland ran,” Linwood Palmer told an interviewer in 1998.
Frankland won a political victory in 1984, when a judge ruled that the state could not shut down religious schools for refusing to comply with state requirements. Two years after he left due to the scandal, he began Messiah Baptist Church in Bangor over Falwell’s public objections.
His first church is now known as Crosspoint Church. The school and a Christian radio station live on. Frankland left behind $2.2 million in debt and a congregation that was deeply split. But church leaders rebuilt the operation. Jerry Mick, the church’s current pastor who was on staff when Frankland left, credited him with paving the way.
“He was a man that was highly gifted and used by God to accomplish great things,” Mick said of Frankland. “But at the end of the day, he’s like everybody else. He’s human.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Frankland’s age. He died at 89.