by Alan Sears
Chapter Sixteen
DESPITE DISRUPTIVE GLITCHES things had generally been going John’s way. The reporter from the wire service did a number on him. Although it angered John beyond words, Andrea had been able to calm him. She sat in the guest chair near his desk. “You have every right to be furious, John. I’m ready to remove her eyes with my fingernails, but what would that achieve? This is one of those case where you have rise above the enemy.”
“You might be right.”
“Might? Might be right? Come on, John. You know I’m always right.”
That made him laugh. “True. Okay, I’ve already moved on.”
“That ability is why you’re such a great leader.”
She crossed her long legs. His eyes lingered on her. He guessed her shoes cost a week’s wages. “You’ve had some great victories. You’ve added new agents here in D.C. and you’ve increased the scope of DTED operations to include a broader range of federal and local agencies. Of course, there is your success with the special grand juries.”
John was especially proud of that last comment. One of his first initiatives under the new expanded program was to ask the federal district court to empanel a series of special grand juries to hear evidence and bring indictments against the offenders. The grand jury was an ideal way to get to all the facts because each member of the jury was allowed to ask questions, and they generally asked a lot of them. But after a grand jury had been sitting for a while—those individuals could be impaneled for several weeks or several months if prosecutors insisted—they tended to become cynical and quick to charge.
Over extended sessions, they got to know the agents and officials of the court very well, and they came to trust the prosecutors. When government lawyers brought an indictment proposal, the grand jury would vote in secret to indict or not indict. More often than not, they went along with the prosecutor and returned an indictment. Unless the Alliance or other experts in constitutional law interfered, most of the indicted would plead guilty or otherwise settle their cases quickly to avoid the threat of prison.
Andrea rose from the guest chair and walked around John’s desk to where he was seated. He noticed as she took a quick glance through the open door to his office, then returned her attention to him. She placed a hand on his shoulder. “I’m with you, John. We all are. Hang in there. Your army stands ready to serve.” She gave his shoulder a little squeeze, then exited.
He kept a physical and emotional distance from his aide, but he did notice his heart rate had picked up.
NOW THE REPORTS upset John. Accounts from his team and his agents in Nashville had identified his old friend from Princeton as high on the DTED offender list. The Reverend Dr. Pat Preston—that was a mouthful—was running the risk of becoming a key target. Learning that Pat had performed the funeral for the pastor who killed Ronnie Lee Jefferson over two years ago had shocked John. He found the act tasteless and cruel to the Jefferson family and the country as a whole. But then again, Pat was a preacher and preachers tend to have soft spots for lost causes. More and more Pat’s name was being associated with the kind of speech John considered hateful. Pat and John had always been on different wavelengths, but John never expected Pat to go very far with his brand of primitive thinking.
When he learned the size and scope of Pat’s ministry and Reneé X showed Pat’s photo on the cover of his favorite news magazine, John didn’t know whether to be angry or disappointed. There was Pat Preston, wearing an Oxford doctoral gown, beneath an enormous headline across the top of the magazine cover: “Is This the Conscience of the Nation?”
“I know this guy,” John admitted. There was no need denying it. Get it in the open and no one could accuse him of going soft on friends. “We went to school together. He was always a pain in my neck at Princeton, and apparently hasn’t changed a bit.” What he didn’t say was that he once considered Pat a friend. That was a very long time ago. John tossed the magazine onto the desk. Why couldn’t Pat have just found a small church somewhere, fed the poor, visited the elderly, performed weddings, and done whatever else small-church pastors did.
“What’s so dangerous about guys like this,” added Reneé, “is the number of people—I’m talking tens of thousands here—who tune in on Sundays to hear him preach; not to mention that his sermons are broadcast over the Internet. He’s in the South and parts of the Midwest on live TV and Internet streaming every Sunday morning—he’s even on D.C. cable. He preaches against abortion rights and gays. And to top it off, he finishes every sermon with what they call an ‘altar call,’ a time of confession and rededication and a claim of Christ’s supremacy.”
“Another way to capture more suckers,” John muttered. None of this was news to John. Many churches did the same. Pat had tried to explain it to John at Princeton.
“It’s a time to make a public statement about their belief. Everyone Jesus called, he called publically. The alter call is a way of doing the same thing. It’s also a time to ask for prayer.” John had stopped listening at that point.
What galled John the most was when churches like Pat’s preached, “Jesus is the only way, the only truth, and the only life.” There was no other way to God.
John took his first New Testament class in college because his father had recommended it. It wasn’t his favorite course, by any stretch, but he learned enough from his professor to know that the context of Pat’s sermons defied common sense. His old friend based a lot of his material on the Gospel of Matthew, a New Testament book that talked about the demands of the Christian life. He mentioned this to Reneé.
“Anyone with the least knowledge of the Sermon on the Mount,” she said, “should know that the whole point of that text is love and acceptance. How can you love your neighbor as yourself when you’re damning his soul to hell? I find it hard to believe that anyone could fall for that line.”
John had come to believe Pat only used scripture to exclude people and attack groups he personally disliked. According to the article Reneé had shown him, Pat said, “A good tree can’t bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” And the caption under Pat’s picture quoted him using that most hated phrase, “By their fruits you will recognize them.”
After seeing that, John was in a slow boil for the rest of the day. Didn’t Pat realize that those words would be a slur against the entire LGBT community? The article also quoted Pat saying, “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven.” John even knew the reference: Matthew 7:18-21. Seeing those words in print, John tossed up his hands. “How can anyone repeat stuff like that with a straight face? That’s the most insensitive thing I’ve seen in months! I’m shocked that the editors would allow a story like that to be printed.”
“So are we going to do anything about it?” Reneé asked.
John hesitated. He gave no thought to crushing people he didn’t know, but this was Pat Preston. The moment passed. “Of course we’re going to do something.
SHORTLY AFTER RETURNING from his studies at Oxford, Pat began attending the meetings of the ecumenical council each week in Nashville. The group included a dozen clergy members from several Protestant denominations, as well as one Greek Orthodox priest, the pastors of two Roman Catholic parishes, and an Orthodox Jewish rabbi.
One of the men Pat met there was an older Catholic priest named Father John Corollo, who had been a highly respected member of the community earlier in his career. But because of his conservatism and strong pro-life positions, he was no longer welcomed by certain groups in the city, or, for that matter, his own parish. He was eventually moved aside and replaced with a younger priest who was more receptive to new ideas.
Despite their differences, Father Corollo felt drawn to Pat and encouraged him in his ministry. In some ways he became Pat’s confessor, which Pat, a proud Baptist, laughingly said was impossible. He offered
encouragement and good counsel, but Pat didn’t fully understand all the advice he was given.
“No one should go into the ministry if they’re just looking for a peaceful, comfortable life,” Father Corollo told him. “I know you’re perplexed by the resistance you’re seeing. But what you’re discovering, Pat, are the kinds of pressures that always come to those who focus their love on Christ rather than on the charms of this world. I’m afraid you’ll have to go through some hard times along the way, which means you need to bathe these concerns with prayer. And make sure you’re always clothed in the full armor of God.”
Pat gained a lot from those conversations. He knew there would be challenges if he continued to speak honestly and openly about his biblical convictions, but that was a challenge he had accepted when he was ordained, and he didn’t plan on changing his focus now. He had no choice in the matter. He was accountable to God and his congregation. If there were repercussions, he would just have to deal with them.
Though they were years apart in age and disagreed on many things (like the role of the pope), they enjoyed their time together. They prayed for and encouraged each other.
PAT TAUGHT AN informal service on Wednesday nights and then preached two of the three Sunday services. A few weeks after returning from England, he began a five-part series on Wednesdays called, “Why Other Religions Don’t Work.” Because of the strong reaction the series stirred up among the members, his associate, Frank Billington, who had been on the staff since the early days with Pastor Richards, persuaded Pat to repeat that series and expand on his thoughts for the Sunday morning services.
Pat agreed. He renamed the series “The Insufficiency of Hope,” and expanded it from five to six weeks in order to wrap up with a suitable summary at the end. During the first five weeks, he explained the so-called “great religions” were based on wishful thinking and clung to “a hope that could never be fulfilled.”
“The Bible teaches the importance of hope,” Pat said, “but other religions can offer only false hopes, either in some powerless deity, in a mistaken belief in the goodness and perfectibility of man, or, as with the Eastern religions, in the hope of escaping the tragedy of life through death and annihilation, and merging their souls with the cosmos.” In his sermons, Pat called this man-made concoction a “death trap.”
The first week Pat preached on Islam. In successive weeks he dealt with Buddhism, Hinduism, and the New Age movement. The fifth week he preached on false messiahs of many kinds. He had been planning a wrap-up to the series with a summary of all his major points, along with an appeal on behalf of what he called “Our Only Hope of Heaven,” when the hammer came down.
THE DTED AGENTS had already classified Preston as a bigot. He had been on their radar for some time. To John, his former friend and school competitor had evolved into a homophobe and a radical pro-life activist. He insisted there could only be one type of marriage and one type of family, which was not only irrational but illegal.
Most offensive of all, after all that had happened across America, was that Pastor Pat had the audacity to attack every other religion in the world and to libel anyone who had a different interpretation of the Bible. He had called them “pagans who follow a false messiah.”
John and his team had declared war on hate and intolerance of that kind, and it was clear that the pulpits of the remaining fundamentalist churches were going to be the next major battlefield. The DTED lawyers selected a grand jury in Washington that had been meeting for several months. The seasoned grand jurors took testimony from dozens of witnesses in all the cases John’s prosecutors brought to them. They were tired, but they were battle-tested and, from John’s point of view, very reliable.
Then a series of new events shocked the nation, starting with a bombing at a middle-school cafeteria in Kingsport, Tennessee. Nine students and several cafeteria workers were killed. Three of the victims were crippled for life. One fourteen-year-old boy died in the hospital, and two young women had been decapitated by flying debris. The photos shook even the toughest men and women on the jury.
The grand jury had seen numerous examples of how certain people and groups used hate speech to create an atmosphere of intolerance, an intolerance that propelled some people to acts of extreme violence. They were eager to do their part to stop it, especially when it seemed a pastor from another part of Tennessee was contributing so heavily to the atmosphere of intolerance and hate.
NOT ONLY DID the series on “The Insufficiency of Hope” create a lot of commentary on the Internet, but the national media began reporting on it the first week, after Pat preached on the weaknesses of Islam. One of John’s closest friends from Americans for the Separation of Politics and Religion, Nabil Medina, accosted him at that group’s monthly meeting and made it clear how deeply offended and hurt he was by what “that Tennessee outlaw” had said about his religion. John was caught off-guard. It was one of the few times he had ever been confronted by his alleged shortcomings in his job.
A short time later, John was a guest on a TV interview program in prime time. He sat across the table from a pair of Washington notables, when the host said he wanted to show John a video clip and get his response. What he showed was a segment from Pastor Pat Preston. Every muscle in John’s body tensed.
After showing the clip, the host said, “Mr. Smith, our reporter, Devon Hayward, has been following this case for weeks now, and he tells us that you’ve been close friends with Rev. Preston for many years, going all the way back to your days at Princeton. Yet you’ve never mentioned this, and apparently no one at the Justice Department is looking into this case. Is that right?”
It was an obvious “gotcha” situation—an unfair, misleading cheap shot. John felt his face turn red. He snapped, “That’s false—absolutely false, and I resent your implication. I knew Pat Preston at Princeton, that’s true, but calling us friends goes too far. My staff is very much involved in this case, and we have agents looking into the situation in Nashville at this moment.”
Unimpressed, the host continued. “All right, Mr. Smith. We’ll come back to that another time. But let me ask you something else. The next statement from your Princeton buddy, Rev. Preston, that I’d like to get your reaction to comes from a broadcast earlier this morning on one of the local stations in Nashville. I suspect our viewers would like to know how you would respond to what the minister has to say here. Take a look.”
This time the video showed Pat Preston standing behind a pulpit. “There are people in this country, and in our own government, who want to tell us what we can and cannot say from the pulpit. They talk about tolerance, but they’re not tolerant in the least. They talk about diversity, but the only diversity they condone is the practice of evil. What they define as hate speech is the gospel of Jesus Christ. And if they could, they would strip this nation of the very freedoms our ancestors died for. Their kind of equality can only occur if the government limits the freedom of everybody to become who God wants them to be. Honestly, I’m afraid that’s where it’s headed.”
Realizing he had reacted a little too strongly in his previous comments, John calmed himself and said, “I agree. That’s not acceptable. It’s unfortunate that Rev. Preston would speak those words on a nationally televised broadcast. Frankly, I’m not surprised. We’ve heard a lot of this kind of talk lately. Take my word for it, we are doing something about it.”
The minute he walked out of the studio, still smoldering, John grabbed his smartphone and scrolled down to a number that Pat had given him years earlier. John knew the number might not work, but it was the only one he had. As it turned out, Pat hadn’t changed cell number in years.
He listened to the phone ring. I’m going to kill him myself. Pat was always strange, but I never thought it would go this far. At least I could talk to him in those days.
To John’s surprise, Pat answered the call on the third ring.
“Pat, is that you?”
“Yes, this is Pat Preston. Who’s sp
eaking?”
“It’s John Knox Smith.”
There was a long pause on Pat’s end, but John didn’t waste any time. He said, “You’ve humiliated me.”
“I what?”
“Humiliated me—with what you said this morning about government practicing evil. You said it on national television.”
“But, John,” Pat said, stumbling over his words, “I never said anything about you. Our service was on the air this morning, that’s true, but it had nothing to do with you. And, besides, I don’t know how you saw it. Aren’t you in Washington?”
“I’ve just been humiliated in front of twenty million people on national TV. They played part of your broadcast, and put me on the spot.” John resisted the growing urge to yell profanities into the phone. “Once upon a time I thought we were friends. Now look what you’ve done!”
“I would never knowingly humiliate you, John. I’m very sorry if I said something that hurt you. Please forgive me.”
John wasn’t about to listen to an apology. He yelled into the phone, “You know perfectly well what I mean, Preston! Did you say that the only diversity we condone in this country is the practice of evil? Did you? Did you say that or not?”
“That’s what you’re calling about—”
“You weren’t like this in college. You were… I don’t know… I thought we understood each other. Now you’re spouting all this sin and hell business, and accusing me—me—of being intolerant!”
Pat said nothing.
“Were you always so full of hate, Pat? Were you ever really my friend?”
“I thought so, John. At least I tried to be. I remember that you told me once that you thought Jesus was a good role model. You said he set a high standard. Back then, you also said you weren’t against God. I thought you were receptive to some of the ideas we talked about. In fact, you said your father—”
“That’s enough, Pat. Don’t you dare tell me about my father. And don’t tell me what you think I may have meant years ago. What I want to know is this: If you have something against me and what I’m doing at the Justice Department, then why haven’t you come to me directly instead of saying all those things behind my back?”
“John, I tried. I called—”
“You did what? That’s a lie! You never called me.”
“Do you have any idea how many times I’ve tried to reach you over the last year—calling, e-mailing, writing to you? I sent you at least six letters, and every one of them came back unopened. I called your office at least that many times, and I was told by some young woman on your staff, Andrea something, that you would be in touch, but you never called back. After months of that, I finally gave up. I decided you didn’t want to hear from me. Besides, John, it’s not like you sought my opinion.”
The statement stunned John. Was Andrea filtering his mail, calls, and e-mails?
“John, are you still there?”
John and Pat had never been on the same page. Whenever he was around Pat, John felt manipulated. The one thing he knew about evangelicals was their unflagging desire to convert people to their religion.
“John?”
Bringing up John’s father was the last straw. That poor man would have been just like the rest of those Christians if he had known how. He never went for the full dose of God-talk, but he spent all his spare time building low-cost apartments, feeding the poor, and passing out blankets to homeless men on winter nights—all the while ignoring the real-world concerns of his family. John was glad that at least his father’s religion was limited mainly to harmless charity work.
“Listen John, it’s obvious you’re upset and you blame me. Let’s talk about this. We can meet if you want and—”
John ended the call and stormed down three flights of stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. When he reached his car, he waved off the driver who came around to open the door.
“Take me to the office, now.”
John slid into the back seat and slammed the car door. A moment later he was on the cell phone with Andrea. The conversation was short. He made it clear to Andrea that the days of filtering his mail and phone calls was over.
