The Family

by Jeff Sharlet

  This is the myth of the quiet man, a noble soul of no outward distinction. “When it came to learning,” writes the Christian biographer J. Steven Wilkins, assessing his hero’s visible assets in All Things for the Good, “everything was a challenge.” Wilkins continues: “He did not have striking characteristics…He was gangly, uncoordinated, and spoke in a high-pitched voice…He did not have a great personality.” Slow, homely, and squeaky; also, peculiar in his posture—he sat ramrod straight, he said, because he was afraid of squishing his organs—and known by what friends he had for smiling lamely when he guessed that someone was saying something funny. Then came the war.

  Jackson didn’t want it. Didn’t want slavery (but accepted it as ordained of God and kept five slaves), didn’t want secession (but accepted it as the will of Virginia, “to which [his] sword belongs”), didn’t want anything but quiet in which to consider his diet (a source of deep fascination and increasing asceticism as the war grew closer) and Scripture (he wished he’d been called by God to the ministry). Instead, he was called to killing. “Draw the sword,” he told his students, “and throw away the scabbard.”

  Anxious about praying aloud in front of others, in battle, Jackson would abandon the reins of his horse to lift up his hands toward heaven. In camp he led revivals and stumbled about as if blind, his eyes shut as he talked to God. Under fire he shouted his prayers, imploring God not for mercy but for the blood of his enemies. “He lives by the New Testament and fights by the Old,” wrote a contemporary, a standard to which the movement now aspires. “He had none of the things held to be essential for leadership,” writes biographer Wilkins. “All he had was a sincere fear of God.”

  This, too, is the American myth of the quiet man, transformed by crisis into a hero. This is the model for spiritual warfare American fundamentalism wants to implement in every household, each family and every living room Bible study group discovering within itself unexpected reserves of leadership and, as need arises, ferocity. Jackson’s troops thought he was literally invulnerable. His presence among his men inspired them to fearlessness in battle. And yet Jackson was killed in 1863 by his own men, who mistook his return from an unannounced scouting sortie as a Union charge. This, too, is an old story: felled within the walls. Our heroes are too great to be killed by the enemy; only our own weaknesses can undo us. Southern dreamers say the Confederacy would have won, abolished slavery peacefully, and established a true Christian nation had Jackson, “the greatest Christian general in the history of this nation,” lived to continue outflanking the Union army.

  Of course, we would have won in Vietnam, too, if only we hadn’t tied our own hands, and we’d win in Iraq, if only Democrats would stop whining. Most of all, we—the believers—could finally build that city upon a hill God promised the as-yet-unformed nation nearly four centuries ago, if only we could submit to God. Jackson, note his Christian biographers, saw this problem even before the war. “We call ourselves a Christian people,” Jackson once wrote, but what he considered the “extreme” doctrine of separation prevented the United States from fulfilling its destiny.

  Look at his wisdom! say his Christian biographers. “A gift from God,” he would have demurred. Oh, the humility of this fallen hero, cries American fundamentalism, always deep in conversation with its mythic past, the model for a new struggle.

  WHEN WILLIAM FEDERER and I reached the overgrown foundation stones of Danbury Baptist, which sit on a grassy hill sprinkled with pale violets, we gathered in a circle with an invitation-only crowd of pastors and activists from around the country. The event’s organizer was Dave Daubenmire, a former high school football coach from Ohio who’d done battle with the ACLU over his insistence on praying with his players. Since then he’d launched a fundamentalist ministry called Minutemen United, with which he was climbing the ladder of the activist hierarchy.* Still a minor league outfit, the Minutemen had managed to wrangle some respectable B-list activists. Besides Federer, there was the Reverend Rob Schenck. Schenck brought greetings from the Library of Congress’s chief of manuscripts, who, he said, had used “FBI classified technology” to discover previously unknown margin notes in Jefferson’s 1802 letter proving his Christian intentions. There was the Patriot Pastor, a giant man from New Hampshire who travels the country in a tricorne hat, black vest, frilly shirt, and leggings, lecturing on the “Black Regiment,” the fighting pastors of the Revolutionary War. “This is the manifest destiny of my life,” he told me. There was the Reverend Flip Benham, head of Operation Save America, also known as Operation Rescue. He was the man who baptized Norma McCorvey—Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade—into fundamentalism. For the rally, he was wearing vintage white-and-brown wingtips, symbols of his commitment to pre-1947 America—1947 being the year when the Supreme Court ruled according to Jefferson’s “wall of separation” for the first time, in a case concerning government funds for parochial schools.

  Providential historians are divided on the question of whether it was this decision, Everson v. Board of Education, or FDR’s socialistic New Deal that led God to withdraw his protection from the nation. Operation Save America’s number two, Pastor Rusty Thomas of Waco, Texas, favors the less controversial New Deal school of thought. God, Rusty told me, “always gave us a left hook of judgment, then he gave us a right cross of revival.” But when the left hook of the Great Depression came, goes the economic theory of fundamentalism, Americans turned to government as their savior instead of God. “So we got another left hook.” Kennedy’s assassination, he explained. Then another left hook: Vietnam. Still we didn’t learn. So God kept throwing punches, said Rusty: crack, AIDS, global warming, September 11, thousands of flag-draped coffins shipped home from Iraq and more on the way.

  Rusty began the day’s preaching, pacing back and forth between Danbury Baptist’s foundation stones. He looked like an exclamation point—tiny feet in thin-soled black leather shoes, almost dwarfish legs, and a powerful torso barely contained by a jacket of double-breasted gray houndstooth. But he had one of the most nuanced preaching voices I’ve ever heard, a soft rasp that seemed to come straight from a broken heart. “We are here to start a gentle revolution,” he whispered, “to reclaim the godly heritage.” He sounded sad, for his sin and mine. We were all guilty of turning our backs on the lessons of history. But then he growled up to a volume that made even the flaxen-haired pastor beside me literally blink before leaning forward into Rusty’s thunder.

  “And when you go to war in your land,” Rusty recited from the Book of Numbers, “—and make no mistake about it, we are in a war—”

  Amen! hollered Reverend Flip.

  “And when you go to war in your land,” continued Rusty, “against an adversary who oppresses you”—and here he interrupted himself: “How many besides me are vexed by what is happening in the United States of America today?”

  The crowd, shedding jackets and coats beneath a wan but warm spring sun, murmured amen.

  “Your soul is vexed,” Rusty moaned. Then he cried out, “We are under oppression!”

  “AMEN!” responded the crowd, amping up to match Rusty’s increased volume. The bill of grievances was hard: “Are we not in mourning?” Rusty asked, repeating the question and drawing it out as the women among us closed their eyes and said, plain and simple, yes. “Are we not in mournnnning?” he moaned. “As terrorism strikes us from without, corruptions from within?” Yes, said the women, the men seemingly shamed into silence. “How many know we’re losing our children?” Yes. “Our marriages are failing!” YES.

  Pastor Rusty, in fact, was a single father of ten, the youngest of whom is named Torah. Liz, his wife of twenty years, had died a year past from lymphoma, on the verge of what seemed like recovery. Reverend Flip had chronicled online her long fight, a roller coaster of remission and relapse, so that the family’s prayer partners—activists and Christian radio listeners across the country—could help fight for her survival. “Good night for now, sweet sister,” Flip wrote when they failed. “We’ll see
you in the morning.”

  Grief, not arrogance, translates the promise of salvation—“whosoever shall lose his life for my sake shall find it”—into a battle cry. For believers fortified by the providential past, all of history’s lessons curdle into the tragedy of one’s own awful losses, and the anguish that emerges is not singular but like that of a vast choir, a Christian nation punished for sin and yet promised ultimate victory. Later that afternoon, on the Danbury village green, Rusty would grip my arm and pull me close, tears streaming from jay-blue eyes as he confessed that he had betrayed God. He had neglected the twin sins fundamentalists believe to be the collective responsibility of the entire society in which they occur. “Child sacrifice”—by which he meant abortion—“and homosexual sodomy. Any nation that condoned those behaviors? That did not challenge them, that did not prevent them from happening? It will be reduced to rubble.”

  He shook his head, eyes squeezed shut. The church had allowed women to murder their children and men through sodomy to damn themselves and all their brothers. It was his fault more than theirs because he knew the “blueprint of God’s Word.” He had pored over the Bible and the Constitution and the Mayflower Compact, had memorized choice words from John Adams and John Witherspoon and Patrick Henry, Jeremiah and Nehemiah and John the Revelator. Scripture and American history are in agreement, he had found: beneath God, family, and church is the state, with only one simple responsibility: “The symbol of the state is a sword. Not a spoon, feeding the poor, not a teaching instrument to educate our young.” Rusty stepped back, fists clenching. “And the sword is an instrument of death!” he yelled. He twitched his Italian loafers in a preacher two-step. He shook out his neck like a boxer. Then sorrow slumped his shoulders. He had failed to wield the sword. He had failed the widows and orphans. He had failed his brothers lost to sodomy. “There’s nobody clean in this,” he whispered.

  There is a mother church, Rusty preaches, and a father church, separate but equal aspects of God. The mother church nurtures and holds a child when he’s done wrong; the father church is the church of discipline. The mother church feeds the poor, comforts the dying, attempting to remind nations of righteous behavior. But to Rusty the lesson of American history, the lesson of Valley Forge and Shiloh, Khe Sanh and Baghdad, Dallas 1963, Roe v. Wade 1973, Manhattan 2001, is clear: this nation is too far gone to be redeemed by mercy alone. It is the father church’s turn.

  “Then shall you sound an alarm with a trumpet that you may be remembered before the Lord your God,” he preached on the hill at Danbury, again quoting from the Book of Numbers, “and you SHOUT”—he replaced the future tense of the biblical shall with his own present-tense bellow—“to be saved from your enemy!” He turned to the man standing behind him, a wiry, goateed musician in a brown bomber jacket. “So, brother,” Rusty called, his voice now joyful, “let it rip, potato chip!” At which the slender man blew his horn.

  THE DAY’S APPOINTED born-again ba’al tokea, the “master of the blast,” was named Lane Medcalf, and his instrument was a shofar, a Jewish trumpet, a three-foot-long spiral horn hewn from the head of a ram, boiled clean of cartilage, polished to a high gleam. Generally reserved for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, once upon a time its blast signaled Joshua’s assault on Jericho, the first battle for the Promised Land.

  Medcalf had borrowed his shofar from his boss’s wife, also a Christian. He was an artificial flavor compounder, less than a chemist but more than a factory worker. He had been saved since he was a teenager, but lately he had become engrossed in Jewish history. He was slender and slight in the shoulders, cautious but earnest about his words. Except for his pale blue eyes, he could have passed for a rabbinical student on the lam from his studies, despite the fact that he was fifty-three. If he’d grown up in Brooklyn instead of Minnesota, he might have been called a luftmensch, Yiddish for a sweet soul who seems a little lost.

  But Medcalf wasn’t interested in Yiddish; he wanted to know Hebrew. And he wasn’t contemplating conversion; he was simply going deeper into the past, in search of a truer Christianity, a faith more raw. “We’ve lost our Judeo side,” he told me later. By this, he meant fighting spirit. “The shofar was for warfare,” he explained. “You know, alarm, in a battle situation. It’s still a weapon of warfare, but for fighting demonic influence.” Medcalf ’s shofar blasts that day, for instance, were intended to travel through time and slay the invisible demons that had once surrounded Supreme Court justice Hugo Black, the author of the Everson v. Board of Education decision, in 1947.

  “Hugo got a little skewed,” he told me. Black himself had not been evil, Medcalf explained, just overwhelmed by Satan, who whispered in his ear. “I was told”—here Medcalf ’s voice dropped a note—“that he was a former Ku Klux Klan member.” (This is true. He was also a Protestant, and his decision was in keeping with that period’s fundamentalist animus toward Catholic schools.) Medcalf had also been told, he continued, that in the mid-1950s there had been another Supreme Court decision, he couldn’t remember the name, that forced children to go to school where they didn’t want to go. This also is technically true. Medcalf may have been referring to Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision that overturned official school segregation, leading to busing and the formation of private, all-white evangelical academies.

  It was Brown, along with two decisions in the early 1960s striking down school prayer, that led to fundamentalism’s embrace of history as a redeeming creed. They had a right to educate their children religiously. Catholics already had a system for doing so. Fundamentalists began to build one, and the bricks of its construction were the proof-texts of an alternate Christian nation: the letters of John Jay, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, on the biblical justifications for America’s wars; President James Garfield’s Gilded Age plea for more Christians in high offices; even, eventually, the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., claimed now from megachurch pulpits across the country as a martyr of fundamentalism. “All it takes is a God-intoxicated people,” they quote King, inaccurately and indifferent to context, “one generation, to alter the course of history from then on.”11

  Medcalf was part of the generation for whom King was a hero rather than a villain. When he was a kid, his older brother joined a Christian rock band, and when he played his guitar kids prayed out loud, free form, with their hands in the air and their whole bodies swaying, and girls flocked to him. “I had never seen Christianity like that before,” Medcalf remembered. He wanted to join the band. He learned keyboards and the drums. “Suddenly, I could understand the Bible. The Holy Spirit got up on me. Man!” “Church” was no longer a place you went to; it was an experience you consumed, and you wanted as much as you could get. You wore your jeans to worship and grew your hair long. You called yourself a Jesus freak and you called Jesus a revolutionary. You listened to groups like The Way and Love Song and the All Saved Freak Band, and you read rags like Right On! and The Fish and Hollywood Free Paper. “‘Truckin’ for Jesus,’” Medcalf remembered. “Solid stuff, man.”

  In 1972, he went to Dallas, for Campus Crusade’s “Explo”—“Godstock” for the Jesus People.12 Eighty-five thousand Jesus freaks packed the Cotton Bowl for a week straight of Christian rock and preaching. When Billy Graham took the stage, all he could do was smile with a hand outstretched in salute as the crowd screamed their love for ten minutes solid. “It was awesome,” Medcalf said. “We knew what he had done for us. He gave us the pure gospel.”

  Medcalf suddenly looked sad. He blinked, as if holding back tears. What had gone wrong?

  “We sold ourselves,” he said, his voice nearly a whisper. He meant it literally: albums and t-shirts, “bumper stickers.” Commercialism killed Christian rock n’ roll. “We lost our teeth.” One year after Explo, the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade. “It happened on our watch, man,” Medcalf said. The Jesus freaks had failed. They had lived for today and forgotten tomorrow, and then it had slipped away from them. To get it back, Medcalf said, the
movement must go backward. Not to the 1960s but to “before.” It needs a foundation, he explained, eternal truths. These were to be found in two places: the Bible and the Constitution.

  While we were talking, Reverend Flip had begun to preach. He told the crowd about a recent victory he’d scored near Charlotte, North Carolina, where he’d led seven hundred prayer warriors to a school board meeting to protest the formation of a Gay-Straight Alliance club in a local high school. “The preachers preached, the singers sang, the pray-ers prayed, and the theology of the church became biography in the streets!” Flip said. The school board shut down the club—a deliberate bid, it had declared, to bring the issue before the courts and get gay-straight clubs outlawed everywhere. Flip said this was what Jesus wanted. He even did an impression: “Cry to me,” he said in his best bass God voice; the prayers of the righteous will be answered.

  Medcalf smiled and applauded gently. He told me how his prayers had changed when he started studying history and blowing the shofar. “I was praying for God to restore America back to its roots one day when I had what I guess you would call a supernatural experience. The Holy Spirit caused me to weep and cry, enabling me to have a broken heart. ‘Please come back,’ I prayed. It was just so intense.” It worked: “Things have started changing.” He said the appointments of Samuel Alito and John Roberts to the Supreme Court were probably the result of God’s intervention. They may be the men God was waiting for, the right tools for the job of restoration. They may be under an anointing.