The Family

by Jeff Sharlet

  In December, Tom received a vision. It is not unheard of for ordinary New Lifers to experience visions, but most are wary about their provenance; what a secularist would call psychological they call satanic. But Tom thought that this one was real. He told two New Life pastors about it, and he told his mother, because, he said, “it was so threatening to me.” His voice trembled with the recollection, and grew quieter, shy and childish, and he seemed close to tears. This is what he had seen: “Complete darkness over all of America. But there was a light coming down to the center of America,” that is, Colorado Springs. “And it was just a circle. And in it there were angels, and the angels were battling. And they were fighting hard as they could”—here Tom’s voice broke—“but they couldn’t hold back the dark, and the Lord said to me, ‘America has to repent, or this hole will close.’”

  Tom returned to the moment. “I’m not even saying I know what to do with it. It’s just—that’s what I see. And I pray. There’s something going on here, and God’s gonna explode it. There’s gonna be an explosion from here bigger than anyone’s ever seen.”

  New Life, he believed, would marshal the shock waves. “I think Pastor Ted is Gandalf,” the wizard of The Lord of the Rings, he said. Tom had received a few minivisions, just glimpses really, and in them he saw a pastor kneeling, praying, in spiritual battle with a demon trying to pull him into a flaming abyss.

  I grew up reading Tolkien, too. “Who’s the Balrog?” I asked, referring to a demon that nearly kills Gandalf. I expected Commander Tom to reply with the usual enemies: “the culture” and the homosexuals and the humanists. But the Balrog, he said, is inside Pastor Ted, inside New Life, inside every follower of Christ.

  ON ANY NIGHT of the week in Colorado Springs, if one knows where to look, one can join a conversation about God that will stretch late into the evening. Some of these are cell groups, spin-offs from New Life or from the city’s other churches, but others are more free-form. On a Thursday, I joined one as the guest of a friend of a friend named Lisa Anderson. Lisa is an editor at the International Bible Society. A few nights earlier, after I bought her several rounds of mojitos, she had promised to send me Our City, God’s Word, a glossy New Testament produced by the IBS and included not long before as an insert in the local paper. “Colorado Springs is a special place,” declares the introduction. “The Bible is a special book.”18

  Lisa’s Thursday-night group met in a town house owned by a young couple with two children, Alethea (Greek for Truth), age three, and Justus (Justice), age one and a half. The father is assistant to the president of the Navigators, a conservative parachurch ministry, and the mother works for Head Start. Also in attendance were two graduates of the Moody Bible Institute and Lisa’s boyfriend, a graduate student and a writer for Summit Ministries, a parachurch organization that creates curricula on America’s “Christian heritage” for homeschoolers and private academies. There was also a gourmet chef.

  When I walked in, an hour late, they were talking about Christian film criticism—whether such a thing could, or should, exist. Then they talked about the tsunami that had just hit South Asia and wondered with concern whether any of the city’s preachers would try to score points off it. When I mentioned that Pastor Ted already had, they cringed. I told them that at the previous Sunday’s full-immersion baptism service, Pastor Ted had noted that the waves hit the “number-one exporter of radical Islam,” Indonesia. “That’s not a judgment,” he’d announced. “It’s an opportunity.” I told them of similar analyses from Pastor Ted’s congregation: one man said that he wished he could “get in there” among the survivors, since their souls were “ripe,” and another told me he was “psyched” about what God was “doing with His ocean.”

  “That’s not funny,” one woman said, and the room fell silent.

  James, an aspiring film critic with oval glasses and a red goatee, spoke up from the floor, where he’d been sitting cross-legged. “You know that Bruce Springsteen song on Nebraska, about the highway cop?” he asked. He was referring to a song called “Highway Patrolman,” in which the patrolman’s brother has left “a kid lyin’ on the floor, lookin’ bad,” and the patrolman sets out to chase him down. Instead, he pulls over and watches his brother’s “taillights disappear,” thinking of “how nothin’ feels better than blood on blood.”

  “He can’t arrest his brother,” James said, and quoted the song: “a man turns his back on family, well, he just ain’t no good.”

  “I think that’s how it is,” James continued. “That’s how I feel about Dobson, or Haggard. They’re family. We have loyalties, even if we disagree.”

  I told James about a little man I had met in the hallway at New Life who, when I said I was from New York City, said, simply, “Ka-boom!” I told him also about Joseph Torrez, a New Lifer I had eaten dinner with, who, when describing the evangelical gathering under way in Colorado Springs, compared it to “Shaquille O’Neal driving the lane, dunking on you.” Torrez had said, “It’s time to choose sides,” a refrain I had heard over and over again during my time in Colorado Springs.

  “So which is it?” I asked. “Which side are you on? Theirs? Are you ready to declare war on me, on my city?”

  “No—”

  “Then choose.”

  “I—”

  “We can’t,” Lisa interrupted, from the corner.

  “We can,” said John, another Bible Society editor. “We do. Just by being here.”

  12.

  THE ROMANCE OF AMERICAN FUNDAMENTALISM

  AFTER NEW LIFE BANISHED Pastor Ted from his pulpit in late 2006, the press wondered if this glaring evidence of hypocrisy would spell the end of fundamentalism’s broad appeal. The press had asked the same question many times during the televangelist sex scandals of the 1980s and ’90s—Jimmy Swaggart’s motel rendezvous, Jim Bakker’s hush money for his secretary—and, long forgotten now, another decade earlier when Time reported that two students at the evangelist Billy James Hargis’s American Christian College, married by Reverend Hargis himself, had discovered on their honeymoon that neither was a virgin; Hargis not only had married the pair but had deflowered both husband and wife.1 Hargis’s reputation never recovered, but his cause survived; so did the college vice president to whom the students confessed, David Noebel, who used Hargis’s downfall to consolidate his own power. Today, Noebel is president of Summit Ministries, headquartered just west of New Life, where he oversees the education of 2,000 students a year and the distribution of fundamentalist homeschooling materials to thousands more. His most influential book is The Homosexual Revolution.

  Scandal does not destroy American fundamentalism. Rather, like a natural fire that purges the forest of overgrowth, it makes the movement stronger. And fiercer. Such was the case in the aftermath of the Hargis affair, when Noebel managed to convince millions that Hargis’s fall was not an occasion for a reconsideration of fundamentalism’s concept of sexuality but rather a call to action. Noebel’s subsequent antigay manifesto, The Homosexual Revolution, helped make sex one of the movement’s most potent political causes.

  Something similar happened after Ted Haggard’s disgrace. The Reverend Mel White, a former ghostwriter for Jerry Falwell who has since come out and now leads Soulforce, a pro-gay evangelical ministry, told me that Ted’s ordeal would serve only to drive more gay fundamentalists into the closet. Nobody would want to face the public shaming Ted endured, while the fact that fundamentalist leaders embraced Ted and promised to cure him would offer queer fundamentalists hope that they, too, could be made pure again by one of the many “ex-gay” ministries that have arisen in recent years.

  Following the end of the Cold War, during which anticommunism was the organizing principle of American fundamentalism, sex provided a new battleground. No longer would fundamentalism present itself primarily as against an enemy, godless communism; after the fall of the Berlin Wall, fundamentalism looked to sex as the new frontier of its empire, and “purity” as the promise of its campaign.
Sexual purity also lends to the movement a radical tenor that’s thrilling to young believers eager to distance themselves from the clumsy politics of the old Christian Right. It is, one virgin told me, a rebellion against materialism, consumerism, and “the idea that anything can be bought and sold.” It is a spiritual war against the world, against “sensuality.” This elevation of sexual purity—especially for men—as a way of understanding yourself and your place in the world is new. It’s also very old. First-century Christians took the idea so seriously that many left their wives for “house monasteries,” threatening the very structure of the family. The early church responded by institutionalizing virginity through a priestly caste set apart from the world, a condition that continues to this day within Roman Catholicism. Now, though, the Protestants of American fundamentalism are reclaiming that system, making every young man and woman within their sphere of influence part of a new virgin army.

  Real sex is no more endangered by such an ambition than the political corruption—or, for that matter, radicalism—that Abram once dreamed he could abolish through the patient construction of a voluntary theocracy. The chaste spiritual warriors of populist fundamentalism continue to experience all the same desires as the rest of us, a fact they readily admit. The sexual purity they’re pursuing isn’t so much a static condition as a perpetual transformation, Charles Finney’s revival machine rebuilt within one’s own soul. Purity lends to populist fundamentalism the intensity of Jonathan Edwards’s Great Awakening, the intimacy of Abram’s prayer cells. To be pure is to be elite, or so chaste believers, looking at a world suffused with sex, may easily tell themselves.

  MATT DUNBAR WAS a short and ruddy-faced twenty-three-year-old, a little shy, a man who kept his hands in his pockets. He was also funny and smart and possessed of excellent conversational timing. He had grown a small brown soul patch beneath his lower lip, and his voice was smooth. When he talked to you, he held your eyes as if he trusted you, which he did; Dunbar, wary of the world since he was a boy, had decided to trust people. He studied religion through an anthropological lens as a graduate student at New York University, where his friends called him Mr. Dunbar. He said in a matter-of-fact manner that women liked him, and it was true. Mr. Dunbar was a gentleman.

  He lived in Brooklyn with his childhood best friend, Robin Power. Sometimes Robin had a thick brown beard, and sometimes he shaved himself clean and dyed his hair black and spiked it up, like Johnny Rotten. He usually worked a gutterpunk look—a ratty, layered look of sweatshirts and buttons advertising obscure bands. Sometimes, he wore eyeliner. He taught ninth-grade English at Martin Luther King High, in Manhattan, and he liked the fact that some of his students thought he was gay.

  Robin, like Dunbar, was a conservative Christian, but he wasn’t allowed to talk about that at school. He was permitted to talk about “values,” though, and to him, loving everyone, even gay men—his students called them “faggots,” but he considered them sinners, and to him this was the difference between secularism and Christianity—was a value he wanted to share with his pupils. Once, he went to school in drag to teach them a lesson, about judging a soul based on appearances.

  When I first met Dunbar and Robin at their church—“The Journey,” a fundamentalist congregation of actors, dancers, and young professionals who want to know actors and dancers—Robin got most of the glances, the smiles, the cute little laughs that said, “Call me.” But Robin was engaged. Dunbar didn’t do badly himself; the women who knew Robin was taken gravitated toward him, and during the time I knew him, he met a church girl, an actress named Anna, blonde, broad-faced, and beautiful, quiet like Dunbar. He thought she was a godly woman. He had been “waiting” for a long time—“saving himself,” as an older generation might have said—and now he had someone to wait for.

  Dunbar and Robin grew up together in Visalia, California, a hard little agricultural town far from the coast. They were not part of the megachurch nation; Dunbar was raised by a single mother, who took him to a traditional Episcopal church, and Robin’s parents and siblings were all musicians. They had their own little recording studio, and they rocked, more Ramones than Partridge Family. Dunbar always wanted to be in their band. He and Robin went to the same conservative, Christian college and moved to Manhattan afterward with two other childhood friends, also Christians. They came because one of the men had a girlfriend here—the two are now engaged—but the city has proven to be a sort of calling. “New York,” said Dunbar, “is a great town for virgins.”

  We were sitting on a bench after church, watching Sunday traffic stream up and down Broadway. “Cleavage everywhere,” noted Dunbar. He had learned to look without desire. Robin held up his right hand. Wrapped around his wrist, in a figure eight, was a black plastic bracelet. “This,” he said, “is a ‘masturband.’” One of their friends at college came up with the idea. As long as you stayed pure—resisted masturbating—you could wear your masturband. Give in, and off it went, like a scarlet letter in reverse. No masturband? Then no one wanted to shake your hand. “It started with just four of us,” said Dunbar. “Then there were, like, twenty guys wearing them. And girls too. The more people that wore them, the more people knew, the more reason you had to refrain.” Dunbar even told his mother. He lasted the longest. “Eight and a half months,” he said. I notice he’s not wearing one now. He wasn’t embarrassed. Sexuality, he believed, is not a private matter.

  The other night, he said, he’s out drinking, with “secular friends.” They were all a little drunk—Dunbar was fond of Bible verses about wine—and they’re talking about sex.

  “Dunbar,” volunteers one of the secular guys, “is a virgin.” The jerk is laughing. “By choice,” he says.

  Huge mistake. All female eyes leave the man who wants their attention and rotate Dunbar’s way. “Four girls surround me. They want to know everything.”

  Is he embarrassed? (“I’d only be embarrassed if I was trying to get some.”) Is oral okay? Anal? (He doesn’t like to be “legalistic,” caught up in rules, and he has friends who enjoyed anal sex and still called themselves virgins, but—no.) Has he always been a virgin? (“Uh, yeah. That’s what ‘virgin’ means.”) Why? (Jesus, “romance,” it all blends together…)

  One of Dunbar’s roommates had recently found himself in the same situation: young man from the sticks in a big-city bar, surrounded by women who genuinely want to know if anything can tempt him. They were tempting him, of course, which was the point. He was in trouble. One woman gave him the kind of look usually used only by teen movie seductresses. “Sex,” she said, “is just something I do.” Lucifer himself could not have whispered more sweetly. And then—the material world ruined it all. Satan’s angel took a chip off a plate of cheesy nachos. “Like eating,” she said. “It’s easy.”

  Dunbar’s virgin comrade took a big breath of virtue and girded his loins for continuing chastity. “The whole sex/nacho thing?” Dunbar said. “It just doesn’t make sense to a virgin.”

  Food, after all, belongs to the mundane realm. Sex, on the other hand, is supernatural. Dunbar read the biblical Song of Solomon—lovers rhapsodizing over each other, he obsessed with her breasts like “two fawns” and her “rounded thighs like jewels”; she with his legs like “alabaster columns” and his lips like lilies, “dripping sweet-smelling myrrh”—not as erotica but as a metaphor for the love between man and God. Sex that is just two bodies in motion struck him as empty, even if love was involved. Every encounter must be a kind of threesome: man, wife, and God. Without Him, it’s just fucking.

  “SUCKERS FOR ROMANCE,” Leslee Unruh, the founder of Abstinence Clearinghouse, described men like Dunbar and Robin. She meant it as praise, since she considers them the vanguard of a desexed revolution. “We want authenticity,” she told me. “We want what’s real.” It’s “safe sex,” she explained, that requires faith, since there is “no evidence” that safe sex “works.” Unruh is a youthful-looking grandmother from South Dakota with a big mouth, literally—outlined
in fire-engine red for public performances—and dyed blonde hair. Since her early days as one of the most fervent antiabortion crusaders of the 1980s, she’s made over her politics, too. She still fights abortion—she was one of the activists behind South Dakota’s ban on all abortions, revoked by referendum in 2006—but she’s discovered that she can win more converts by going to the root cause, sex itself.

  So, in 1997, she launched Abstinence Clearinghouse in Sioux Falls. She’d been a self-declared “chastity” educator since the early 1980s, but it wasn’t until the Clinton years that American fundamentalism fully discovered sex as a weapon in the culture wars. In 1994, a Southern Baptist celibacy program, True Love Waits, brought 200,000 virginity pledge cards to Washington, D.C. In 2004, the group brought a million to the Olympics in Athens. Now, Abstinence Clearinghouse acts as a nexus for activists and as their voice in Washington, claiming as “friends” a slew of officials with unrecognizable names, abstinence crusaders in the Departments of Health and Human Services, Education, and even State. Family members like Brownback and Representative Joe Pitts used their Value Action Teams to insert chastity into foreign affairs.

  Uganda, which following the collapse of Siad Barre’s Somalia became the focus of the Family’s interests in the African Horn, has been the most tragic victim of this projection of American sexual anxieties. Following implementation of one of the continent’s only successful anti-AIDS program, President Yoweri Museveni, the Family’s key man in Africa, came under pressure from the United States to emphasize abstinence instead of condoms. Congressman Pitts wrote that pressure into law, redirecting millions of dollars from effective sex-ed programs to projects such as Unruh’s. This pressure achieved the desired result: an evangelical revival in Uganda, and a stigmatization of condoms and those who use them so severe that some college campuses held condom bonfires. Meanwhile, Ugandan souls may be more “pure,” but their bodies are suffering; following the American intervention, the Ugandan AIDS rate, once dropping, nearly doubled. This fact goes unmentioned by activists such as Unruh and politicians such as Pitts, who continue to promote Uganda as an abstinence success story.