The Family (37 page)

Every revolutionary class must wage war on the cultural front.

—
LEWIS COREY,
THE DECLINE OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM
(1934)

L
EWIS
C
OREY, A JOURNALIST
and radical political theorist who helped fight just such a battle, saw the shape, if not the tone, of the future. I first learned about Corey in a history of the United States’ original
cultural front,
an alliance of radical workers, artists, and intellectuals that briefly flourished in the 1930s, guided by Stalin’s invisible hand, and then was thought to have disappeared. Or so held conventional wisdom, until Yale scholar Michael Denning discovered that the cultural politics of those years were an unstable mix of totalitarian influence and wild diversity that didn’t dead-end with the close of the decade. Rather, the cultural front of the 1930s flowed into postwar American life in diluted but more widespread form. The cultural front—the spirit of a more tightly defined “Popular Front” of antifascist political parties, sects, and factions—transformed class politics in America: it gave classes a sense of themselves as struggling over not just wages but also ideas, aesthetics, rituals, customs, the imagination of things to come.
¹

The idea of “classes” disappeared from America following World War II, absorbed into the great blob of the Cold War. And yet a cultural front survived. The evidence? The so-called culture war fought to this day between fundamentalism and secularism.

That American fundamentalism contains within it a multitude of beliefs, impulses, traditions, politics—just a few of which have been explored here—must lead us to question the other side of the battle. Secularism, of course, conceives of itself as rational and thus open to all empirical data. And yet it, too, is subject to the broad brush with which it’s easiest to paint social conditions.
Culture war
was a label created by conservative elites who wanted to demand of the public the old question of union battles: which side are you on? But the lesson of elite fundamentalism is that the sides are not just blurry; they’re interwoven.

The Cold War liberalism that led to American wars and proxy wars, for example, ran parallel with elite fundamentalism’s sense of its own divine universalism. The Family’s Worldwide Spiritual Offensive infused America’s global mission—the economic reconstruction of Western Europe and the militaristic destruction of Southeast Asia alike—and that imperial project in turn sparked the imaginations of elite fundamentalists, providing them with an alternative to traditional fundamentalist separatism. Domestically, the establishment practice of containing political argument within such narrow confines that most Americans could barely conceive of the radicalisms, left and right, that shape politics throughout the rest of the world sat comfortably with the desire of elite fundamentalists for a politics of no politics. The results include elections based on “character” rather than ideas, debates as rituals meant to result in reconciliation, the consensus of the powerful represented as a reasonable process in which everyone gets some small piece of the action. We call this “compromise,” and consider our democracy healthy.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, it was the Left that recognized that American democracy was drifting toward empire, and that the democratic project had never been anywhere near complete to begin with. Since then, it has been the Right that discerned the cracks in democracy’s veneer and the hollowness behind it. From that perception arose the conservative movement that declared culture war. Culture war as a slogan may be relatively new, but we can easily identify its antecedents on the San Francisco docks in 1934, or with Jonathan Edwards sitting beside Abigail Hutchinson’s bed in Northampton in 1735. In both cases—and now—culture war revolves around an implicit critique of what Abram called “materialism.”

Edwards saw as his enemy the unwitting banality of the American business society, fools who did not realize that they dangled over an abyss. Harry Bridges and the men and women whom he fought beside in San Francisco were all too aware of the abyss; they saw as their enemy the economic system that held them precariously suspended above it. The populist fundamentalism that in the late 1970s marched into the public square railed against the same familiar enemy, but now defined entirely as
secularism.
What does secularism do, according to this fundamentalist front? It cheapens life, it sells sex, it puts a price tag on the human soul. It makes people into commodities. And who will oppose this godless deviltry? “Followers of Christ,” a term that requires quotes to distinguish it from the much broader category of those who believe in or are born into one of the many Christian traditions no longer considered valid by the new fundamentalists. Followers of Christ—those who cleave to a unique American fundamentalism—define themselves more sharply. They are a class, a revolutionary one, no less, dedicated, in theory at least, to the transformation of American life and thus the world.

But they’re vague on the details. They’d like to abolish abortion, and they’d like to pray in school and do away with pornography, and drive queer people back into the closet (or “cure” them, say the optimists among them). And then what? What about hunger, poverty, the greed and blindness that drives global warming? All important concerns, concede American fundamentalism’s elites and populist champions. Would the steps they’ve proposed bring an end to the commodification of bodies, the pricing of souls, a culture in which dollars pass for ideas? Hardly. But the believers, the fundamentalists, those who would reshape society along lines of their idea of Christ’s order, have no further solutions. They are a cultural front without a politics. Where once there was a critique of what some might call godlessness and others might call capitalism, there is a vacuum. And in that empty space, the status quo remains unthreatened. Secular democracy, such as it is, faces no serious challenge. Nor, for that matter, does the elite fundamentalism that for the last seventy years has coexisted alongside it, ensuring that the United States was never fully secular, nor democratic.

The story so far has been about how elite fundamentalism has shaped domestic and foreign politics, how a theocratic strand ran through the “American century” and remains taut in the new one. Now the story turns inward, into the lives of ordinary Americans, toward the cultural front of fundamentalism. It’s this cultural front, converging with the political project of elite fundamentalism, that justifies the label of “Popular Front.” In the United States in the twenty-first century, the Popular Front is that of fundamentalism, the faith that promises that you can be born again, that miracles still occur, that we might yet revive the nation. This Popular Front will no more rebuild the economic and structural foundations of America or its soft empire than did that of the 1930s, but it has already transformed the way we think, the way we live, the way we feel, the way we know ourselves and the world.

Culture war,
then, is a misleading term for such a metamorphosis. What the elite and populist movements of American fundamentalism have together wrought is not a culture war but a cultural evolution, one that is adapting to the twenty-first century much faster than secularism. This religion isn’t an opiate of the masses; it’s the American Christ on methamphetamine.

T
HEY ARE DRAWN AS
if by magnetic forces; they speak of Colorado Springs, home to the greatest concentration of fundamentalist activist groups in American history, both as a last stand and as a kind of utopia in the making. They say it is new and unique and precious, embattled by enemies, and also that it is “traditional,” a blueprint for what everybody wants, and envied by enemies. The city itself is unspectacular, a grid of wide western avenues lined with squat, gray and beige box buildings, only a handful of them taller than a dozen stories. Local cynics point out that if you put Colorado Springs on a truck and carted it to Nebraska, it would make Omaha look lovely. But the architecture is not what draws Christians looking for clean living. The mountains help, but there are other mountain towns. What Colorado Springs offers, finally, is a story.

Lori Rose is from Minnesota and heard rumors about this holy city when she lived on an air force base near Washington, D.C. Her husband isn’t a Christian, refuses Jesus, looks at things he shouldn’t; but she has found a church to attend without him. “I want a relationship like my relationship with God,” she says. “It’s almost like an affair.” Ron Poelstra came from Los Angeles. Now he volunteers at his church, selling his pastor’s books on “free-market theology” after services. His two teenage boys stand behind him, display models for the benefits of faith. They fold their hands in front of themselves and both smile whenever Ron glances their way. L.A., Ron says, would have eaten them up: the gangs. Adam Taylor grew up in Westchester County, an heir to the Bergdorf Goodman fortune, the son of artists and writers, a prince of the city. He lived the life of Augustine, and it nearly killed him. He came to Colorado Springs to learn the Bible the hard way, each word a nail pounded into sin. Now he’s a pastor, and the Bible doesn’t hurt anymore.
¹

The story they found in Colorado Springs is about newness: new houses, new roads, new stores. And about oldness, imagined: what is thought to be the traditional way of life, families as they were after the world wars, before the culture wars, which is to say, during the brief, Cold War moment when America was a nation of single-breadwinner nuclear families.

Crime, of course, looms over this story. Not the actual facts of it—the burglary rate in and around Colorado Springs exceeds that in New York City and Los Angeles—but the idea of it: a faith in the absence of crime. And of politics, too: Colorado Springs’ fundamentalists believe they live in a politics-free zone, a carved-out space for civility and for like-minded dedication to commonsense principles. Even pollution plays a part: Christian conservatives there believe that they breathe cleaner air, despite the smog that collects against the foothills of the Rockies and the cyanide, from a century of mining, that is leaching into the aquifers and mountain streams.

But those are facts, and Colorado Springs is a city of faith. A shining city at the foot of a hill. No one there believes it is perfect. And no one is so self-centered as to claim the perfection of Colorado Springs as his or her ambition. The shared vision is more modest, and more grandiose. It is a city of people who have fled the cities, people who have fought a spiritual war for the ground they are on, for an interior frontier on which they have built new temples to the Lord. From these temples they will retake their forsaken promised lands, remake them in the likeness of a dream. They call the dream
Christian,
but in its particulars it is
American,
populated by cowboys and Indians, monsters and prayer warriors to slay them, and ladies to reward the warriors with chaste kisses. Colorado Springs is a city of moral fabulousness. It is a city of fables.

T
HE CITY’S MIGHTIEST
megachurch crests silver and blue atop a gentle slope of pale yellow prairie grass on the outskirts of town. Silver and blue, as it happens, are the air force colors. New Life Church was built far north of town in part so it could be seen from the Air Force Academy. New Life wanted that kind of character in its congregation.
²

Church
is insufficient to describe the complex. There is a permanent structure called the Tent, which regularly fills with hundreds or thousands of teens and twentysomethings for New Life’s various youth gatherings. Next to the Tent stands the old sanctuary, a gray box capable of seating 1,500; this juts out into the new sanctuary, capacity 7,500, already too small. At the complex’s western edge is the World Prayer Center, which looks like a great iron wedge driven into the plains. The true architectural wonder of New Life, however, isn’t a physical structure but the pyramid of authority into which it orders its roughly 12,000 members. At the base are 1,300 cell groups, whose leaders answer to section leaders, who answer to zone, who answer to district, who used to answer to Pastor Ted Haggard, New Life’s founder.

In late 2006, Pastor Ted achieved a notoriety that surpassed the fame he had won as a preacher, when a middle-aged prostitute named Mike Jones played for the press answering machine messages from a regular client of his, “Art,” whom Jones had just learned was Ted Haggard, one of the most powerful fundamentalist leaders in the country. That wasn’t all. It turned out that Pastor Ted had been using methamphetamine—speed—as well. At first, Ted denied everything; but there was too much evidence, and he soon resigned. Since then, Ted, married and a father, has been “healed,” according to a panel of fundamentalist leaders charged with his cure; he is now “100 percent heterosexual.” But he is not back in his pulpit. And yet the pulpit itself—the fundamentalist experiment known as New Life—endures. Pastor Ted’s ideas survive, even prosper, for Ted’s downfall was taken by many within his congregation as evidence of the great works he had been doing. So great, that is, that the Enemy, Satan himself, targeted Ted above all others. The two antigay initiatives on the 2006 ballot, which Jones hoped to defeat by outing Ted’s hypocrisy, passed with greater support than their backers—including Ted—had imagined possible.

When I met him, Pastor Ted was a handsome forty-eight-year-old Indianan transplanted to Colorado, a casual man most comfortable in denim. He insisted he was an ordinary man, in an ordinary church, in an ordinary city. On the other hand, he also wanted me to know that he talked to George W. Bush in a conference call every Monday. He liked to say that his only disagreement with the president was automotive; Bush drove a Ford pickup, whereas Pastor Ted loved his Chevy. At the time, Pastor Ted presided over the National Association of Evangelicals, whose 45,000 churches and 30 million believers make up the nation’s most powerful religious lobbying group. The NAE had come a long way since its creation in 1942, when its leaders had to ask Abram for help in making contact with U.S. government officials. Under Pastor Ted, the NAE was a force unto itself, no longer in need of favors from anyone.

Under Ted, the NAE made its headquarters in Colorado Springs. Some believers call the city the “Wheaton of the West,” in honor of Wheaton, Illinois, once the headquarters of a more genteel Christian conservatism. Others call Colorado Springs the “evangelical Vatican,” a nickname that says much both about the city and about the easeful orthodoxy with which the movement now views itself. Certainly the gathering there has no parallel in this country, not in Lynchburg, Virginia, nor Tulsa, nor Pasadena, nor Orlando, nor any other city that has aspired to be the capital of evangelical America. Fundamentalist activist groups and parachurch ministries in Colorado Springs number in the hundreds. Groups migrate there and multiply. They produce missionary guides, “family resources,” school curricula, financial advice, athletic training programs, Bibles for every occasion. The city is home to Young Life, to the Navigators, to Compassion International; to Every Home for Christ and Global Ethnic Missions (Youth Ablaze). Most prominent among the ministries is Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, whose radio programs (the most extensive in the world, religious or secular), magazines, videos, and books reach more than 200 million people worldwide. It was Pastor Ted who persuaded Dobson to relocate from Pasadena to Colorado Springs, where his operation is so vast it earned its own zip code.

Whereas Dobson plays the part of national scold, promising to destroy politicians who defy the Bible, Pastor Ted quietly guided those politicians through the ritual of acquiescence required to save face. He didn’t strut, like Dobson; he gushed. When Bush invited him to the Oval Office to discuss policy with seven other chieftains of the Christian Right in late 2003, Pastor Ted regaled his congregation with the story via e-mail. “Well, on Monday I was in the World Prayer Center”—New Life’s high-tech, twenty-four-hour-a-day prayer chapel—“and my cell phone rang.” It was a presidential aide. The president, said Pastor Ted, wanted him on hand for the signing of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Pastor Ted was on a plane the next morning and in the president’s office the following afternoon. “It was incredible,” wrote Pastor Ted. He left it to the press to note that Dobson wasn’t there.
³

Moreover, it was Pastor Ted, not Dobson—a child psychologist with a Ph.D.—who proved most comfortable in the secular atmosphere of Washington politics, where he was as likely to lobby for his views on international trade negotiations as on sexual morality. In Ted, the populist and elite strands of American fundamentalism had merged. At the height of his power, no pastor in America held more sway over the political direction of fundamentalism than did Pastor Ted, and no church more than New Life. It was by no means the largest megachurch, but New Life was a crucible for the ideas that inspire the movement. Fundamentalism is as much an intellectual as an emotional movement; and what Pastor Ted built in Colorado Springs was not just a battalion of spiritual warriors but a factory for ideas to arm them.

New Life began with a prophecy. In November 1984, a missionary friend of Pastor Ted’s named Danny Ost—known for his gifts of discernment—asked Ted to pull over on a bend of Highway 83 as they were driving, somewhat aimlessly, in the open spaces north of the city. Pastor Ted—then twenty-eight, married, father to Christy and Marcus, given to fasting and oddly pragmatic visions (he believes he foresaw Internet prayer networks before the Internet existed)—had been wondering why God had called him to this bleak city, then known as a “pastor’s graveyard.” Ost got out of the car and squinted. “This,” said the missionary, “this will be your church. Build here.”
⁴

So Pastor Ted did. First, he started a church in his basement. The pulpit was three five-gallon buckets stacked one atop the other, and the pews were lawn chairs. A man who lived in a trailer came round if he remembered it was Sunday and played guitar. Another man got the Spirit and filled a five-gallon garden sprayer with cooking oil and began anointing nearby intersections, then streets and buildings all over town. Pastor Ted told his flock to focus their prayers on houses with For Sale signs so that more Christians would come and join them.

He was always on the lookout for spies. At the time, Colorado Springs was a small city split between the air force and the New Age, and the latter, Pastor Ted believed, worked for the devil. Pastor Ted soon began upsetting the devil’s plans. He staked out gay bars, inviting men to come to his church;
⁵
his whole congregation pitched itself into invisible battles with demonic forces, sometimes in front of public buildings. One day, while Pastor Ted was working in his garage, a woman who said she’d been sent by a witches’ coven tried to stab him with a five-inch knife she pulled from a leg sheath; Pastor Ted wrestled the blade out of her hand. He let that story get around. He called the evil forces that dominated Colorado Springs—and every other metropolitan area in the country—
Control.

Sometimes, he says, Control would call him late on Saturday night, threatening to kill him. “Any more impertinence out of you, Ted Haggard,” he claims Control once told him, “and there will be unrelenting pandemonium in this city.” No kidding! Pastor Ted hadn’t come to Colorado Springs for his health; he had come to wage “spiritual war.”
⁶

He moved the church to a strip mall. There was a bar, a liquor store, New Life Church, a massage parlor. His congregation spilled out and blocked the other businesses. He set up chairs in the alley. He strung up a banner: SIEGE THIS CITY FOR ME, signed JESUS.
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He assigned everyone in the church names, taken from the phone book, they were to pray for. He sent teams to pray in front of the homes of supposed witches—in one month, ten out of fifteen of his targets put their houses on the market.
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His congregation “prayer-walked” nearly every street of the city.

Population boomed, crime dipped; Pastor Ted believed that New Life helped chase the bad out of town. His church grew so fast there were times when no one knew how many members to claim. So they stopped talking about “members.” There was just New Life. “Are you New Life?” a person might ask. New Life moved into some corporate office space. Soon it bought the land that had been prophesied, thirty-five acres, and began to build what Pastor Ted promised would be a new Jerusalem.

JERUSALEM, COLORADO. T
O
the east is sky, empty land, Kansas. To the west, Pike’s Peak, 14,110 feet above sea level, king of a jagged skyline of the lower forty-eight states’ tallest mountains. The old city core of Colorado Springs withers into irrelevance thirteen miles south; New Life leads the charge north, toward fusion with Denver and Boulder and a future of one giant front-range suburb, a muddy wave of big-box stores and beige tract houses eddying along roads so new they had yet to be added to the gas-station map I bought. Sunday mornings, traffic backs up from the church half a mile in all four directions. When parents finally pull into a space amid the thousands of cars packed into a gray ocean of lot, their kids tumble out and dash toward the five silver pillars of the entrance to New Life, eager to slide across the expanse of tiled floor, run circles around
The Defender,
a massive bronze of a glowering angel, its muscular wings in full flex, and bound up the stairs to “Fort Victory,” whose rooms are designed to look like an Old West cavalry outpost where soldiers once battled real live Indians, back when Colorado still had Indians to conquer and convert.