Church as Moral World
Madonna Massey recently moved to Lake Charles from Mississippi, so she is unfamiliar with the Arenos' ordeal at Bayou d'Inde or the lawsuit in which they were hoping for victory. She'd heard about the Bayou Corne Sinkhole and shakes her head at that. Madonna has read articles in the local American Press about "structural problems" in the 1-10 bridge. "It spooks me out," she says. "Something about that bridge I don't like." But she'd read nothing in the paper nor heard anything on Fox News about a spill of EDC that was approaching the foundations of the 1-10 bridge.
"I am so for capitalism and free enterprise," Madonna tells me as we sip our sweet teas at a cafeteria. "I hate the word 'regulate.' I don't want the size of my Coke bottle or type of lightbulb regulated. The American Dream is not due to socialism or the EPA. Sure, I want clean air and water," Madonna adds, "but I trust our system to assure it." Government workers do that, the thought streaks through my head. Still, in Madonna's worldview, it seems that one has the police to protect one's property, Rush Limbaugh to protect one's pride, and God to take care of the rest.
"Environmentalists want to stop the American Dream to protect the endangered toad," she says, "but if I had to choose between the American Dream and a toad, hey, I'll take the American Dream." Others I spoke to also pose the same either-or scenario—the very one Paul Templet had challenged.
Madonna was born in the non-dream town of Lake Providence, Mississippi, which Time magazine named as the poorest town in America. And she has since prospered beyond her wildest dreams. She is helping her husband build a much-beloved megachurch. A gifted gospel singer and mother of two, she has produced highly popular CDs with innumerable iTunes downloads, lives in a lovely house, and drives a white Mercedes.
Church had helped bring Madonna the American Dream, as it had for a good number in the congregation, it seemed. But there were rich churches and poor churches. About 10 to 15 percent of the congregation at Living Way is black, Madonna was happy to say, but Lake Charles is half black, so the numbers suggest, if not inequality, at least separation. With almost no exceptions, Lake Charles's mainly white churches are richer, and its mainly black churches are poorer. So if government were removed from the picture, and the church made a substitute for it, I wondered, wouldn't the churched world remain a highly unequal one? This isn't an issue Madonna engages. With God's help, she believes, everyone can rise as she has, one person at a time, if one truly and completely allows God to strengthen one's resolve.
The religious community appreciates the outdoors, I learn, but what do they have to say about keeping it clean? In a description on his church website, Pastor Jeffrey Ralston of First Pentecostal Church in Lake Charles notes: "I grew up in the country. My brother and I rode horses for miles and fished every day." Associate Pastor Jerod Grissom describes his hobbies as: "hunting... fishing in and around Louisiana, frogging." But there is no mention of the health of the habitats for these fish, game, and frogs. On the websites of ten major churches in Lake Charles, I found no mention of activities concerned with the polluted environment around them.
The National Association of Evangelicals is a voice for its 30,000,000 members, who make up a quarter of the American electorate, and a leading organization of the religious right with a political voice. This is true too of the Christian Coalition, which supported some 36 senators and 243 members of the House of Representatives, half of whom received a score of 10 percent or lower on the environmental scorecard of the League of Conservation Voters.
In a startling 2006 PBS television show called Is God Green? Bill Moyers tried to interview top leaders of the evangelical churches—including the Reverends Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and the Christian activist Ralph Reed. All of them referred Moyers to their shared spokesman, Dr. Calvin Beisner, an adjunct fellow at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Beisner, in turn, cited Genesis chapter 1, verse 28: "Then God blessed them, and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth."
Dr. Beisner said the Bible also sanctioned mountaintop removal, presumably by coal companies. "If you are going to mine for precious metals, for fossil fuels, for anything else, you don't do that with a feather brush, Beisner tells Moyers. "I think the Scriptures actually tell us about the wonderful things that we can do with metals. We're told of gold and silver and other such things. Those things require mining, and 'force' is simply a scientific term for the application of energy to physical objects to bring about change.... My simple point about Genesis 1:28 [is] that we cannot escape the force involved in the Hebrew word for 'subdue.'" The Acton Institute was founded to "teach on (and) to favor a free market perspective," its website says, and it is financially supported by various corporations, including ExxonMobil.
But within the evangelical church, a small number of green voices are rising, calling for care of the environment—"creation care." In 2006, some eighty-six religious leaders signed a statement entitled "Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action." A West Virginia-based coalition opposed to coal blasting established a group called "Christians for Mountains." So in the nation at large, a debate about the environment has begun, especially among the young.
But I saw no hint of such a debate in my encounters with evangelical believers. Word from the Lake Charles pulpits seemed to focus more on a person's moral strength to endure than on the will to change the circumstances that called on that strength. The service offered a collective, supportive arena, it seemed, within which it was safe to feel helpless, sad, or lost. As in an hour of therapy, the individual drew strength from support in order to endure what had to be endured. The church had given comfort to Harold and Annette Areno. Another grief-stricken parishioner, the mother of an ill child living in the highly polluted town of Mossville, told me, "I don't know how I could have gotten through this without my church." As for altering the pollution, poverty, ill health, and other things that had to be endured, for many that lay beyond the doors of the church.
Like the Arenos and others, Madonna believes in the rapture. According to the Bible, "The earth will groan," she tells me, "and earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, rain, blizzards, strife will occur, and the earth is groaning." Drawing from the books of Revelation and Daniel, Madonna believes that within the next thousand years, gravity will release the feet of believers as they ascend to Heaven, while non-believers will remain on an earth that will become "as Hell" (Revelation 20:4-20; Daniel 9:23-27). After the rapture, the world will end for a time before Christ creates it anew and begins a new thousand-year period of peace, Madonna explains.
So what should we do about the groaning earth? I ask Madonna. "I want my ten great-grandchildren to have a great planet," she replies, "but the earth may just not be here." She poses a question I myself wondered about. "The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? I don't know; some would say, 'Let it go.'" Then she adds, "I'm giving you my Bible answers. I'm not well educated." Madonna attended two years of Bible College in Mississippi and explains, "This is not what you'd learn at your university, but mine is a true belief." This belief offered her a graphic image of the creation of the earth in seven days. It put the age of the earth at six thousand years. The City of Heaven, she told me, was a cube 1,500 miles square, divided into 12 bejeweled stories, each 120 miles high with gates, the largest one of pearls.
Across the nation, many share these beliefs with Madonna. According to a 2010 Pew Research Center report, 41 percent of all Americans believe the Second Coming "probably" or "definitely" will happen by the year 2050. Images of the rapture that believers have posted on the Internet suggest a growing gulf between those who rise to Heaven and those who stay on earth. In one image, svelte, well-dressed adults rise to a blue sky. Perhaps the rapture speaks to shared and understandable anxieties about an earthly economy, it occurs to me. For many congregants, well-paid, union-prote
cted jobs through which a man could support a stay-at-home wife are gone for all but a small elite. Given automation and corporate offshoring, real wages of high school-educated American men have fallen 40 percent since 1970. For the whole bottom 90 percent of workers, average wages have flattened since 1980. Many older white men are in despair. Indeed, such men suffer a higher than average death rate due to alcohol, drugs, and even suicide. Although life expectancy for nearly every other group is rising, between 1990 and 2008 the life expectancy of older white men without high school diplomas has been shortened by three years—and truly, it seems, by despair. In their tough secular lives, life may well feel like "end times."
But word from the pulpit also seems to turn concern away from social problems in Louisiana—poverty, poor schools, pollution-related illness— away from government help, and away from the Great Paradox.
Media as Anxiety Producer
We are still drinking sweet teas at the cafeteria, and Madonna pokes at her cell phone to show me her Twitter feed, which reflects the list of sources of information she relies on: the Republican National Committee, Jeb Bush, Michael Reagan, Michelle Malkin, the National Review, the Drudge Report, Donald Trump. Then it continues with motivational quotes, Fox News, Debbie Phelps (the mother of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps), and various Christian leaders. Madonna's car radio is tuned to Rush Limbaugh, her "brave heart."
As a powerful influence over the views of the people I came to know, Fox News stands next to industry, state government, church, and the regular media as an extra pillar of political culture all its own. Madonna tunes into Fox on the radio, television, and Internet. Up in Longville, where few subscribe to cable, Mike Tritico told me he could tell who was watching Fox News by the tilt of rooftop aerials. "It's nearly all Fox," he said. Fox gives Madonna and others the news. It suggests what the issues are. It tells her what to feel afraid, angry, and anxious about.
To some, Fox is family. One woman, a great reader who is highly attuned to world news, tells me she listens to Fox throughout the day. When she turns the ignition in her SUV, Fox News comes on. When she sits at her computer in her study at home, she tunes in to Fox via a small television to the right of her monitor. At the end of the day, sitting in a soft chair next to her husband, before a large screen, she watches the five o'clock news on Fox. "Fox is like family to me," she explains. "Bill O'Reilly is like a steady, reliable dad. Sean Hannity is like a difficult uncle who rises to anger too quickly.
Megyn Kelly is like a smart sister. Then there's Greta Van Susteren. And Juan Williams, who came over from NPR, which was too left for him, the adoptee. They're all different, just like in a family."
Fox offers news and opinions on matters of politics, of course, but it often strikes a note of alarm on issues—diseases, stock market plunges—with little direct bearing on politics. All news programs address our emotional alarm systems, of course. But with talk of a "terror mosque" at Ground Zero, of the "left's secret immigration plan" to wipe traditional America off the face of the earth, of Obama's supposed release of the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, of his supposed masterminding the massacre at Fort Hood, Fox News stokes fear. And the fear seems to reflect that of the audience it most serves—white middle- and working-class people. During the series of police killings of young black men, Fox reporters tended to defend white police officers and criticize black rioters. It defended the right to own guns and restrict voter registration, and it continually derided the federal government. While many claimed to listen to various stations—one car repair man listened to Brigham Young University radio on Sirius XM—in the evenings they watched Fox, and it was often Fox News that was digested along with dinner.
Sitting amidst his boxes near the sinkhole, Mike Schaff watches Bill O'Reilly and the rest of the Fox family for his main news, but routinely channel surfs to CNN, MSNBC, and CBS, with a special curiosity about how liberal commentators like Rachel Maddow describe Southern white conservatives. "A lot of liberal commentators look down on people like me. We can't say the 'N' word. We wouldn't want to; it's demeaning. So why do liberal commentators feel so free to use the R' word [redneck]?"
None of the people I talked to one-on-one, off-and-on, over five years used the extreme language I heard on Fox. George Russell, a Fox commentator, spoke of the "green energy tyranny." Business anchor Eric Boiling referred to the EPA as "job terrorists" who are "strangling America." Fox News Business Network commentator Lou Dobbs commented in 2011 that "as it's being run now, [the EPA] could be part of the apparat of the Soviet Union." One woman's favorite commentator, Charles Krauthammer, compared the rise in EPA air quality standards to an "enemy attack" on America. Fox offers no less news on the environment than did CNN or CNBC, but its oratory was inflammatory. Yet the words tyranny, apparat, terrorist, and strangler did not come up in my talks with Tea Party embracers in Louisiana.
We all intuitively filter the news ourselves. One well-read, enthusiastic member of the Tea Party relied mainly on Fox News to watch and the Drudge Report to read online. But she sometimes dipped into the liberal media, occasionally purchasing the Sunday New York Times "just for the arts section." The rest of the Times, she said, "I throw away. It's too liberal to read." She was a devotee of Fox News, but, employed as a flight attendant, she sometimes found herself in foreign cities, flipping channels on the TV in her hotel: BBC, CNN, MSNBC. "CNN is not objective at all," she complains. "I turn it on for news and what I get is opinion."
"How can you tell straight news from opinion?" I ask. "By their tone of voice," she explains. "Take Christiane Amanpour. She'll be kneeling by a sick African child, or a bedraggled Indian, looking into the camera, and her voice is saying, 'Something's wrong. We have to fix it.' Or worse, we caused the problem. She's using that child to say, 'Do something, America.' But that child's problems aren't our fault." The Tea Party listener felt Christiane Amanpour was implicitly scolding her. She was imposing liberal feeling rules about whom to feel sorry for. The woman didn't want to be told she should feel sorry for, or responsible for, the fate of the child. Amanpour was overstepping her role as commentator by suggesting how to feel. The woman had her feeling guard up. "No," she told herself in so many words, "That's PC. That's what liberals want listeners like me to feel. I don't like it. And what's more, I don't want to be told I'm a bad person if I don't feel sorry for that child." The social terrain around her—industry, government, church, media—lifted focus away from such a child's needs and from her own detachment from them. Again, I was backing into her deep story by exploring what it shut out. But all deep stories do that, and we all have deep stories.
Secret News
Long after Lee Sherman had polluted Bayou d'Inde, had fallen ill, and had been fired for "absenteeism" from his job, around the time he held up the "I'M THE ONE..." sign before a stadium of a thousand angry fishermen, he had joined a small environmental group called RESTORE. In 1994, a forty-year-old pipeline between Condea Vista and the Conoco docks was discovered to have sprung a leak—slow and over many years—of EDC into the soil. Ill-protected cleanup workers had become sick. Five hundred of them had sued the company and, in 1997, with modest recompense, won their case.
This was when the strange things had begun to happen. As Lee Sherman recalls: "We met in the den of Miss Bobby's and my house, some eight of us. The Arenos were there, and Mike Tritico. But a schoolteacher and his wife joined later. At first they seemed helpful. But little things happened. One day he and I were asked to buy some things for the group. He wrote down and held the list and on it were two GPSs. We got home with those, and people asked why we'd gotten them. He made it seem like I had bought them for myself with the group's money. I didn't say anything but I didn't like it. Another day, Lee recounted, "that man came early and asked to use Miss Bobby's computer. That was the computer she used for the group's bookkeeping." Having left the room momentarily, Miss Bobby noticed the man quickly changing the page on the computer screen. Later she discovered that he had downloaded spyware that c
opied her e-mail onto his computer. At the next meeting, Miss Bobby confronted the man, and after an acrimonious parting, the group fell apart, never to reassemble. No one knew the man's intent or why things in this tiny environmental group had gone so awry.
Ten years later, news of something called the "Lake Charles Project" surfaced. Wanting to stop troublemakers from helping workers bring more such lawsuits, Condea Vista had secretly hired a team to spy on RESTORE. Peter Markey, then manager of the Condea Vista's supply-chain operations, admitted in sworn deposition that for a quarter of a million dollars, the company had hired spies to infiltrate RESTORE. The spies were Special Forces retirees who worked for a Maryland-based security firm.
One investor in the security firm discovered company officials burning papers and became suspicious of wrongdoing. He took the unburned portion home and discovered among them files from the "Lake Charles Project."
What was that?
When asked during his deposition what the group was hired to do, Markey replied, "It was a surveillance operation..."
Attorney Perry Sanders asked, "What was being surveilled?"
"Environmental groups," Markey answered.
Attorney Sanders: "When you say they were being surveilled, what do you mean by that?"
Markey: "People go to the meetings and that type of thing."
Attorney Sanders: "What sort of people would go to meetings, you talking about like undercover operatives?"
Markey: "Yeah..."
Attorney Sanders: "Who knew about it?"
Markey: "The president. Probably the chief counsel."
The spies had collected tax records, listened in on phone calls, and photographed the Lake Charles home of Mike Tritico's mother, where he stayed.
When in 2008 news of the Lake Charles Project got out, it was through an investigative report by journalist James Ridgeway published in the left-leaning Mother Jones magazine, which none of my right-leaning friends in Louisiana had ever heard of. The local ABC affiliate television station KPLC broadcasted four programs, each a few minutes long, in the summer of 2008, in a series that began with "Condea Vista Hired Spies." But the archives of the main newspaper in the area, the Lake Charles-based American Press, contain no mention of it. The New Orleans-based Times-Picayune reported on a lawsuit filed by Greenpeace in 2011, which mentioned the 2008 expose in passing. But by 2011, when I began interviewing people in town, no one remembered the spy case. The environmental group had broken up and Condea Vista was now called Sasol.
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right Page 14
