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

by Jeff Sharlet

  “There’s a world,” he preached, pacing across the stage. “I call it the Underworld.” The Underworld, he explained, is similar to what he sees when he goes skin diving; only instead of strange fishes, there are strange people. Too many churches, he said, focus on the Overworld. “That’s where the nice people are. The successful people. But the Lord said, ‘I’m not sending you to the Overworld, I’m sending you to the Underworld.’ Where the creatures are. The critters! The people who are out of it. People you see in Colorado Springs, even. You got an Underworld of people. The tattoo crowd, the people into drugs, the people into sex. You find ’em…in the Underworld.”

  AFTER CHURCH, I crossed the parking lot to the World Prayer Center, where I watched prayers scroll over two giant flat-screen televisions while a young man played piano. The Prayer Center—a joint effort of several fundamentalist organizations but located at and presided over by New Life—houses a bookstore as well as “corporate” prayer rooms, personal “prayer closets,” hotel rooms, and the headquarters of Global Harvest, a ministry dedicated to “spiritual warfare.” The atrium is a soaring hall adorned with the flags of the nations and guarded by another bronze warrior angel, a scowling, bearded type with massive biceps and, again, a sword. The angel’s pedestal stands at the center of a great, eight-pointed compass laid out in muted red, white, and blue-black stone. Each point directs the eye to a contemporary painting, most depicting gorgeous, muscular men—one is a blacksmith, another is bound, fetish-style, in chains—in various states of undress. My favorite is The Vessel, by Thomas Blackshear, a major figure in the evangelical-art world. Here in the World Prayer Center is a print of The Vessel, a tall, vertical panel of two nude, ample-breasted, white female angels pouring an urn of honey onto the shaved head of a naked, olive-skinned man below. The honey drips down over his slablike pecs and his six-pack abs and overflows the eponymous vessel, which he holds in front of his crotch, oozing over the edges and spilling down yet another level, presumably onto our heads, drenching us in golden, godly love. Part of what makes Blackshear’s work so compelling is precisely its unabashed eroticism; it aims to turn you on, and then to turn that passion toward Jesus.

  In the chapel are several computer terminals, where one can sign on to the World Prayer Team and enter a prayer. Eventually one’s words will scroll across the large flat screens, as well as across screens around the world, which as many as 70,000 other Prayer Team members are watching in their homes or churches at any moment. Prayers range from the mundane (real-estate deals and job situations demand frequent attention) to the urgent, such as this prayer request from “Rachel” of Colorado: Danielle. 15 months old. Temperature just shy of 105 degrees. Lethargic. Won’t eat.

  Or this one from “Lauralee” of Vermont: If you never pray for anyone else, please choose this one! I’m in such pain I think I’m going to die; pray a healing MIRACLE for me for kidney problems (disease? failure?); I’m so alone; no insurance!

  One might be tempted to see an implicit class politics in that last point, but to join the Prayer Team one must promise to refrain from explicitly political prayer. That is reserved for the professionals. The Prayer Team screen, whether viewed at the center or on a monitor at home, is split between “Individual Focus Requests,” such as the above, and “Worldwide Focus” requests, which are composed by the staff of the World Prayer Center. Sometimes these are domestic—USA: Pray for the Arlington Group, pastors working with Whitehouse to renew Marriage Amendm. Pray for appts. of new justices. Pray for Pastor meetings with Amb. of Israel, and President Bush. Lord, let them speak only your words, represent YOU! Bless! But more often they are international—N. KOREA: Pray God will crush demonic stronghold and communist regime of Kim Jung Il.

  The Iraqis come up often, particularly with regard to their conversion: Despite the efforts of the news media, believing soldiers and others testify to the effective preaching of the Gospel, and the openness of so many to hear of Jesus. Pray for continued success!

  Another prayer request puts numbers to that news: 900,000 Bibles in the Arabic language distributed by Christians in Iraq. And one explicitly aligns the quest for democracy in Iraq with the quest for more Christians in Iraq: May the people stand for their rights, and open to the idea of making choices, such as studying the Bible.

  The most common Iraq-related prayer requests, however, are strategic in the most worldly sense, such as this one: Baghdad—God, press back the enemy.

  Behind the piano player in the main hall of the World Prayer Center, the front range of the Rocky Mountains stretched across a floor-to-ceiling, semicircular window with a 270-degree view. Above him, a globe fifteen feet in diameter rotated on a metal spindle. He played songs that sounded familiar but unnamable, the soundtrack to a sentimental movie I hadn’t seen. When he took a break, I sat with him in the front row. His name was Jayson Tice, he was twenty-five, and he worked at Red Lobster. He wasn’t from Colorado Springs, and he knew very few people who were. He’d grown up in San Diego, and once, he said, he’d been good enough to play Division I college basketball. But he broke his ankle, and because the marines promised him court time, he joined. There didn’t turn out to be much basketball for him in the marines, just what he described as “making bombs and missiles,” so he didn’t re-up. Instead, he decided to start over in a new city. His mother had moved to Colorado Springs, so Jayson and his girlfriend did, too; his mother left after three months, but Jayson had already decided that God, not his mother, had called him to the mountains. He discovered that a lot of the people he knew, working as waiters or store clerks or at one of the air force bases, felt the same way.

  “Colorado Springs,” Jayson told me, “this particular city, this one city, is a battleground”—he paused—“between good and evil. This is spiritual Gettysburg.” Why here? I asked. He thought about it and rephrased his answer. “This place is just a watering hole for Christians. For God’s people. Something extra powerful’s about to pour out of this city. I hope not to stay in Colorado Springs, because I want to spread what’s going on here. I’m a warrior, dude. I’m a warrior for God. Colorado Springs is my training ground.”

  “THERE WAS,” PASTOR Ted said one afternoon in his office, “a significant influence exerted on the [2004] election by Colorado Springs.” He was meeting with me and another reporter, an Australian from a financial paper.

  “You mean,” the Australian asked, “almost like a force going out from Colorado Springs?”

  A force—Pastor Ted liked that. He smiled and offered other examples. His favorite was the Ukraine, where, he claimed, a sister church to New Life had led the protests that helped sweep a pro-Western candidate into power. Kiev is, in fact, home to Europe’s largest evangelical church, and over the last dozen years the Ukrainian evangelical population has grown more than tenfold, from 250,000 to 3 million. According to Ted, it was this army of Christian capitalists that took to the streets. “They’re pro–free markets, they’re pro–private property,” he said. “That’s what evangelical stands for.”

  In Pastor Ted’s book Dog Training, Fly Fishing, & Sharing Christ in the 21st Century, he describes the church he thinks Christians want. “I want my finances in order, my kids trained, and my wife to love life. I want good friends who are a delight and who provide protection for my family and me should life become difficult someday…I don’t want surprises, scandals, or secrets…I want stability and, at the same time, steady, forward movement. I want the church to help me live life well, not exhaust me with endless ‘worthwhile’ projects.” By worthwhile projects Ted means new building funds and soup kitchens alike. It’s not that he opposes these; it’s just that he is sick of hearing about them and believes that other Christians are, too. He knows that for Christianity to prosper in the free market, it needs more than “moral values”; it needs customer value.8

  New Lifers, Pastor Ted writes with evident pride, “like the benefits, risks, and maybe above all, the excitement of a free-market society.” They like the stimula
tion of a new brand. “Have you ever switched your toothpaste brand, just for the fun of it?” Pastor Ted asks. Admit it, he insists. All the way home, you felt a “secret little thrill,” as excited questions ran through your mind: “Will it make my teeth whiter? My breath fresher?” This is the sensation Ted wants pastors to bring to the Christian experience. He believes it is time “to harness the forces of free-market capitalism in our ministry.” Once a pastor does that, his flock can start organizing itself according to each member’s abilities and tastes.9

  Which brings us back to “Order.” Key to the growth of evangelicalism during the last twenty years has been a social structure of cell groups that allows churches to grow endlessly while maintaining orthodoxy in their ranks. Outsiders to evangelicalism often note the seemingly anonymous experience of the megachurch and conclude that such institutions prosper because they make so few demands, moral or intellectual, on their congregants. But a strong network of cells makes megachurch membership more all-encompassing than traditional Sunday congregations. That was why Abram developed the system for businessmen in 1935; he dreamed of a faith that would address every aspect of a believer’s life, all the time. But Abram didn’t imagine that such commitment could extend beyond his small circle of elites. Ordinary people, he thought, had too little power over the circumstances of their days—or too many distractions in the form of a consumer society’s pleasures—to make such an intimate involvement feasible. He may have been correct at the time.10

  Pastor Ted’s insight was that the very growth of consumer society itself had conditioned ordinary Americans to perceive themselves as decision makers. “Free-market globalization” has made Americans so free, he concluded, that a populist cell-group system could function just like a market. One of Pastor Ted’s favorite books is Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree, which he made required reading for the hundreds of pastors under Ted’s spiritual authority across the country. From Friedman, Pastor Ted says he learned that everything, including spirituality, can be understood as a commodity.

  Friedman may have been the transmitter, but it was elite fundamentalism’s belief that international capitalism is at the heart of the Gospel that migrated from Abram’s cells into the seminaries and sermons of populist fundamentalism. Ted grew up in a faith that began and ended with moral control, but as he grew in power, so did the complexity of his beliefs. Unregulated trade, he concluded, was the key to achieving both worldly and spiritual freedom. His real challenge became one not of policing individual morality but of persuading his working- and middle-class congregation that the deregulated market that had driven so many of them to Colorado Springs in search of fresh starts was both biblical and in their interest. The former was the easier task, as the Family has long known; followers with an uneven knowledge of scripture but a reverence for authority are easily sold the idea of “biblical capitalism.” That’s all it takes for the Family, since such laissez-faire economics really are in the interest of its elite members, but Ted faced a more difficult challenge, since the economics of globalization have not so much increased competition and opportunity as squashed it, ushering in an age of unprecedented corporate consolidation. The cell-group system, which functions much like consumer capitalism—offering the semblance of “choice” even as it forecloses genuine alternatives—proved the perfect means of persuasion.

  The irony of both Ted’s and Abram’s embrace of the cell group, an idea originally borrowed from communist revolutionaries, is that both settled on the “truth” of laissez-faire economics by obsessing over communism. In 1935, Abram saw communism as a menace within his city; forty years later, Ted had to go looking for it. His first job in professional Christendom was smuggling Bibles into Eastern Europe—a project with which the Family had been involved since the 1950s. As it had been to Abram, it was important to Ted not to confuse America with Jesus, so instead of declaring the U.S. holier than other nations, he blended Jesus’ teachings with American political aims and then convinced himself that the hybrid was objective truth, much like what Abram had once called the universal inevitable, much like Sam Brownback’s conviction that free trade is foretold in the Bible. The process of economic globalization, Ted believed, is a vehicle for the spread of Christ’s power.

  By that, he meant Protestantism; Catholics, he believed, “constantly look back. And the nations dominated by Catholicism look back. They don’t tend to create our greatest entrepreneurs, inventors, research and development. Typically, Catholic nations aren’t shooting people into space. Protestantism, though, always looks to the future. A typical kid raised in Protestantism dreams about the future. A typical kid raised in Catholicism values and relishes the past, the saints, the history. That is one of the changes that is happening in America. In America the descendants of the Protestants, the Puritan descendants, we want to create a better future, and our speakers say that sort of thing.”

  For Ted, though, the battle boils down to evangelicals versus Islam. “My fear,” he said, “is that my children will grow up in an Islamic state.” That is why he believed spiritual war requires a virile, worldly counterpart. “I teach a strong ideology of the use of power,” he said, “of military might as a public service.” He was for preemptive war, because he believed the Bible’s exhortations against sin set for us a preemptive paradigm, and he was for ferocious war, because “the Bible’s bloody. There’s a lot about blood.”

  LINDA BURTON, THE woman next to whom I’d sat at the dedication of New Life’s sanctuary, told me she’d been “specifically called by God” to Colorado Springs seventeen years ago. Linda was not a Christian back then. She had married young and moved west from Buffalo so her husband could work for Martin Marietta, a defense contractor. He wouldn’t let her go to church because he was determined to forget his Baptist past, and she was a Catholic, which he considered simply “Roman” and bad. That was fine with Linda. Church didn’t feel middle-class. Linda never did find out what middle-class felt like, though, because her marriage fell apart. When her husband left, he took their two daughters with him. After that there were many men, and there was an abortion. With the man who beat her she bore a son, whom she named Aaron Michael, the “strong right hand of God.” Linda took the baby and fled to Colorado Springs, which she remembered from a vacation she and her ex-husband had taken with their daughters. They’d ridden one of those Old West trains almost to the top of Pike’s Peak, a climb of more than two miles. In her mind she drew a straight line from Buffalo to this point high up in the Rockies, and there, for the first time, she had felt close to God. Years later, when she had to run, she went where she remembered God had been.

  At first, she and Aaron Michael lived in a shelter, and she got a job at a Popeye’s Fried Chicken. She worked every hour they gave her, but the money she made was barely enough to eat on. She took another job, waiting tables at the best hotel in town, and another at Red Lobster. She was working seventy hours a week, and she was still broke. A friend at the hotel invited her to New Life. She didn’t want to be around all these people weeping and babbling and shaking. But then Pastor Ted started talking, and he sounded so ordinary he made Linda feel ordinary, too: middle-class.

  One day, Pastor Ted preached that all she had to do was pray for what she needed, as specifically as possible. She went right home and got down on her knees in the kitchen and said, Lord, I need $2,500. The next day, a check came. Her wages had been docked for childcare payments to her ex-husband, but he had waived the payments without telling her. The check was for $2,495. She wept.

  Now Linda is an insurance agent, and she and Aaron Michael live in a suburban home. Aaron Michael is sixteen. He wears his black hair long, and his denim jacket is dirty. He likes violent movies—“anything with blood,” he tells me—and video games and fantasy novels. But he’s a good church boy: he loves most of all his youth cell, and reading the Bible, and talking with his mom about how to be a follower of Christ. His mom has grown strong in her faith. She hears voices, but they do not
disturb her. “The Holy Spirit is a gentleman,” she told me over a basket of cinnamon muffins she’d baked for my visit, still warm from the oven. Sitting across from me in her kitchen, she closed her big brown eyes and shushed herself. “I’m listening,” she said quietly.

  “To the TV?” I asked. In the next room, Aaron Michael was watching an action movie; the house was filled with the sound of explosions.

  “No,” said Linda. “To my Spirit.” She opened her eyes and explained the process she had undergone to reach her refined state. She called it spiritual restoration. Anyone can do it, she promised, “even a gay activist.” Linda had seen with her own eyes the sex demons that make homosexuals rebel against God, and she said they were gruesome; but she did not name them, for she would not “give demons glory.” They are all the same, she said. “It’s radicalism.”

  She reached across the table and touched my hand. “I have to tell you, the spiritual battle is very real.” We are surrounded by demons, she explained, reciting the lessons she had learned in her small-group studies at New Life. The demons are cold; they need bodies; they long to come inside. People let them in in two different ways. One is to be sinned against. “Molested,” suggested Linda. The other is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You could walk by a sin—a murder, a homosexual act—and a demon might leap onto your bones. Cities, therefore, are especially dangerous.

  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.”