The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

by Jeff Sharlet

  But those are facts, and Colorado Springs is a city of faith. A shining city at the foot of a hill. No one there believes it is perfect. And no one is so self-centered as to claim the perfection of Colorado Springs as his or her ambition. The shared vision is more modest, and more grandiose. It is a city of people who have fled the cities, people who have fought a spiritual war for the ground they are on, for an interior frontier on which they have built new temples to the Lord. From these temples they will retake their forsaken promised lands, remake them in the likeness of a dream. They call the dream Christian, but in its particulars it is American, populated by cowboys and Indians, monsters and prayer warriors to slay them, and ladies to reward the warriors with chaste kisses. Colorado Springs is a city of moral fabulousness. It is a city of fables.

  THE CITY’S MIGHTIEST megachurch crests silver and blue atop a gentle slope of pale yellow prairie grass on the outskirts of town. Silver and blue, as it happens, are the air force colors. New Life Church was built far north of town in part so it could be seen from the Air Force Academy. New Life wanted that kind of character in its congregation.2

  Church is insufficient to describe the complex. There is a permanent structure called the Tent, which regularly fills with hundreds or thousands of teens and twentysomethings for New Life’s various youth gatherings. Next to the Tent stands the old sanctuary, a gray box capable of seating 1,500; this juts out into the new sanctuary, capacity 7,500, already too small. At the complex’s western edge is the World Prayer Center, which looks like a great iron wedge driven into the plains. The true architectural wonder of New Life, however, isn’t a physical structure but the pyramid of authority into which it orders its roughly 12,000 members. At the base are 1,300 cell groups, whose leaders answer to section leaders, who answer to zone, who answer to district, who used to answer to Pastor Ted Haggard, New Life’s founder.

  In late 2006, Pastor Ted achieved a notoriety that surpassed the fame he had won as a preacher, when a middle-aged prostitute named Mike Jones played for the press answering machine messages from a regular client of his, “Art,” whom Jones had just learned was Ted Haggard, one of the most powerful fundamentalist leaders in the country. That wasn’t all. It turned out that Pastor Ted had been using methamphetamine—speed—as well. At first, Ted denied everything; but there was too much evidence, and he soon resigned. Since then, Ted, married and a father, has been “healed,” according to a panel of fundamentalist leaders charged with his cure; he is now “100 percent heterosexual.” But he is not back in his pulpit. And yet the pulpit itself—the fundamentalist experiment known as New Life—endures. Pastor Ted’s ideas survive, even prosper, for Ted’s downfall was taken by many within his congregation as evidence of the great works he had been doing. So great, that is, that the Enemy, Satan himself, targeted Ted above all others. The two antigay initiatives on the 2006 ballot, which Jones hoped to defeat by outing Ted’s hypocrisy, passed with greater support than their backers—including Ted—had imagined possible.

  When I met him, Pastor Ted was a handsome forty-eight-year-old Indianan transplanted to Colorado, a casual man most comfortable in denim. He insisted he was an ordinary man, in an ordinary church, in an ordinary city. On the other hand, he also wanted me to know that he talked to George W. Bush in a conference call every Monday. He liked to say that his only disagreement with the president was automotive; Bush drove a Ford pickup, whereas Pastor Ted loved his Chevy. At the time, Pastor Ted presided over the National Association of Evangelicals, whose 45,000 churches and 30 million believers make up the nation’s most powerful religious lobbying group. The NAE had come a long way since its creation in 1942, when its leaders had to ask Abram for help in making contact with U.S. government officials. Under Pastor Ted, the NAE was a force unto itself, no longer in need of favors from anyone.

  Under Ted, the NAE made its headquarters in Colorado Springs. Some believers call the city the “Wheaton of the West,” in honor of Wheaton, Illinois, once the headquarters of a more genteel Christian conservatism. Others call Colorado Springs the “evangelical Vatican,” a nickname that says much both about the city and about the easeful orthodoxy with which the movement now views itself. Certainly the gathering there has no parallel in this country, not in Lynchburg, Virginia, nor Tulsa, nor Pasadena, nor Orlando, nor any other city that has aspired to be the capital of evangelical America. Fundamentalist activist groups and parachurch ministries in Colorado Springs number in the hundreds. Groups migrate there and multiply. They produce missionary guides, “family resources,” school curricula, financial advice, athletic training programs, Bibles for every occasion. The city is home to Young Life, to the Navigators, to Compassion International; to Every Home for Christ and Global Ethnic Missions (Youth Ablaze). Most prominent among the ministries is Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, whose radio programs (the most extensive in the world, religious or secular), magazines, videos, and books reach more than 200 million people worldwide. It was Pastor Ted who persuaded Dobson to relocate from Pasadena to Colorado Springs, where his operation is so vast it earned its own zip code.

  Whereas Dobson plays the part of national scold, promising to destroy politicians who defy the Bible, Pastor Ted quietly guided those politicians through the ritual of acquiescence required to save face. He didn’t strut, like Dobson; he gushed. When Bush invited him to the Oval Office to discuss policy with seven other chieftains of the Christian Right in late 2003, Pastor Ted regaled his congregation with the story via e-mail. “Well, on Monday I was in the World Prayer Center”—New Life’s high-tech, twenty-four-hour-a-day prayer chapel—“and my cell phone rang.” It was a presidential aide. The president, said Pastor Ted, wanted him on hand for the signing of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Pastor Ted was on a plane the next morning and in the president’s office the following afternoon. “It was incredible,” wrote Pastor Ted. He left it to the press to note that Dobson wasn’t there.3

  Moreover, it was Pastor Ted, not Dobson—a child psychologist with a Ph.D.—who proved most comfortable in the secular atmosphere of Washington politics, where he was as likely to lobby for his views on international trade negotiations as on sexual morality. In Ted, the populist and elite strands of American fundamentalism had merged. At the height of his power, no pastor in America held more sway over the political direction of fundamentalism than did Pastor Ted, and no church more than New Life. It was by no means the largest megachurch, but New Life was a crucible for the ideas that inspire the movement. Fundamentalism is as much an intellectual as an emotional movement; and what Pastor Ted built in Colorado Springs was not just a battalion of spiritual warriors but a factory for ideas to arm them.

  New Life began with a prophecy. In November 1984, a missionary friend of Pastor Ted’s named Danny Ost—known for his gifts of discernment—asked Ted to pull over on a bend of Highway 83 as they were driving, somewhat aimlessly, in the open spaces north of the city. Pastor Ted—then twenty-eight, married, father to Christy and Marcus, given to fasting and oddly pragmatic visions (he believes he foresaw Internet prayer networks before the Internet existed)—had been wondering why God had called him to this bleak city, then known as a “pastor’s graveyard.” Ost got out of the car and squinted. “This,” said the missionary, “this will be your church. Build here.”4

  So Pastor Ted did. First, he started a church in his basement. The pulpit was three five-gallon buckets stacked one atop the other, and the pews were lawn chairs. A man who lived in a trailer came round if he remembered it was Sunday and played guitar. Another man got the Spirit and filled a five-gallon garden sprayer with cooking oil and began anointing nearby intersections, then streets and buildings all over town. Pastor Ted told his flock to focus their prayers on houses with For Sale signs so that more Christians would come and join them.

  He was always on the lookout for spies. At the time, Colorado Springs was a small city split between the air force and the New Age, and the latter, Pastor Ted believed, worked for the devil. Past
or Ted soon began upsetting the devil’s plans. He staked out gay bars, inviting men to come to his church;5 his whole congregation pitched itself into invisible battles with demonic forces, sometimes in front of public buildings. One day, while Pastor Ted was working in his garage, a woman who said she’d been sent by a witches’ coven tried to stab him with a five-inch knife she pulled from a leg sheath; Pastor Ted wrestled the blade out of her hand. He let that story get around. He called the evil forces that dominated Colorado Springs—and every other metropolitan area in the country—Control.

  Sometimes, he says, Control would call him late on Saturday night, threatening to kill him. “Any more impertinence out of you, Ted Haggard,” he claims Control once told him, “and there will be unrelenting pandemonium in this city.” No kidding! Pastor Ted hadn’t come to Colorado Springs for his health; he had come to wage “spiritual war.”6

  He moved the church to a strip mall. There was a bar, a liquor store, New Life Church, a massage parlor. His congregation spilled out and blocked the other businesses. He set up chairs in the alley. He strung up a banner: SIEGE THIS CITY FOR ME, signed JESUS.7 He assigned everyone in the church names, taken from the phone book, they were to pray for. He sent teams to pray in front of the homes of supposed witches—in one month, ten out of fifteen of his targets put their houses on the market.8 His congregation “prayer-walked” nearly every street of the city.

  Population boomed, crime dipped; Pastor Ted believed that New Life helped chase the bad out of town. His church grew so fast there were times when no one knew how many members to claim. So they stopped talking about “members.” There was just New Life. “Are you New Life?” a person might ask. New Life moved into some corporate office space. Soon it bought the land that had been prophesied, thirty-five acres, and began to build what Pastor Ted promised would be a new Jerusalem.

  JERUSALEM, COLORADO. TO the east is sky, empty land, Kansas. To the west, Pike’s Peak, 14,110 feet above sea level, king of a jagged skyline of the lower forty-eight states’ tallest mountains. The old city core of Colorado Springs withers into irrelevance thirteen miles south; New Life leads the charge north, toward fusion with Denver and Boulder and a future of one giant front-range suburb, a muddy wave of big-box stores and beige tract houses eddying along roads so new they had yet to be added to the gas-station map I bought. Sunday mornings, traffic backs up from the church half a mile in all four directions. When parents finally pull into a space amid the thousands of cars packed into a gray ocean of lot, their kids tumble out and dash toward the five silver pillars of the entrance to New Life, eager to slide across the expanse of tiled floor, run circles around The Defender, a massive bronze of a glowering angel, its muscular wings in full flex, and bound up the stairs to “Fort Victory,” whose rooms are designed to look like an Old West cavalry outpost where soldiers once battled real live Indians, back when Colorado still had Indians to conquer and convert.

  There were no kids in Fort Victory on my first Sunday at New Life, the first Sunday of the year. It was a special day, “Dedication,” the spiritual anointing of the church’s new sanctuary. Metallic and modern, laced with steel girders and catwalks, the sanctuary is built like two great satellite dishes clapped belly to belly. It was designed, I was told, to “beam” prayer across the land. (New Lifers always turn to metaphors to describe their church and their city, between which they make little distinction. It is like a “training camp” in that its young men and women go forth on “missions.” It is like a “bomb” in that it “explodes,” “gifting” the rest of us with its fallout: revival, which is to say, “values,” which is to say, “the Word,” which is to say, as so many there do, “a better way of life.”)

  At the heart of the sanctuary rises a four-sided stage, on either side of which are two giant cross-shaped swimming pools with mechanical covers. Above the stage a great assemblage of machinery hovers, wrapped in six massive video screens. A woman near me compared it to Ezekiel’s vision of a metallic angel, circular and “full of eyes all around.” When the lights went down and the screens buzzed to life, the sanctuary turned a soft, silvery blue. Then the six screens filled with faces of tribute, paying homage to New Life and Pastor Ted: a senator, a congressman, Colorado’s lieutenant governor, the city’s mayor, and Tony Perkins, Dobson’s enforcer on Capitol Hill; denominational chieftains, such as Thomas E. Trask, “general superintendent” of the 51 million worldwide members of the Assemblies of God; and a succession of minor nobles from the nation’s megachurches. These I know now by numbers: Church of the Highlands, in Alabama—pastored by a New Life alumnus—that has grown from 34 to 2,500 souls in the last four years; a New Life look-alike in Biddeford, Maine, that has multiplied to 5,000; Rocky Mountain Calvary, the New Life neighbor that has swelled in a decade from a handful to 6,000.

  Kyle Fisk, then the executive administrator of the National Association of Evangelicals, had guided me to a seat in the front row, which meant I had to crane my neck back ninety degrees to follow the video screen above me. The worship band, dressed in black, goateed or soul-patched or shag-headed, lay flat on their backs, staring straight up. To my right sat a middle-aged woman in a floor-length flower-print dress with shades of orange and brown. Her hair was thick, chestnut, wavy, her face big-boned and raw and beautiful, her eyelids electric blue with eyeshadow when she closed them in prayer, her eyes dark and wide as she tilted her head back to watch the tributes roll past. Her mouth hung open.

  The band stood. A skinny, chinless man with a big, tenor voice, Ross Parsley, directed the musicians and the crowd, leading us and them and the choir as the guitarists kicked on the fuzz and the drummer pounded the music toward arena-rock frenzy. Two fog machines on each side of the stage filled the sanctuary with white clouds. Pod-shaped projectors cast a light show across the ceiling, giant spinning white snowflakes and cartwheeling yellow flowers and a shimmering blue water-effect. “Prepare the way!” shouted Worship Pastor Ross. “Prepare the way! The King is coming!” A man in a suit in the eastern front row shuddered and shot his right foot forward and fell into a kickboxing match with the air, keeping time with the rhythm. Across the stage teens began leaping straight up, a dance that swept across the arena: kids hopped; old men hopped; middle-aged women hopped. Spinners wheeled out from the ranks and danced like dervishes around the stage. The dark-eyed woman next to me swayed, her hips filling one side of her dress, then the other, her hands waving like sea grass. The light pods dilated and blasted the sanctuary with red. Worship Pastor Ross roared, “Let the King of Glory enter in!” The woman beside me screamed, fell down to her knees, rocked back and forth until her arms slid out before her and her forehead tapped the carpeted floor. The guitars thickened the fuzz, and ushers rushed through the crowds throwing out rainbow glow strings, glow necklaces, glow crowns. The arena went dark, and 8,000 New Lifers danced with their glow strings, like a giant bowl of rainbow sorbet.

  White light flared, blinding us, and then disappeared, leaving us in darkness again. Fog pumped out double-time. We would have been lost had it not been for the blue video glow of the six big screens. All heads tilted upward again. Watching the screens, we moved in slow motion through prairie grass. A voiceover announced, “The heart of God, beating in our hearts.” Then the music and video quickened as the camera rose to meet the new sanctuary. The woman beside me gasped. Images spliced and jumped over one another: thousands of New Lifers holding candles, and dozens skydiving, and Pastor Ted, Bible in hand, blond head thrust forward above the Good Book, smiling, finger-shaking, singing, more smiling, filling half of his face with perfect white teeth. His nose is snubby and his brow overhung, lending him an impishness crucial to the smile’s success; without that edge he would look not happy but stoned. Now Pastor Ted, wearing a puffy ski jacket in red, white, and blue, took us to the suburban ranch house where he stayed on his fateful visit to Colorado Springs; then on to another suburban ranch house, nearly indistinguishable, where he made plans for the church. Then to a long successi
on of one-story corporate office spaces and strip-mall storefronts, the “sanctuaries” Pastor Ted rented as his congregation grew, each identical to the last but for the greater floor space.

  The lights came up. Pastor Ted, now before us in the flesh, introduced a guest speaker, one of his mentors, Jack Hayford, founding pastor of the ten-thousand-strong Church On The Way, in Van Nuys, California. Hayford is a legend among evangelicals, one of the men responsible for the revival that made Bible-believing churches—what the rest of the world refers to as fundamentalist—safe for suburbia. He is a white-haired, balding, eagle-beaked man, a preacher of the old school, which is to say that he delivers his sermons with an actual Bible in hand. (Pastor Ted uses a PalmPilot.) Pastor Hayford wanted to “wedge” an idea in our minds. The idea was “Order.” The illustration was the Book of Revelation’s description of four creatures surrounding Christ’s throne. “The first…was like a lion, the second was like an ox, the third had a face like a man, the fourth was like a flying angel.” Look! said Pastor Hayford, his voice sonorous and dignified. “All wonderful, all angels.” The angels were merely different from one another. Just, he said, as we have different “ethnicities.” And just as we have, in politics, a “hierarchy.” And just as we have, in business, “different responsibilities,” employer and employees. Angels, ethnicities, hierarchy, employers and employees—each category must follow a natural order.

  Next came Pastor Larry Stockstill, from Ted’s old church in Baton Rouge, presenting yet another variation of preacher. He took the stage with his wife, Melanie, who wore a pink pantsuit. Pastor Larry wore a brown pinstripe suit over a striped brown shirt and a golden tie. His voice was Louisiana; the word pulpit came out as pull-peet.