The Family

by Jeff Sharlet

  IT IS NOT so much the large populations, with their uneasy mix of sinner and saved, that make Christian conservatives leery of urban areas. Even downtown Colorado Springs, presumably as godly as any big town in America, struck the New Lifers I met as unclean. Whenever I asked where to eat, they would warn me away from downtown’s neat little grid of cafés and ethnic joints. Stick to Academy, they’d tell me, referring to the vein of superstores and prepackaged eateries—P. F. Chang’s, California Pizza Kitchen, Chili’s—that bypasses the city. Downtown, they said, is “confusing.”

  Part of their antipathy is literally biblical: the Hebrew Bible is the scripture of a provincial desert people, suspicious of the cosmopolitan powers that threatened to destroy them, and fundamentalists read the New Testament as a catalog of urban ills: sophistication, cynicism, lust. But the anti-urban sentiments of modern fundamentalists are also more specific to the moment in which they find themselves.

  In the 2002 election, fundamentalists swept Georgia’s elected offices. They toppled an incumbent Democratic governor, a war-hero Democratic senator, the Speaker of the state house, the Democratic leader of the state senate, and his son, the Democratic candidate for Congress in a majority-black district that state Democrats had drawn up especially for him. The new Republican senator, Saxby Chambliss, and the new governor, Sonny Perdue, both conservatives and Christian, won not on “moral values” but on an exurban platform. The mastermind behind the coup was Ralph Reed, once of the Christian Coalition, who had been reborn as Georgia’s Republican chairman. Reed remains a fundamentalist, the same man who once tested employees’ commitment to “Christian values” by asking them if they supported the death penalty for adultery, but he was too canny to talk like that in public. The term Christian, he’d learned, is a “divider,” not a “unifier,” so he had left overt faith behind. He backed candidates who ran under the mantra of the exurbs: “Shorter commutes. More time with family. Lower mortgages.”

  This troika of exurban ambition worked on multiple levels. Just as Nixon used marijuana and heroin in the 1960s as code for hippies and blacks, Reed devised a platform that conflated ordinary personal goals with fundamentalist values. Shorter commutes is a ploy that any old-time ward heeler would recognize. It means “Let’s move the good jobs out of the city.” Atlanta, like Colorado Springs, has an urban core that conservatives would just as soon see wither. More time with family extends that promise of exurban jobs but also speaks in code to the fundamentalist preoccupation with “family”—that is, with defining it, with excluding not just gay couples but any combination not organized around “biblical” principles of “male headship.”

  As for lower mortgages, they are lower in exurbs because cities subsidize them. The city pays the taxes that build the sewers and the roads for the exurbs. The city provides the organization that makes them possible. Exurbs are parasites. And what else does lower mortgages mean? More land. More space between you and your neighbors. And this, too, is necessary for fundamentalism, which depends on the absence of conflict—the Family’s reconciliation—as one of its main selling points. For all its talk of community, it is wary of community’s main asset: the conflict, and the resulting cultural innovation, born of proximity. Such cultural innovation is death to today’s populist fundamentalism, which tosses a gauzy veil of tradition over the big-box consumerism of its megachurches, much as the Family’s elite fundamentalism once cast big-business conservatism as “first-century” Christianity.

  As contemporary fundamentalism, populist and elite, has become an exurban movement, it has reframed the question of theodicy—if God is good, then why does He allow suffering?—as a matter of geography. Some places are simply more blessed than others. Cities equal more fallen souls equal more demons equal more temptation, which leads to more fallen souls. The threats that suffuse urban centers have forced Christian conservatives to flee—to Cobb County, Georgia, to Colorado Springs. Hounded by the sins they see as rampant in the cities (homosexuality, atheistic schoolteaching, ungodly imagery), they imagine themselves to be outcasts in their own land. They are the “persecuted church”—just as Jesus promised, and just as their cell-group leaders teach them.

  This exurban exile is not an escape to easy living, to barbecue and lawn care. “We [Christians] have lost every major city in North America,” Pastor Ted writes in his 1995 book Primary Purpose, but he believes they can be reclaimed through prayer—“violent, confrontive prayer.”11 He encourages believers to obtain maps of cities and to identify “power points” that “strengthen the demonic activities.” He suggests especially popular bars, as well as “cult-type” churches. “Sometimes,” he writes, “particular government buildings…are power points.” The exurban position is one of strategic retreat, where believers are to “plant” their churches as strategic outposts encircling the enemy.

  I RETURNED TO the World Prayer Center for a church staff meeting. More than one hundred employees began with “worship”—which means they started with a band, one of New Life’s many “worship teams” of musicians. This one was composed of students in New Life’s Worship and Praise School, a one-year college-credit program created to train and staff churches around the country. The students were all young and attractive, dressed in the kind of quality-cotton punk clothing one buys at the Gap. “Lift up your hands, open the door,” crooned the lead singer, an inoffensive tenor. Male singers at New Life and other megachurches are almost always tenors, their voices clean and indistinguishable, R&B-inflected one moment, New Country the next, with a little bit of early 1990s grunge at the beginning and the end.

  The worship style was a kind of musical correlate to Pastor Ted’s free-market theology: designed for total accessibility, with the illusion of choice between strikingly similar brands. (Pastor Ted preferred the term flavors and often used Baskin-Robbins, the chain of ice cream stores, as a metaphor when explaining his views.) The drummers all stuck to soft cymbals and beats anyone could handle. Lyrics tended to be rhythmic and perfectly pronounced, the better to sing along with when the words were projected onto movie screens. There are no sad songs in a megachurch, and there are no angry songs. There are songs about desperation but none about despair; songs convey longing only if it has already been fulfilled.

  The idea of applying market economics to church originated not within fundamentalism or evangelicalism, nor even in the petri dishes of the laissez-faire think tanks in D.C., but with a sociologist from the University of Washington named Rodney Stark, whose work has won a broad readership beyond his discipline. Stark (who now teaches at Baylor, a Baptist university in Texas) and various collaborators began interpreting religious-affiliation data through the lens of neoliberal market theory in the 1980s.12 The very best sort of religious economy, insists Stark, is one unregulated by either the state or large denominations. Left to form, change, and die organically, Stark believes, churches will naturally come to meet the populace’s diverse spiritual needs, which he divides into a spectrum of six “niches” akin to a left/right political scheme. He argues that the law of the market spurs new religious movements, which start out small, in “high tension” with the society around them, at the “ultraconservative” end of the spectrum. As these sects grow, their tension usually decreases—that is, writes Stark, they dilute the “seriousness” of their faith—until they eventually drift to the “ultraliberal” end. Implicit is that there is a natural and fairly steady demand for religion that needs only to find expression in a properly varied supply.13

  Despite its academic prose, Stark’s work has won a wide readership among local pastors, who have propagated his ideas through the cell-group structure. On the surface, at least, the evangelical enthusiasm for Stark’s work might seem somewhat puzzling. Certainly Stark does celebrate the entrepreneurial, “ultraconservative” church as the engine of religious vigor. And yet he also seems to promise fundamentalists that their eventual fate will be moderation, or pluralistic irrelevance, or both.

  In fact, the analogy
with free-market economics holds up quite neatly. Stark is an economist of religion; his theory tells him that unfettered markets will lead to competition, diversity, pluralism. His fundamentalist adherents, by contrast, are like businessmen, who understand and approve of where the theory leads in practice: toward consolidation, control, manufacture of demand. What the most farsighted are doing is fostering something like Stark’s spectrum of “niches,” but all within the confines of their individual megachurches. They are building aisles and aisles in which everyone can find something, but behind it all a single corporate entity persists, and with it an ideology.

  In devising New Life’s small-group system (Pastor Ted preferred small-group to cell, but he considered the terms interchangeable), Ted asked himself and his staff a simple question: “Do you like your neighbors?” And, for that matter, “Do you even know your neighbors?” The answers he got—the golden rule to the contrary—were “Not really” and “No.”14 Okay, said Pastor Ted, so why would you want to be in a small group with them? Ted deduced a few “rules.” One was, “I Want to Meet with People I Like.” That is, he didn’t want to be forced into fellowship with people who weren’t his type. That wasn’t un-Christian, he decided; it was biblical. God loves everyone, Ted decided, but God likes some people more than others. And so did he. Another rule was, “I Don’t Want to Study Something I’m Not Interested In.” Ted, for instance, got mad when he thought of all the dull Bible studies he’d sat through that had ignored his passion, free-market economics.15 His point was that arbitrary small groups would make less sense than self-selected groups organized around common interests. Hence New Life members can choose among small groups dedicated to motorcycles, or rock climbing, or homeschooling, or protesting outside abortion clinics. There are even stealth small groups, such as a film club created to draw in people unaware that they’ve joined a Christian group, much less a New Life evangelical effort. The New Lifers involved simply “choose movies with subtle Christian themes [and] gently nudge the conversation toward spiritual themes.” An ostensibly secular group created to help young couples with their finances teaches that the primary cause of poverty is divorce; from there it’s a short leap to Christian “family values” such as male authority.16

  Pastor Ted’s true genius lay in his organizational hierarchy, which ensured ideological rigidity even as it allowed for individual expression. For all his talk about “free markets,” Pastor Ted was oddly deterministic. Not just in his assumption that social networks should remain entrenched along class lines, but in his belief that social science provides the tools with which to quantify the condition of the soul and to direct it—some might say “engineer” it—accordingly. Absent the societal vetting of the elites gathered in the Family’s prayer cells, the aspiring group leaders of populist fundamentalism must undergo a battery of personality and spiritual tests, as well as an official background check. Once chosen, they meet regularly with their own leaders in the chain of command, and members are encouraged to jump the chain and speak to a higher level if they think their leader is straying into “false teachings”: moral relativism, ecumenism, or even “Satanism,” in the form of New Age notions such as crystal healing.

  Whether the system is common sense or heresy itself—the Body of Christ atomized—is beside the point; New Lifers found it powerfully persuasive. Pastor Ted instituted a semester system, so that no one needed to be locked into a group he or she didn’t like for too long. And since New Life’s cell groups didn’t limit themselves to Bible study, they functioned as covert evangelizing engines. In return, what Pastor Ted gave his flock, and American fundamentalism, were lifestyle choices.

  COMMANDER TOM PARKER and his family live a long way from New Life, far south in a neighborhood of postage-stamp yards and houses without foundations and streets without sidewalks. Not because they’re suburban but because nobody bothered to pour concrete. Commander Tom used to make computer chips; his wife is a maid. Their living room set is comprised of two couches a leg-stretch apart, with Commander Tom’s recliner between. An upright piano, painted red-and-white, is backed against one wall; a TV, no longer much used, squats against the other. When I visited, Commander Tom’s wife stayed in the kitchen, but his son, Junior Commander TJ, joined us in the living room. The two men—TJ is only fifteen, but he’s been bar mitzvahed, about which more in a moment—owe their officer’s ranks to the Royal Rangers, a Christian alternative to the Boy Scouts.17 The largest “outpost” of the Rangers in the country, 475 boys and men, rallies at New Life.

  Royal Rangers wear khaki military uniforms and black ties. They study rope craft and smallbore shooting and “American Cultures.” There is a badge for “Atomic Energy,” which boys can earn by making scale models of a nuclear reactor. Mainly, though, Rangers earn merit badges for reading the Bible. Most boys go book by book, which earns them a special vest stitched over entirely in badges, but truly dedicated Rangers take it all in one giant swallow, a feat of reading for which they earn a single Golden Achievement Badge. TJ, who traveled to Los Angeles last year to claim second place in the regional Ranger of the Year competition, has such a Golden Achievement Badge. He is a sturdy boy, with a swimmer’s shoulders and an honest, rectangular face, baby fat all gone but for plump roses over his cheekbones. His blue eyes have more focus than that of most boys his age, and his smile is shy but sweet and wide. In another setting, he’d be a teen dream, but TJ doesn’t meet many girls. He is homeschooled, and most of his out-of-the-house hours are dedicated to the Rangers, an all-male organization. TJ’s purity ring, which he wears on a delicate silver chain, is a symbol of his commitment to virginity until marriage. It was given to him two years ago by Commander Tom on the occasion of TJ’s bar mitzvah.

  The bar mitzvah was Tom’s idea. A heavier, darker-haired version of TJ plus glasses and a mustache, Tom decided his son deserved a ritual to mark his entrance into manhood, just like the Jewish people have. TJ took as his text not a portion of Torah but the song “Shine,” by a Christian rock band called the Newsboys.

  The Kind of Light

  That might persuade

  A strict dictator to retire

  Fire the army

  Teach the poor origami.

  TJ and Commander Tom are both members of an elite Ranger cadre known as the Frontier Christian Fellowship, in which boys and men regress to pioneer life in pursuit of ultimate Christian manhood. Father and son are still Frontiersmen, which is the lowest level, but they dream of becoming Buckskin Men. “The problem,” said TJ, “is that it takes time and money. Because you have to make an outfit. And it has to be out of leather.”

  “If you’re a Frontiersman, you can’t wear regular clothes,” Tom explained.

  “You don’t have to catch the deer yourself,” said TJ. “You can just buy the leather at a store. But you gotta learn how to sew it.”

  “And you gotta make up something you can live off.”

  “A trade.”

  “Like making candles,” said Tom.

  You also have to choose a special name. TJ was thinking about “White Flame,” to follow up on his bar mitzvah theme of “Shine.” Tom had chosen “Rain Bolt.” Rain came from his favorite contemporary Christian song. “Word of God speak,” he sings gently, “Let it fall down like rain, open my eyes to see His majesty.” Bolt, he adds, “is just the awesome power of God.”

  Tom thought that power was misunderstood, even by his fellow Christians. It’s about being in the Father, he said. In the sabbath, too, but he couldn’t really explain this in-ness. “At the end of Hebrews 4, it has this verse”—he looked to TJ, who recited from memory: “The Word of God is living and active, sharper than any double-edged sword, cutting until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow.”

  TJ is the kind of boy who always has a book with him. Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop sat on the couch in case the conversation grew boring, and on the coffee table between TJ and his father was a pile of Christian thrillers Tom was reading on TJ’s recommendation.
Mostly, Tom read the Bible, and The Lord of the Rings, over and over. He would have liked to have joined the Riders of Rohan, a New Life cell of suburban bikers that took its name from Tolkien’s noble horsemen, but he couldn’t afford a motorcycle. He couldn’t afford much of anything but religion itself. Tom’s favorite book of the Bible is the Gospel of John. “It’s dying to yourself, so you can be with Jesus, going into the throne of God. It says don’t be ashamed, going into the throne of God. But how can you not be ashamed?”

  One day the previous August, Tom had been at work, making computer chips, when for no apparent reason his mind said good-bye to his body and left it standing there with no power to move. He told it to turn, but it wouldn’t turn. Blink, but it wouldn’t blink. When he regained control, the first thing he did was take himself to the doctor for an MRI. But the moment the nurse turned on the machine, his eyeballs felt as if they were popping; his hands clenched into claws. All he could do was whisper, “Turn…it…off.” Electronics seemed to exacerbate the condition. “I’m allergic,” he said. He believed that years of working with powerful magnets have broken his “polars.” His company moved him to a desk job, but the computer made his eyes wobble. He can’t talk on a cell phone, and TV causes a meltdown. His company pays him a modest sum for disability. He wouldn’t dream of suing. New Life helps out when his finances get close to nothing. “God keeps saying to me, ‘Tom, this is not about you. It’s about Me,’” he told me. “There’s something going on. And God is just trying to get me ready.”