The Power Worshippers

by Katherine Stewart

  I approach one of the young women present, a representative of an affiliate of Concerned Women of America called Young Women for America, and ask her what she makes of the link between abortion and women’s rights. She offers a swift, practiced response: “Half of the babies that are killed are female babies, and those women, those very young girls, they don’t have a choice.” I chat with the Northern California regional coordinator of Students for Life, and she gives me pretty much the same answer: “Abortion is discrimination based on their age,” she says. “And that’s a message that plays pretty well with young people, because our generation is all about equal human rights and equality for all,” she nods.

  I approach another two dozen or so women and I hear versions of the same response. The talking points match those found in widely disseminated “apologetics” intended to help pro-life activists refute progressive arguments for abortion rights. The Students for Life of America National Conference, which takes place the day after the march, offers a breakout session on “Pro-Life Apologetics for College Students,” which promises “tips based on actual experience on college campuses.” There is also an “Advanced Apologetics” course that provides answers to “the most difficult pro-life questions that would’ve previously left you stumped.”

  I get mixed results when I test the apologetics on the connection between abortion access and economic insecurity. While virtually every antiabortion activist speaks of connecting pregnant women with “resources,” and some mention government assistance, none have a ready response when I press them on whether they would favor investments in the kind of education, safety net, and social service programs that their party, the Republican Party, has aggressively undermined. One woman tasked with developing a pro-life apologetics at her church cheerfully volunteers that she organized a donation drive, collecting a roomful of castoff toys and maternity clothes. Another activist says, with a sanguine, straightforward air, “Poverty has always been with us.”

  There are a handful of delegations from Jewish and liberal Christian groups, a lonely band of atheists, and a dash of pro-life Democrats. But there is no mistaking that this is a Christian nationalist event. The spirit of the day belongs to groups like the Crusade for Life, a Fountain Valley, California–based organization whose pamphlets express a fervent hope that a constitutional amendment banning abortion will help return the nation to the time of the founders, when, it supposes, there was no separation between church and state. Or groups like 40 Days for Life, a Bryan, Texas–based international prolife advocacy organization with hundreds of groups and initiatives around the world. They have a close relationship with a program in Colombia, for instance, where abortion is largely banned. The program, called Choose Life Colombia, trains teenagers to seek repeal of the country’s “relaxed” restrictions on abortion, which presently permit the procedure in cases of rape, incest, extreme fetal abnormality, and to save the life of the mother. Apparently even these exceptions are objectionable.69

  The marchers’ commitment to “science”—the official theme of this year’s March for Life—is similar to their commitment to female empowerment. They have learned the language, but they have mostly changed its meaning. The marchers I meet have adopted a scientistic rhetoric but evince little interest in the social science of reproductive rights, which shows that an especially effective way to reduce abortions is to promote access to long-acting contraception. The most vocal members of the movement remain committed to antiscientific positions in biology and climate science.

  They also show a stunning disregard for the science of reproduction, particularly as it relates to complications in pregnancy or fetal development. It is not uncommon to hear birth control characterized as abortion, or pronouncements that abortion is “almost never” necessary to save the life of the mother. And they characterize late-term abortions as whimsical decisions when the research shows that such abortions are almost always done in the event of complications that threaten the life and health of either or both mother and fetus. What they mean by “science,” it becomes very clear, is simply the images delivered by scientific instruments—high-resolution images of fetuses in the womb—which they see as powerful tools in advancing the belief that “life begins at conception.”

  In much of the reporting on the 2019 March for Life, attention focused on the Catholic boys’ school from Covington, Kentucky, whose MAGA-hatted students fell into a viral encounter with a Native American drummer from Michigan. But the telling detail of that story is not what happened on the mall but the form of the Pledge of Allegiance that the Covington boys are compelled to recite at their school. Every day they amend the pledge, “with liberty and justice for all, born and unborn.”70 The implication is clear: real Americans belong to one party alone, the party that opposes abortion.

  As in last year’s event, Donald Trump once again appears, Oz-like, on the giant video screen. He reads from a prepared text in a somewhat robotic tone. He drones through all the expected language about his sincere commitment to “life.” The crowd cheers; the deal is done. He sounds genuinely bored. I wonder if it’s because it has become so easy.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Mind of a Warrior

  At a mini-mall Starbucks in southern San Diego, I’m staring into my coffee and wondering whether coming here was such a good idea. I have written about the most emotionally fraught chapters of Jim Domen’s life in a column for the New York Times. I did it not to invade his privacy but because by his own account those intimate details are part of what define him as the public figure that he is. Still, as I take in the glow of the late-afternoon California sun reflecting off the Home Depot across the parking lot, I’m on edge. Did I get him right? Will he be angry? Two months ago, he retweeted @realDonaldTrump’s claim that the “FAKE NEWS media”—including the “failing @nytimes”—is “the enemy of the American People!”

  A black sedan pulls up and Jim Domen pops out of the back seat sporting a broad smile. He is exquisitely attired in an upscale plaid shirt with a coordinating plaid tie and well-cut navy vest. Every article of clothing trumpets red, white, and blue. Even his socks are Stars-and-Stripes. Trim and athletic, with his short blond hair curled at the top, he radiates a kind of kinetic energy.

  “Wow, you look fantastic!” I say. Then I catch myself. I wonder if I’m building some assumption about his sexuality into the way that I am speaking to him. Domen has built a whole new identity and career out of the idea that he is “ex-gay.” I worry that he’ll take offense. But he immediately puts me at ease.

  “Thank you for that incredible article!” he exclaims. “I am so blessed by your piece.” He asks for a hug, which I happily supply, and invites me to dinner, adding that his wife is eager to meet me. In an instant I feel the warmth and charisma that has made Domen a leader in conservative Christian circles in this part of the state.

  “Sometimes the Latino pastors call me Jefe,” he laughs, then shakes his head modestly. “But I say, ‘No, please don’t call me that. Because only Jesus is Lord.’ ”

  Domen’s story is an irresistible one for anyone interested in understanding the Christian nationalist movement. His issues are the issues of the movement. But the part of the story that many outside observers don’t get—and the main reason I’m back in Southern California—has to do with those Latino pastors.

  The Christian nationalist movement is frequently characterized as a white movement. And for some of the white people in the rank and file of the movement, it is indeed implicitly a white movement. For them, it surely is part of a vision that involves recovering a nation that was once, supposedly, both Christian and white.

  But the leaders of the movement can read the demographic future just as well as you or I can. Many of them understand very well that the electoral future of Christian nationalism is not ethnically homogenous. They can also see, as some members of majority-white American congregations cannot, that some of the fastest-growing varieties of evangelicalism in America are in the charismatic an
d Pentecostal vein, and these are explicitly multiracial movements. A number of the more farsighted leaders are therefore making a conscious effort to include and empower conservative Christians of color. At the very least, they are doing what they can to collect their votes.

  Jim Domen is one such leader. A California pastor and the founder of a group called Church United, he has built his voter-outreach machine around the idea of racial inclusiveness. Like Watchmen On the Wall, Church United holds gatherings in which the organization is introduced to pastors across the state, and the aim is to get them to engage with political leaders and persuade their congregations to vote their “biblical” values. A substantial number of Church United gatherings are conducted in the Spanish language, and the organization has spawned at least one affiliate, Alianza de Pastores Unidos de San Diego, whose members minister to largely Spanish-speaking audiences.

  It wasn’t always this way, of course, and it isn’t going to change overnight. Many of the southern white evangelical groups that remain entrenched in the national leadership of the religious right hail from a tradition that long maintained the separation of the races is central to the Bible’s plan. In the 1959 case Loving v. Virginia, for example, Judge Leon M. Bazile spoke for many of his fellow Bible believers when he argued that God “did not intend for the races to mix.”1 Yet while the movement’s demands for purity are as intense as ever, they understand that the sorting of the pure and impure now answers to different rules. This gives activists like Domen an opening—not only for redemption, but for a path to political power. “God wired me for government and church,” he tells me. As Domen fills me in on the details of his life story, he invites me to a pastors’ event that evening, and I promise to meet him there.

  Perched on a knoll in a southern section of San Diego, the Ocean View Church is a sturdy, attractive complex decorated in soothing shades of green and blue. From the back of the property, behind the youth chapel, you can catch a distant glimpse of the Pacific. When I arrive at 6:00 P.M., families are gathered around the alfresco buffet, filling paper plates and bowls with fruit salad, ceviche, and ham and roast beef sandwiches. There are a few Anglos in the crowd, but most of the attendees are Latino, and they chat quietly in small groups as they enjoy the evening breezes. The women are dressed in modest yet stylish fashions. The men, most of them pastors, are wearing guayaberas or sport jackets. The conversations around me are all in Spanish.

  The event is cohosted by Church United and its affiliated organization, Alianza de Pastores Unidos de San Diego. I chat with Hugo Campos Sr., Spanish pastor of the Ocean View Church and president of the Alianza de Pastores Unidos, who appears to be in his mid-forties and sports a robust mustache.

  “We need to get involved in politics to the extent that it impacts the family,” Campos says to me in a temperate voice. “Hispanic people are very family-oriented, and we are uncomfortable speaking about sex very openly. For us, this is an issue for parents. The things they are putting in public schools are messages that we don’t feel comfortable exposing our children to.

  “You have to pay attention,” he adds, gesturing around the outdoor patio and the families enjoying the early evening air. “Because your kids are the most valuable thing you have.”

  From conversations with Campos and others at the event, it is clear that the Latino pastors present have a stake in other issues, too. Community health and safety, access to quality education, economic opportunity, and immigration policy come up, at times in somewhat guarded tones. Latino voters have traditionally gravitated toward the Democratic Party, but today the pastors know that they will hear a different message.

  A pastor who is among the small number of Anglos at the gathering explains that breaking the news to congregants can be a delicate business. “They came up in tears and said, ‘I was born in this political party and I’ve always voted in this political party. But now I understand I have to vote on issues.’ Or: ‘My husband has always told me who to vote for. But, before God, I can’t vote for a candidate who believes in abortion.’ I’ve had people coming up crying, and they’ve said, ‘The company or the union told me how to vote. And I can’t vote for that person.’ ”

  As I head inside for the main event, an usher wearing a crisp black pantsuit greets me. “¿Es pastora?”—Are you a pastor?—she asks. “No,” I respond in Spanish, “I am a guest of Jim Domen.” Her face lights up and she guides me to what I gather is a place of honor in the auditorium. I settle into my seat, eager to witness the work that has made Domen a fast-rising star of the movement.

  By the time he was in middle school, Jim Domen knew he was different. He found boys sexually attractive, and that confused him. His thoughts, he knew, would shock and offend those he loved the most.

  Domen’s father, a stern figure who worked as a sheriff for Los Angeles County, came from a Catholic family. His mother’s background was Episcopalian. Around the time Jim turned seven, both parents were “born again.” The family was financially stable and religiously devout. They lived in Yorba Linda, the birthplace of Richard Nixon, and attended the Rose Drive Friends Church, an evangelical ministry affiliated with the Evangelical Friends Church Southwest. Though nominally descended from Quaker heritage, the group in fact practices a conservative, nondenominational form of evangelicalism. The pastors at Rose Drive Friends Church left no doubt that same-sex relationships are an abomination.

  “I tried to read the Bible and I prayed to change the sinful desires,” Domen told a radio interviewer in 2013, but “they weren’t changing.” He also tried dating girls, but that didn’t seem to work, either.

  At night he liked to watch Michael J. Fox in the popular eighties TV series Family Ties. Alex Keaton, the character played by Fox, was his hero, fresh-faced and precocious. “He was this conservative kid surrounded by liberal family members,” says Domen. “I wanted to be like him.”

  In a moment of crisis, Domen entrusted his secret to a youth pastor at church. The pastor told him to confess his sin to his parents. Domen did as he was asked. If he had been hoping for acceptance, he was sorely disappointed.

  “They were shocked and devastated,” he said.

  Domen resolved to change his sexual orientation. He sought out treatment from a Christian counselor to help with the transition. It didn’t work.

  The attractions persisted through his teen years and into young adulthood. At twenty-four, Domen announced to his parents that he had fallen in love.

  “Is it with a woman or a man?” His mother asked. It was a man.

  “She just started bawling,” he later recalled. “My sister started just screaming over the phone and said, ‘Don’t call here ever again.’ My brother started praying for me.”

  Fearing he would be forsaken by his family and faith, Domen abandoned both. He moved to the desert luxury town of Palm Springs and embraced the “homosexual lifestyle,” he says. His boyfriend was a successful paper sculptor fourteen years his senior, and the couple established an art gallery. “He made the art and I would sell it,” Domen recalls. “The most expensive piece sold for $30,000.”

  Among the attractions of Palm Springs is its lively gay scene, and Domen was living at the heart of it all. His partner was involved in the city council, and the pair frequented White Parties, where guests circulated in all-white clothing and costumes. Many of their friends were prominent Hollywood industry insiders who came down from Los Angeles on weekends.

  But sometimes Domen felt it couldn’t last. “When I was in the lifestyle, I knew what I was doing was wrong,” he says.

  The denouement was abrupt. “I came home one day with my eyelashes and eyebrows dyed black. And [my partner] screamed at me, ‘I don’t want to be with a woman!’ ” Domen recalls. His partner demanded that he leave the house. “He switched all the bank accounts and filed a restraining order. I went from being well off to having nothing.”

  A taste of bitterness lingers in Domen’s version of the story. “I started to see a lot of alcoholic behaviors
in [him],” he says. “I had been planning to leave anyway.”

  Homeless and penniless, Domen fell into a depression. In his lowest moment, he turned to prayer: “God I’m yours again.”

  The next morning he found a $5 bill on the sidewalk. When Moses had been lost in the desert, Domen reminded himself, God had shown him a path. Now God was showing that He would provide for him, too. Domen used the money for breakfast at Denny’s. Then he resolved to return home to Yorba Linda, a broken man, ready to wield his own pain as a weapon in the fight for redemption.

  He arrived at the Rose Drive Friends Church with quite a lot to prove. “When he showed up in those days, 2002 and 2003, he seemed intent on projecting an ultra-masculine persona,” says Bradley Onishi, who was a member of Rose Drive Friends Church for ten years and served as a youth pastor at the church for seven. “At the summer camp where we took our high school and junior high school students, occasionally a bear would come into the camp. Jim made it his life’s mission to hunt the bear down and kill it.” Domen took up endurance sports with intentional vigor, running, biking, and swimming his way into triathlon competitions.

  Everyone knew the story. “He was the prodigal son coming home from the wilderness of the gay lifestyle,” says Onishi.

  Domen evinced only pity for the earlier version of himself, the young man careening through the gay party scene in all-white outfits. When driving past Palm Springs on a church road trip, Onishi recalls, Domen asked everyone in the vehicle to pray. “We were praying for the den of sin that is Palm Springs; it was like praying for the Castro,” says Onishi. “My take is that it was clear that that was on his mind all the time. Taking part in triathlons, riding his bike—he seemed to me like someone who was always moving and never wanted to stop, because it wasn’t clear what would happen if he did.”