The Family (47 page)

While we were talking, Reverend Flip had begun to preach. He told the crowd about a recent victory he’d scored near Charlotte, North Carolina, where he’d led seven hundred prayer warriors to a school board meeting to protest the formation of a Gay-Straight Alliance club in a local high school. “The preachers preached, the singers sang, the pray-ers prayed, and the theology of the church became biography in the streets!” Flip said. The school board shut down the club—a deliberate bid, it had declared, to bring the issue before the courts and get gay-straight clubs outlawed everywhere. Flip said this was what Jesus wanted. He even did an impression: “Cry to me,” he said in his best bass God voice; the prayers of the righteous will be answered.

Medcalf smiled and applauded gently. He told me how his prayers had changed when he started studying history and blowing the shofar. “I was praying for God to restore America back to its roots one day when I had what I guess you would call a supernatural experience. The Holy Spirit caused me to weep and cry, enabling me to have a broken heart. ‘Please come back,’ I prayed. It was just so intense.” It worked: “Things have started changing.” He said the appointments of Samuel Alito and John Roberts to the Supreme Court were probably the result of God’s intervention. They may be the men God was waiting for, the right tools for the job of restoration. They may be under an anointing.

That’s the secret of Christian history. It doesn’t require great men—Medcalf considered Bush’s 2000 election an “answer to prayer,” but he was under no illusions about the president’s natural abilities—only willing men, ready to be anointed. Bush was one; Medcalf was another. Medcalf submitted to Bush’s authority according to Romans 13—“the powers that be are ordained of God”—but both submitted equally to God’s guiding hand. To Medcalf this resulted in a democracy more radical than any dreamed of in the 1960s. In the flow of secular time, Medcalf was a nebbish from Connecticut, mixing beakers full of artificial flavors. But in Christian time, he was a herald, blowing his shofar back to 1947, calling the key men of our Christian nation’s history to battle.

A
FTER THE RALLY
in Danbury, I joined a group of about twenty pastors, activists, and a few wives for a victory dinner. It really had felt victorious; Pastor Rusty had worked the crowd into a high fever of
hallelujah
s, and then all the pastors had joined hands in a circle at the center for round robin prayer. The Reverend Jim Lilly, a white hip-hop Assemblies of God preacher from a nearby town, led the way, his neck heavy with cruciform bling and bobbing up and down to the beat of his own exhortations, his smooth tenor gone gravelly: “YES, LORD! PULL IT DOWN, LORD! PULL DOWN THAT LIE!” He meant history as told absent the anointing of God. “KING OF GLORY! COME IN! KING OF GLORY! MIGHTY IN BATTLE! MANIFEST YOURSELF ON THIS LAND!” A pastor from a Latino fundamentalist church in the Midwest grabbed the reins: “Lord God, we pray for the restoration of the land!” Reverend Lilly was overtaken by a fit of what’s called
holy laughter,
a gift of the spirit that’s like speaking in tongues. Medcalf got busy on his shofar, and the whole crowd decided to march seven times around the foundation, just like Jericho, singing in unison an old gospel hymn, “Power in the Blood,”
There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder-workin’ pow’r, in—the—prec—ious—blood—of—the—lamb!

Everyone was feeling pretty high at the dinner later that evening. They dragged four long tables into a giant square on the second floor of the restaurant, an Italian joint that doubled as the kind of comedy club that brings in sidekicks from Howard Stern’s radio show. I sat between the Patriot Pastor, still in costume, and Bill Federer, an accidental place of honor that seemed to make some of the event’s local field organizers a little jealous. Across the table sat Pastor Rusty and Reverend Flip. Flip threw his tie over his shoulder and leaned back in his chair. The waitress, a handsome middle-aged woman named Anna, looked crushed when she learned that the whole group, out of respect for the nondrinkers among them, would be sticking to iced tea. Several of the men asked her where her accent was from. She said she was Polish-Russian, but when she came around to Flip, he said, “Hola, Señorita,” and asked her where she was from. Anna rolled her eyes. We ordered, most of us the buffet. Anna came back to refill our iced tea. She tried to tally the orders, which the pastors kept changing. “You ordered the buffet?” she asked Flip.

Flip took a toothpick from his mouth, fixed her with a stare. He owned the room. “I think I already had a buffet,” he said, pronouncing the word as
Buffy
. “Now I’d like to try an Anna.”

Nobody missed a beat. The party went on.

I thought, Here’s where it would be easiest to unravel the whole tapestry of fundamentalism. To dismiss it as rank hypocrisy, a bunch of bullies cloaking their lusts, for sex or money or power, in piety. But to do so would be to ignore the anointing. Flip doesn’t command whatever small following he has in the movement because he’s a good man but because he’s God’s chosen man. “God uses who he chooses,” a North Carolina preacher once told me, the essence of John Calvin’s dense theology of
election
boiled down to an advertising slogan. Flip obeyed orders, and that made him a key man.

“Obedience is my greatest weapon,” Coach Dave told me after dinner. He took off the ball cap he’d had made, blue black with a red cross, and ran his hand through his white hair. In obedience, he said, he found strength. Coach Dave was built like an old can of beans, squat and solid with muscle except for a bulge in the middle. I imagined him lecturing his former football team. Obedience, he continued, was a gift from God; but you needed the Holy Spirit to open it. “The Holy Spirit is like the software,” he said.

He tried to explain. “We may need another 9/11,” he declared slowly, a teacher reciting a lesson, “to bring about a full spiritual revival.” He must have seen my surprise. “Now, you don’t get that, do you?” I admitted that I did not. Well, he continued, history’s horrors are just like God spanking a child. “That’s a perfect example of where you need the software to understand what I just said, or else you’re gonna say, ‘Coach, you mean he spanks us by killing people?’ You need the software. What’s the software? Well, it’s history. You gotta understand what history is. It’s collective. Are you getting the software?
Collective. History.
”

Now I got it. Fundamentalism blends the concept of a God involved in our daily affairs with the Enlightenment’s rationalization of that deity as a broader, more vague “common good.” The fundamentalist God is first and foremost all-powerful, his divinity defined by his authority; the “common good” is all-inclusive, its legitimacy established by democracy. Fundamentalism, as a theology, as a “worldview,” wants both: the power and the legitimacy, divine will and democracy, one and the same. As theology, such confusion may be resolved with resort to miracles, but as politics, it is broken logic, a story that defeats itself. Why, then, does it prosper?

Secularists like to point out that many of the Founders were not, in fact, Christian but rather Deists or downright unbelievers. Fundamentalists respond by trotting out the Founders’ most pious words, of which there are many (Franklin proposing prayer at the Constitutional Convention; Washington thanking God for His direct hand in revolutionary victories; etc., etc.). Secularists shoot back with the founders’ Enlightenment writings and note their dependence on John Locke; fundamentalists respond that Locke helped South Carolina write a baldly theocratic constitution. Round and round it goes, a lucrative subgenre of popular history, “founder porn,” that results in spasms of righteous ecstasy—secular as well as fundamentalist—over the mystical authority of origins.

But fundamentalist historians can also point, accurately, to the subsequent instances of overlooked religious influence in American history: not just Sergeant York’s Christian trigger finger and Stonewall Jackson’s tragic example, but also the religious roots of abolitionism, the divine justification used to convert or kill Native Americans, the violent pietism of presidents: not just Bush and Reagan, but also Lincoln and McKinley and Wilson and even sweet Jimmy Carter, the first born-again president, led by God and Zbigniew Brzezinski to funnel anticommunist dollars to El Salvador, the most murderous regime in the hemisphere. Historians enmeshed in the assumptions of Enlightenment rationalism naturally seek rational explanations for events, and in so doing tend to deemphasize the religious beliefs of historical actors. Fundamentalist historians go straight to those beliefs; as a result, they really do see a history missed by most secular observers.

Fundamentalism embraces its mythic past; secular liberalism declares its own myth simply a matter of record. Liberalism proposes in place of nationalist epic a “demystified” state based on reason. And yet the imagination with which we, the levelheaded masses, view the “demigod” Founders and the Civil War, the Good Fight against Hitler, and the American tragedy of Vietnam (the tragedy is always ours alone) is almost as deeply mystical as that of fundamentalism’s, thickened by “destiny,” blind to all that which does not square with the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a nation. There are occasional attempts at recovering these near-invisible pieces, “people’s history” and national apologies and HBO specials about embarrassing missteps in the march of progress, usually related to race and inevitably restored to forward motion by the courage of some “key man” of liberalism, Jackie Robinson at first base, 1947, Rosa Parks on the bus, 1955, Muhammad Ali refusing to fight in Vietnam, 1966. But such interventions are not so different from fundamentalism’s addition of Martin Luther King to its pantheon; they are attempts to convince ourselves that the big
We
of nationalism was better than the little people of history actually were.

Likewise our attempts to shunt fundamentalists into the outer circle of kooks and haters and losers and left-behinds, undemocratic dimwits who do not understand the story the rest of us have agreed to live by. Our refusal to recognize the theocratic strand running throughout American history is as self-deceiving as fundamentalism’s insistence that the United States was created a Christian nation.

The actual past no more serves the secular imagination than that of fundamentalism. While fundamentalism projects providence onto the past, secularism seeks to account for history with tools of rationalism. But history cannot be demystified; it is dependent as much on mystery—that which we recognize we cannot know about the past—as on the rationally understood. If we believe the aphorisms of literature—“The past isn’t dead, it’s not even past,” and “The past is a foreign country”—then we believe in mystic history. We are not so secular after all. Fundamentalism knows this, and that is why, for now at least, those we’ve misunderstood as the dupes, the saps, and the fools—the believers—prefer its reenchanted past, alive to the dark magic with which all histories are constructed, to the demystified state’s blind certainty that it is history’s victor.

Most of us outside the influence of fundamentalism ask, when confronted with its burgeoning power, “What do these people want? What are they going to do?” But the more relevant question is, “What have they already done?” Consider the accomplishments of the movement, its populist and its elite branches combined: foreign policy on a near-constant footing of Manichean urgency for the last hundred years; “free markets” imprinted on the American mind as some sort of natural law; a manic-depressive sexuality that puzzles both prudes and libertines throughout the rest of the world; and a schizophrenic sense of democracy as founded on individual rights and yet indebted to a higher authority that trumps personal liberties.

Run that through Coach’s software; look through a glass darkly. This, then, is what American fundamentalism understands democracy to mean, this is what it understands as “freedom of religion”: the freedom to conform, to submit, to become one with the “biblical worldview,” the “theocentric” parable, the story that swallows all others like a black hole. Within it time loops around, past becomes present, and the future is nothing but a matter of return. Not to the Garden but to the
Mayflower
, the Constitution, or Stonewall Jackson’s last battle, moments of American purity, glimpses of the Camelot that haunts every nationalist imagination, fundamentalist or secular. History
is
God’s love, its meanings revealed to his key men, presidents and generals, preachers and a schlemiel with a shofar. As for the rest of us, we are simply not part of the dream. Fundamentalism is writing us out of history.

“What is to be done?” the unbelievers ask. Oh, it’s simple: think up a better story, a creation myth that is as rich as American fundamentalism’s. We cannot just counter fundamentalism’s key men with our own; nor can we simply switch out the celebratory model of history for an entirely grim chronicle of horrors. Rather, we must continue to revisit the history of American fundamentalism—which is to say, we must reconsider the story we speak of when we say “America.”

1. S
UFFERING

She was as pretty as any nineteen-year-old girl thinned down to near nothing. Hair smooth and blonde, eyes big and blue, and her lips, pale red on white skin, were quivering. She stood between me and the door to the bar in which she’d just struck out at begging change from the last round of drinkers. She carried a piece of cardboard, the sum of her life to date scrawled with black marker in a hand too shaky to read. So she put it to a sort of song, a practiced routine she chanted with artificial sadness while something real inside actually broke down. “Mister, I just got to Portland, I got nowhere to go. They won’t give me my TB card and, you know, so…I need money for a shelter, I slept under a bridge. Mister, I just got to Portland, I’m scared, I need somewhere to go.”

I scrounged in my pocket and came up with a thin wad of twenties and small bills; I peeled off two singles and gave them to her.

“Thank you, Mister,” she said.

I said, “Good luck.” She began weeping. “Good luck,” I said again.

“Thank you.”

“I have to go,” I said.

“Thank you.” She turned and went out the door; as it swung shut behind her, she doubled over, sobbing.

I gave her a minute to gain some ground, and then I left, too. She was halfway up the block. I went to my rental car and took my bags out of the trunk. I was staying in a room above the bar, in Portland searching out the Family’s early days in archives and at addresses long since given over to purposes other than Abram Vereide’s or Doug Coe’s. I hadn’t found a trace. I was killing time.

The girl spotted me rolling my suitcase across the parking lot. She approached as if I might hit her. The yellow streetlight made her face look as if it had color; she was even prettier than she’d been inside. “Mister,” she said, “I just got to Portland, I got nowhere to go…” Word for word the same song.

I stared at her. “I’m sorry. I just helped you inside.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry, too.”

“I wish I could help more.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What’s a TB card?”

“For a test,” she said. “They got no reason not to give it to me.”

She began crying again, her tears leaving trails of streetlight glimmer on her cheeks.

“Good luck,” I said.

I
F
I
WAS
a believer, I would have said, “God bless you.” If I wasn’t a believer, I should have said, “God bless you.” Either way, it would have cost me nothing and would have been so much less hopeless than wishing “good luck” to a woman who was not likely to have any. Such is the dilemma of the American city upon a hill with which I began this book, and the problem of fundamentalism’s myths versus those of liberalism with which I closed the last chapter. Both are systems of knowing, of believing, of absorbing citizens into what Doug Coe calls the “social order.” They are not means of “changing the world” but of reconciling us—the believers and the unbelievers—to its ordinary suffering.

If I was a believer, I might think my blessing would matter; if I wasn’t, I’d know it would sound good and that it would not matter.

But I said, “Good luck,” and the woman bent over crying again, and I left her like that, weeping on the street, and I went up to my room thinking of Christians and of “followers of Christ,” of the Family’s “heart for the poor.” I was thinking, too, that I should go back and offer the woman a place to stay; of giving her a bed to sleep in, and how I wouldn’t put any moves on her, and she would appreciate that, and she’d make me some kind of offer, and I’d decline, and I’d be a real hero. I was thinking, too, of tuberculosis, and of the cramped, airless rooms above the bar, and the germs swirling around me as I drifted off, her microscopic gratitude serving as a different kind of communion.

And I thought of the morning, of waking up with no money.

How would she get it? She couldn’t sneak away without waking me. Maybe she had a knife. I imagined bringing her to the room and her big eyes turning mean and her lips and teeth snarling like she was a raccoon in a corner, her bone-and-skin hand swiping my money and her backing away with her knife ready for my gut should I make a wrong gesture.

That wouldn’t have happened. There would have been no knife, and, for that matter, I’m guessing here, she would have said no if I’d offered to share my room with her. She needed something, but it wasn’t a bed. I don’t know what it was, whether it came in a pill or a pipe or a needle.

I asked myself, What would a believer do?

I was thinking about some believers whom I’d met earlier in the evening, a house church of a half dozen young families and a few single men and women who met every Sunday night in the living room of a couple named Adam and Christie Parent. I’d joined them because a false lead had suggested that theirs was a church that functions as a feeder to Ivanwald—I’d come across several around the country—but the connection turned out to be no deeper than one young man nobody knew well. Still, I stuck around, because what the Parents were doing—church in their living room, “small groups,” discussions of “accountability” that denied personal responsibility—seemed to merge the methods of elite fundamentalism with the passions of the populists. I told them I was writing a book about religion in America; they welcomed me, I think, because they know they’re its future.

Adam and Christie have three kids, two little boys and a girl, and they live in a handsome old box of a house with a real yard, in east Portland, just off the campus of Multnomah Bible College. Adam is starting his fourth year there. He is twenty-seven, tall, wide, and square in the shoulders. He grew up in San Diego and as a teenager wandered up to rural Washington, where he worked as a youth pastor until he decided to go back to school. He wears a small brown soul patch just beneath his lip and dresses like the frat boy he never was—loose plaid shirt, matching light blue ball cap—and he talks like a former surfer who has left the waves behind. He cracks smiles like they were flip tops on a six-pack, but he has developed a habit common to preachers and salesmen, of holding your eyes with his and transmitting sincerity. That it is real makes it no less disconcerting.

His wife, Christie, is short and strawberry blonde, all buttery cheeks and bouncy energy. But at twenty-nine she’s one of the oldest in the group, and she talks with the authority befitting a young mother with more kids than any other couple in the “home community” has managed. When it came time to take all the children upstairs, Christie summoned a helper and herded them past Adam’s golf clubs and his acoustic guitar, leaving the rest of us sitting on couches and cross-legged on the floor, in a big circle, waiting for Adam to tell us what we’ll be discussing. First, a prayer: studded with
just
s: “I just want to thank You”; “I just, just really love You”; “I just pray and hope You show up tonight.”

When I first heard the many justs of prayer at Ivanwald, I thought it was a southern thing. But here was a room of northwesterners and transplanted midwesterners and one Californian, and when I peeked during the prayer, I saw their heads nodding on the
just
like they were counting rhythm. Shirley Mullen, a religious historian and provost at Westmont College when I spoke with her in 2004, told me she had noticed the rise of
just
in evangelical prayer over the last twenty years. “It is a claim to innocence,” she said. “A disqualifier.”
Just
is, in its ubiquity, a word central to the self-effacing desire for influence that has driven those evangelicals who stud their prayers with it out of their churches and into “the culture,” a word they use to refer to something that is to be wrestled with and defeated. It’s a word that hides its own hunger.

“Just use us, Lord, just use us, please,” Adam concluded his prayer. They’d been brought together by a shared belief in the awesome power of God, “awesome” the way a skater might say it, “power” as an absolute, a totality. They wanted and believed they were called to be in the presence of that power, but to approach it in pride would be meaningless, and they were very keen on
meaning
. So they prefaced speculation about God and the nature of His power with
just
, as if by claiming their needs were simple they could slip beneath the radar God used to detect unseemly
want
. All they wanted, after all, was just to be
used
.

At Adam’s direction, the group broke up into smaller groups of three and four and proceeded to work through a series of questions devised by Adam and the leaders of eleven other like-minded home churches, all part of something called the Imago Dei Community. Imago Dei is an odd mix of progressive evangelicalism and fundamentalism, a church that rejects the idea of “church”; its “vision” promises, instead, community and Jesus, stripped not so much of cultural accretion as of everything boring and less-than-intense about traditional church services. They do hold a Sunday morning service, but at the pulpit an artist, who paints or draws or sculpts the Gospel as directed by God, accompanies the preacher. They believe God is present, as in here, now. “Interventionist,” as some theologians would describe their conception of the deity, is too wonky a word for the Jesus they believe is simultaneously sitting right next to them and possessing them, guiding every breath, every thought, every flicker of their eyes. They believe in sin but don’t much care; they prefer love and discuss it often.
Love
is the word they use most frequently to evoke how completely in the control of Jesus they find themselves. Adam’s home church group had instituted a collective prayer journal, a black hardcover notebook in which each member was to write, on one side of the page, his or her prayer requests; and, on the other, the date and time Jesus answered them. “We forget what God does in our lives,” Adam explained. “We need to remind each other.”

In the small groups, they planned to spend that evening reminding each other of what Truth is. The Truth they were talking about was the kind that comes with a capital
T
, and it was essential, Adam had written on the top of the worksheet, to “set us free from the destructive nature of life and the world.”

Then followed the chief question: What is Truth?

I joined a group of three sitting on the carpet beside the stairs: Matt, a reedy Multnomah Bible philosophy student with presence greater than his age, who acted as group leader; Sara, a long-legged, long-armed, long-necked woman, given to elaborate stretching, who worked in standardized testing; and Ben, a resident at a nearby hospital. Ben lay down in front of the screen door. Across the street behind him an orange and blue sign grew in the garden of each yard, declaring: one man / one woman. vote YES on Prop 36—a state initiative to ban even the possibility of proposing gay marriage.

“What is Truth?” Matt asked.

Sara jumped right in. “A lot of people say there is no Truth, but my problem with that is that it’s an absolute itself.”

“Right,” said Ben. “It’s self-contradictory.”

“But
we’re
here,” Sara continued. “So there has to be some Truth.”

Matt volunteered that one of his Multnomah Bible professors had brought in a woman who didn’t believe in Truth. The class had challenged her by demanding that she admit that the attacks of September 11 had been wrong. But she wouldn’t give. Right and wrong, she said, weren’t categories she found useful; she was more interested in learning about what she, we, anyone could do better. It was as concise a definition of liberalism’s strengths—and central weaknesses—as she could have given them.

Sara put a hand over her right eye, holding her head and shaking it at the same time. “I wonder how her opinion would change if someone near to her was martyred. Or raped!”

Matt said he had heard such people believe in what they call “pragmatism,” which means, he explained, that you believe whatever happens to be useful at the moment.

“But some things never change!” Sara said.

“I know,” Matt agreed. “But they deny that.” He had learned about pragmatism, he added, in an education class; pragmatism, he’d been told, was infecting public schools. Matt hadn’t heard of John Dewey, the early twentieth-century reformer who’d introduced the philosophical school of pragmatism into American education in the form of an emphasis on critical thinking rather than memorization. But the ideas of Tim LaHaye, who writes that Dewey was part of a prideful conspiracy to undermine Truth, had infused his lessons at Multnomah Bible College.

Sara wove her fingers together and twisted her hands backward and stretched them out in front of her, then arched her back and leaned forward, her shirt riding up her spine; Ben and Matt, red-faced, averted their eyes. “What Truth does,” Sara said, “is: Truth names things.” She rose up out of her stretch and pointed between Matt and Ben. “Truth puts a value on things. The culture tries to portray a Truth, like with women.” She didn’t like the pressure put on women to be thin and beautiful, she explained. Either you are or you aren’t, she felt, and the culture shouldn’t tell you differently. “That’s the culture trying to name us,” she said. “We want
God
to name us.”

“Yeah,” agreed Ben. “Science”—it seemed to be his word for what Sara called “the culture”—“gives you at best fragmentary truth. It doesn’t try to unify things.”

They concluded the small group with a scripture study, looking for evidence of Truth, and then everyone reassembled in the living room, where Adam asked each group to announce their results. He reminded everyone to stay centered on Jesus and scripture. “Don’t get too caught up in the huge concepts.”

Truth did a lot of things, the groups had discovered: sets you free, protects you from lies, exposes deception, gives you a solid foundation. Truth’s solidity was key to Adam’s closing sermon. He sat in a chair in the corner and punctuated his remarks with both hands curled like commas and slicing downward.