by Chris Hedges
There is a gradual establishment of new standards for every aspect of life. Those who choose spouses must choose Christian spouses. Families and friends are divided into groups of “saved” and “unsaved.” The movement, while it purports to be about families, is the great divider of families, friends and communities. It competes with the family for loyalty. It seeks to place itself above the family, either drawing all family members into its embrace or pushing aside those who resist conversion. There are frequent prayers during the seminar for relatives who are unsaved, who remain beyond the control of the movement. Many of these prayers, including one by a grandmother in my prayer group for her unsaved grandchildren, are emotional, and it is not unusual to see saved Christians weeping over the possible damnation of those they love.
This control, while destructive to personal initiative and independence, does keep believers from wandering back into the messy situations they fled. The new ideology gives the believers a cause, a sense of purpose, meaning, feelings of superiority, and a way to justify and sanctify their hatreds. For many, the rewards of cleaning up their lives, repairing their damaged self-esteem, and joining an elite and blessed group are worth the cost of submission. They know how to define and identify themselves. They do not have to make moral choices. They are made for them. They submerge their individual personas into the single persona of the Christian crowd. Their hope lies not in the real world, but in this new world of miracles. For many, the conformity, the flight away from themselves, the dismissal of facts and logic for magic, the destruction (even with its latent totalitarianism) of personal autonomy amount to a welcome and joyous relief. The flight into the arms of the Christian Right, into blind acceptance of a holy cause, compensates for converts’ despair and lack of faith in themselves. And the more corrupted and soiled they feel, the more profound the despair, the more militant they become, shouting, organizing and agitating to create a pure and sanctified Christian nation, believing that this purity will offset their own shame and guilt. Many yearn to be deceived and directed. It makes life easier to bear.
The most susceptible people, we are told in the seminar, are those in crisis: people in the midst of a divorce; those who have lost a job or are grieving for the death of a close friend or relative; those suffering addictions they cannot control, illness, or the trauma of emotional or physical abuse. We are encouraged to target the vulnerable. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James wrote that those who experienced dramatic conversions might have been born with a “melancholy disposition,” a chronically “divided” mind—or else, he suspected, they had drunk “too deep of the cup of bitterness.”12 It is easier to bring about a conversion when the person being proselytized is in crisis. Indeed, the goal of the conversion is to generate a sense of crisis by stressing that all who are unsaved are lost and in desperate need of help.
When he speaks, Kennedy exudes the oily charm of a traveling salesman. He is meticulous about his appearance: never a hair out of place, his face tanned to a leathery brown and his suits finely cut. He talks in a low, sonorous voice, one he uses every Sunday when, decked out in his robe and academic hood, he stands behind his massive mahogany pulpit at the start of the service and announces, “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it,” at which point the thunderous organ erupts in pulsations that rock the church. He is a rigid fundamentalist, determined to defend and prove the truths of the Bible through what he sees as intellectual, rational and scientific argument. His sermons can often be pedantic, filled with windy discussions about what he says are historical or scientific facts that illustrate the inerrant truth of the Bible. He is one of America’s most public and vocal dominionists.
Kennedy was born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, and raised in a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago by a glassware-salesman father, rarely at home, and an abusive, alcoholic mother. It was not a happy childhood. Kennedy moved with his parents to Jacksonville, Florida, while he was in high school and by his own admission spent most of his time surfing and water-skiing. In his early 20s, he taught the fox-trot at an Arthur Murray Dance School in Tampa. He met his wife, Anne, there in 1952. But the official literature reads, “It all began on a Sunday morning in 1953, when he [Kennedy] was startled awake by a preacher’s stern question on his clock radio: ‘Suppose you were to die today and stand before God, and He were to ask you, “What right do you have to enter into My heaven?”—What would you say?’ ”13
Kennedy explains he was unsure of his answer. He says he went to a bookstore and bought The Greatest Story Ever Told, the 1949 novel by Fulton Oursler that chronicles the life of Christ. Kennedy had little experience with religion. He did not attend church regularly. The book, he says, opened his eyes to God, and he enrolled in seminary. He, unlike some of his charismatic or evangelical counterparts, did real academic work. He studied at Columbia Theological Seminary and the Chicago Graduate School of Theology, and received a PhD from New York University.
He began modestly with a small church, affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in America, which split with the mainline Presbyterian Church over what the schismatic sect branded its liberal theology. It had fewer than 100 members. But Fort Lauderdale proved to be fertile ground for the young preacher, with families moving in droves into sprawling new developments. The population influx helped swell his congregation, although the church literature portrays its growth as the result of successful proselytizing. He slowly built a massive multimedia empire. Kennedy’s weekly broadcasts of The Coral Ridge Hour can be seen on more than 600 television stations and four cable networks and heard on the Armed Forces Network. It is the third most widely syndicated Christian program in the nation, reaching more than 3.5 million people. His radio show, Truths That Transform, is on more than 744 stations, six days a week.14 He runs a lobbying group in Washington called the Center for Reclaiming America, as well as the Center for Christian Statesmanship, which evangelizes those who work in Congress. He hosts monthly luncheons, for members of Congress and their staffs, which feature conservative speakers. Kennedy believes that “the Christian view of morality and life is the one that should prevail in America.”15 He is fond of quoting John Jay, the Chief Justice of the first U.S. Supreme Court, who said that “God in His providence has given to us a Christian nation, and it behooves us as Christians to prefer and select Christians to rule over us.” Kennedy argues that this “was the Christian perspective of most of the founders in the beginning of this country.”16
“Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost,” Kennedy has said. “As the vice regents of God, we are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government, our literature and arts, our sports arenas, our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors—in short, over every aspect and institution of human society.”17
Kennedy is opposed to abortion, homosexuality and the study of evolution. He rails against the values of the Enlightenment. He says that theories of evolution were the basis for Nazism, communism and fascism and that “these are the views of men that have resulted in millions and millions of people dying.”18
He once told a reporter he’d never had a gay friend, adding, “I believe one was working at the dance studio [where he worked in his 20s], but I couldn’t tell for sure. They are very good at blending in.”19 Still, despite having no personal interaction with gay people (he says only exgays are members at his church), Kennedy formed Worthy Creations Ministry, a branch of Exodus International, in 1998. Worthy Creations preaches that homosexuality is a sickness that can be healed.20
The cultural decline in America is the result, he says, of straying from Christian values. In The Gates of Hell Shall Not Prevail: The Attack on Christianity and What You Need to Know to Combat It, a book Kennedy wrote in 1996, he writes that although the United States was once a “Christian nation,” that is no longer the case because today “the hostile barrage from atheists, agnostics and other secular humanists
has begun to take a serious toll on that heritage. In recent years, they have built up their forces and even increased their assault upon all our Christian institutions, and they have been enormously successful in taking over the ‘public square.’ Public education, the media, the government, the courts, and even the church in many places, now belong to them.”21
The goal is not simply conversion but also eventual recruitment into a political movement to create a Christian nation. But this process is riddled with lies and deception. In the seminar, evangelists are told to pretend at first that they are taking a survey of religious belief to get people to talk and that proselytizers should hide their Bibles so their targets do not know they are being proselytized, and should ignore “No Soliciting” signs, since what they are giving people is “a free gift.”
Kennedy begins to talk about the godless character of liberal churches. He dismisses the members of these churches as “nominal Christians.” Referring to a potential convert whom he calls Scott, Kennedy tells us that since Scott had previously attended Grace Baptist Church, the word “grace” being a popular term within the Christian Right, he was probably a real Christian.
“Suppose we’ve got a lot of liberal churches in this area, and if you just named a church in this area that you go to, probably 90 to 10, I could tell whether or not you’re a Christian,” he says. “And how could I do that? Simply because these liberal churches don’t preach the Gospel. I can tell you a big liberal church in this area where you can stand outside the church, Sunday morning after service, and say, ‘Excuse me, sir, I’m lost, I wonder if you can tell me how to get to heaven.’ And I would venture to say that 98 percent could not tell you, and that’s because the pastor is a liberal and he doesn’t believe in heaven. He doesn’t believe in salvation; he probably doesn’t believe in sin. Certainly doesn’t believe in hell.
“There are millions of people in this country who attend church regularly,” Kennedy tells us, “trying to live a good life and follow God’s teachings, and yet somehow—now underline this next phrase—the church has failed to communicate to them how they can know for sure that they have eternal life and they’re going to heaven.”
At the Evangelism Explosion workshop we must write and rewrite our personal testimonies and practice delivering them in front of our assigned prayer partners, who critique them according to the manual. The testimony is an illustration to the nonbeliever that the converted are absolutely certain of eternal life and have been freed from all human anxieties. The testimony, we are told by the instructor, must state explicitly that the fear of death has been banished forever. We must describe moments in our lives when death appeared certain and we felt at peace and certain of eternal life. The testimony has to stress and repeat this total certitude of our belief in eternal life and freedom from fear. We turn our testimonies in for correction by the instructors to make sure our essays have not deviated from the two approved outlines of conversion, and we rewrite them when they come back with “errors” marked in red.
Freedom from fear, especially the fear of death, is what is being sold. It is a lie, as everyone who works to write and rewrite their testimonies has to know on some level. But few people would have the firmness of mind to admit this in front of other believers. Such an admission would be interpreted as a lack of faith. Yet creation of this internal conflict is also part of the process, for it fosters a dread of being found out, a morbid guilt that we are not as good or as Christian as those around us. The process, from its inception, is not only dishonest but cruel. The dissonance between individual sensibility and the group does not go away with conversion or blind obedience or submission. Belief systems that preach a utopian and unachievable ideal drive this angst underground, forcing the convert to measure him-or herself against an impossible ideal. This system ensures continuous feelings of inadequacy, self-doubt, guilt and self-loathing. That many converts feel deep remorse for past actions, for mistakes and cruelties, for the despair that has gripped their lives, only makes them more insecure.
The proper form for a conversion testimony is detailed for us in the Evangelism Explosion workbook:
Stage 1: What I was before. “Select one life concept such as loneliness, strife, guilt, fear of death, emptiness, rejection, insecurity, depression. Then include it (only one life concept per testimony) in an opening statement, saying, ‘Before I received eternal life, my life was filled with a paralyzing fear of death.’ Next, move from the general statement to a specific illustration out of your own life experiences. Give concrete details to make your illustration come alive.”22
Stage 2: How I received eternal life. “At this point, you may want to say something like, ‘Not many months later, a friend shared with me the most wonderful news I’d ever heard—that God had provided eternal life for me and what the conditions were to receive that life. As a result, many things changed in my life.’ ”23
Stage 3: What eternal life has meant to me. “At this point, you may want to share the life concept in reverse. If you selected fear of death as your life concept, you will now want to speak of courage in the face of death. If you chose the concept of guilt, you may now want to speak of forgiveness. The reverse of depression is hope; of emptiness, purpose; of rebellion, obedience, etc. Then you will want to illustrate the reverse life concept with another illustration from your experience. For instance, you may want to say, ‘The fear of death is now gone, and in its place is courage when facing death situations or thoughts about death.’ ”24
“As you prepare your testimony,” Kennedy says, “realize that you are fashioning an evangelical tool, so that you will be a more proficient witness.”
There are two possible types of conversion experiences, the class is told: a childhood conversion and an adult conversion. Those who have experienced childhood conversions are told by the instructors not to state in the testimony that they were converted as a child. It will hurt their credibility with adults.
A childhood conversion testimony starts with the sentence “I’m glad I have eternal life because it’s given me the certainty of knowing where I’m going when I die. And because of this, I have no fear of death.”
The instructor gives us an example of an effective childhood conversion testimony:
“ ‘Not long ago we were driving north on Interstate 57 during an ice storm that put a sheet of glazed ice on the highway. . . . We were easily easing along at 25 miles per hour, looking for a place to get off the highway to find shelter for the night, and as we were driving we came alongside a semitrailer truck.’ They’re painting a picture here. ‘The wind was blowing very hard, and the trailer truck became like a sailboat, catching the wind.’ Got this picture? ‘Whoa. The truck was gradually being pushed across the center line, and steadily toward the car. There was nowhere to go. We couldn’t go to the right because we’d run into the truck; we couldn’t go to the left because we would eventually end up in a ditch with the truck on top of us. And as we waited to see the outcome, our tragic injury seemed certain. My whole life came before me, and yet God gave me complete peace in my heart, knowing that even in light of this almost certain tragedy, I knew for certain that if I were to die, I’d go to heaven. What a joy and a difference that made as I faced that danger. And it’s the same today. I know that if I were to die right now, I’d go to be with God in heaven.’
“See?” the instructor goes on. “He captured your attention with a story, and that’s what we’re wanting you to build into your story, because all of you have that. I teach my trainers that they should be able to write a testimony like that. As they’re listening in the introduction, the Lord will capture them with something in their own story with which they can build a testimony.”
The adult conversion testimony, however, is different, although it too focuses on overcoming the fear of death. A stocky instructor recounts it for us:
“ ‘Before I received eternal life, I had a fear of death and dying.’ Same concept: the thought of death terrified me. ‘I had no idea
what lay beyond death’s door for me. When I was in college I was living in a small home alone. One night, a terrible storm arose with wind gusts over 50 miles per hour. Kind of like Wilma down here; she was packing some heavy winds. The wind was so strong that the rain was pouring horizontally across the ground, our little mobile home was rocking on its concrete block foundation, and a bolt of lightning struck a tall oak tree right next to me. I was frightened, and I set up near to the sofa, fearful that I was going to die. Not many months later, a friend shared with me something very wonderful, and I received eternal life. Many things changed in my life. And now that I have eternal life, the fear of death and dying is gone. Not long after I received eternal life, we were driving north on Interstate 57 during an ice storm that put a sheet of glazed ice on the highway.’ . . . Same illustration, only in the life of a person who’s accepted Christ, you know? And what happened before and then what happened after. ‘As we waited to see the outcome, death or tragic injury seemed certain, and my whole life came before me.’ ”
The class has their workbooks open to the chapter “Sharing Your Testimony.”
“Now here’s not how to give a testimony,” an instructor says. “ ‘I received blessing when I became a Christian! I received deliverance through the Sinners’ Prayer! I was unsaved and needed to be saved! My conversion happened when I put my faith in Jesus Christ, my savior, who died for the sins of those who trust Him. Praise the Lord! Hallelujah! Amen! I received salvation when I believed the Gospel and was washed in the blood of the Lamb, and I was born again when the Holy Spirit spoke to me at the altar of God. I lost all my friends and I lost my job, but God has looked after me ever since, and praise His name! The trials and tests are unbearable, and I just hope I can hold out until the end, and then maybe I’ll be able to go to heaven!’
