Sweet Heaven When I Die

by Jeff Sharlet

  “Thanks,” I whispered.

  We sat in the last two seats of our row. Vera, not a tall woman, tucked herself neatly beneath my ear when she translated. “Now he is asking Jesus to come down and be here with us tonight, because we love Him, and we know He is King, that He reigns in His power”—she stopped, frustrated by her misleading homonym—“that with his power he reigns over our hearts and it is only through Him that we can love Him and one another.”

  The music faded to a trickle of acoustic guitar and murmuring. Berlin youth swayed. One hand in the air, or two hands waving, or both hands palms up at their waists as if to catch falling water. “Rain down on me,” they sighed, the last line of an English-language praise song. A teenager in a plaid shirt bounced out of his seat and onto the stage.

  “He is saying,” Vera whispered, her lips almost close enough to brush my ear, “that we must concentrate on ourselves now. That before we can love our city we must look into our own hearts. Now he says we must break into small groups to pray to let Jesus into our hearts, to examine our hearts, before we can move on to the city.”

  Three girls down the row of chairs smiled at us. “Here,” Vera said, gesturing to a chair next to the closest girl, Krista, maybe seventeen, with curly brown hair and olive skin. The other two were bright blonde, Anne and Gina, one straight haired and delicate featured, the other’s hair crimped, her features thick and leonine, her lips full and her red-and-white jersey skin tight. She folded herself onto the floor, and Vera knelt next to my knees so that we could form a circle, and we all leaned in, shoulder against shoulder, eyes closed and fluttering open as Gina began to pray in German, a flow of words rounded into whispering continuity.

  Anne picked up where Gina left off, and then it was Vera’s turn. I thought it might come around to me, but it didn’t work that way. It worked the holy-spirit way, which brought us back to Gina, to Anne, to Gina, and so on, each singsonging a stream of syllables, automatic prayer. Not speaking in tongues—it was all in German—but spirit speaking.

  We broke up and sang more, then regrouped and prayed more. Sang, prayed, sang. There was some clapping and a lot of swaying and much whispering, and from the boys around us curious and poorly masked antagonistic stares. Despite all the pressed-together thighs and hands holding knees, it was a determinedly unerotic scene, the love filial or something other, sexuality willfully suspended. But all craved intimacy, and several seemed to be mistaking Vera’s whispering for it; wondered what the songs inspired her to tell me; envied the spirit working between us.

  Then Pastor Fab took the stage and announced that we were ready. The over-the-shoulder stares and glares of pale blue eyes in sharp-boned faces ceased as Fab gave the stage over to a tall blond in a red cotton sweatshirt, who began—so translated Vera—to talk about the city. The city needed our love, and we needed to love the city. We must love everyone within it, and not just ourselves. We must love indiscriminately. We must love the city’s troubles.

  It was time to concentrate on our sins; we could not fully love the city until we were pure. “She says she will say a prayer now,” whispered Vera. “She prays, ‘Jesus, forgive us our sins. We have sinned. We have tolerated that which is wrong.’”

  Vera paused.

  “What is ‘wrong?’” I asked.

  “Tolerance,” she said, resuming her translation. “We have worshipped tolerance, and forgotten the sins that must not be tolerated. We have tolerated the homosexual. We have tolerated the esoteric religion. We have tolerated the satanic music.”

  There was no hesitation in her voice to suggest “You must understand,” or “I know what you think.” She charged into the litany, reciting the list of her and Berlin’s sins with a pride bigger than repentance. She knew what this sounded like to American ears, knew that there was another, imprecise word Americans used for any German who did not bow down to tolerance. Vera had lived in America, she knew the unpleasantly Teutonic-sounding phrase “politically correct,” knew that she was not, knew the word Americans used to describe people like her, Germans who did not “cringe.”

  (Later, over Cokes, she would say it aloud and roll her eyes, and follow it up with “Enough, already.” She sometimes thought that Berlin was obsessed with its own past, knew only that one word—“Nazi”—it costs nothing to say—and not the other, His name.)

  “We ask for Your forgiveness,” Vera translated from the woman in red. “For we know You call on us to be true to purify Your city, to restore Your city, that this is the meaning of the love You have given us. And we are not capable of this love on our own, so we tolerate the work of Satan, when we do not need to, because You are here to give us the power of Your love, and we pray that we may become testimonies of that power.”

  And testimonies ensued, teenagers in tears as they proclaimed the awesome power of God. There were Germans and Nigerian immigrants and a Turk converted from Islam—a “demonic lie,” volunteered Vera. And then came the woman in red again to share her “prayer language” with us—something less than the gift of tongues but more than the ordinary procession of words, a tumbling repetition of syllables too fast and impassioned for Vera to translate until the woman in red came to one phrase she began to yell. The crowd began to yell with her, and Vera shouted, too, hopping up and down. Then she stopped, grabbing my arm as if she had something terribly exciting to tell me: “Close the gate!” she translated. “Close the gate to Berlin!” She hopped. Onstage the woman in red and the Turk both shouted: “Close the gate! Close the gate to Berlin!”

  It meant something different than the old cry of “Foreigners out!” “Foreigners in,” Vera and the Turk might just as easily have said, so long as they bear the cross. But the motive was the same: purification. Once it was of the “race”; now it was of the “faith.” It failed, then, in the end; it would fail now, too. But it had already claimed as its own Vera and the Turk and all those who had come to believe that different places, different beliefs, different words can be reduced to one fundamental meaning.

  We returned to our small group. Again Gina led. “I will tell you the subject of her prayer,” Vera whispered, “so you can pray for the same thing. She is starting by praying for her school. She goes to a Catholic school, and she prays that her teachers will learn about Jesus. She prays, too, because she has, ah, yoga? Yes, yoga, esoteric religion in her school.” Anne took over. “She prays for a major homosexual,” translated Vera. “She prays for forgiveness, for His forgiveness, for having tolerated this homosexual.”

  Then the spirit took hold of Vera and she, too, prayed. None of the other girls could translate, so Vera grabbed hold of my eyes with hers and bowed her head and took us both down into the German precision and American spirit and Christian truth of her repentance.

  Forgive us our sins, forgive us our yoga, forgive us the lies we tell ourselves, the things we say we don’t mind, the degradation from which we turn away, the truths we don’t share. . . .

  Forgive us, I prayed, for that language we do share. The language that whittles God down to a sharp point with which to spread a gospel; the gospel of Berlin or the gospel of Tulsa or the gospel of any city that knows the words—“love,” “God,” “forgive”—and uses the language swirling around them to hide their meanings. Forgive us our prayers, the way we touch ice and mistake the heat of our own flesh against the cold for the warmth of the spirit. “Forgive Vera and forgive me—”

  I said this last aloud, quickly, and the women stopped their prayers and stared, Gina and Anne struck dumb, silent Krista arching an eyebrow. They looked to Vera for translation.

  Instead she leaned close to me and murmured “Thank you,” and smiled and rested her fingertips on my knee.

  “Thank you,” I replied, as if our words had any meaning.

  9She Said Yes

  I am the offering. Burn me then, Father.

  —CYNTHIA HUNTINGTON, “WITNES
S FOR JEHOVAH”

  THIS IS HOW you enlist in the army of God: First come the fireworks and the prayers, and four thousand kids who scream, “We won’t be silent anymore!” Then the kids go to their knees, silent, after all, but for the weeping and regrets of fifteen-year-olds. The lights in the Cleveland arena fade to blue, and a man on the stage whispers about sin and love and the Father-God. The kids rise, thrilled; en masse they swear off “harlots and adultery”; the twenty-one-year-old MC twitches taut a chain across the ass of her skintight red jeans and summons a lucky few from the crowd to show off their best dance moves for God. “Gimme what you got!” she shouts. They dance, hip-hop for Jesus, a graceful balletic turn from an oversize boy who looks like a linebacker. Then they are ready.

  They’re about to accept “the mark of a warrior,” explains Ron Luce, commander in chief of BattleCry, the most furious youth crusade since young sinners in the hands of an angry God flogged themselves with shame in eighteenth-century New England. Nearly three centuries later, these teens are about to become “branded by God.” It’s like getting your head shaved when you join the marines, Luce says, only the kids keep their hair. His assistants roll out a cowhide draped over a sawhorse and Luce presses red-hot iron into the dead flesh, projecting a close-up of sizzling cow skin on giant movie screens above the stage.

  “When you enlist in the military there’s a code of honor,” Luce preaches. “Same as being a follower of Christ.” The code requires a “wartime mentality,” a “survival orientation,” and a readiness to face “real enemies.” The queers and communists, feminists and Muslims, and also Luce’s special nemesis, a cabal, he says, “like al-Qaeda,” that slips poisoned pop culture into innocent skulls. A conspiracy of advertising executives, clothing designers, film directors, musicians; even schoolteachers. “Techno-terrorists” of mass media, doing to the morality of a generation what Osama bin Laden did to the Twin Towers. “Just as the events of September 11, 2001, permanently changed our perspective on the world,” Luce has written, “so we ought to be awakened to the alarming influence of today’s culture terrorists. They are wealthy, they are smart, and they are real.”

  Luce is forty-five, his brown hair floppy, his lips pouty. On the screens above the stage his green eyes blink furiously. “The devil hates us,” he warns, his voice boyish yet certain. “And we gotta be ready to fight and not be these passive little lukewarm, namby-pamby, kumbayya thumbsucking babies that call themselves Christians. Jesus? He got mad!”

  Luce considers most evangelicals too soft. He hates what he sees as the weakness of “accepting” Christ, of “trusting” the Lord. He isn’t looking for followers, he’s seeking young Christians willing to become “stalkers,” obsessive for God. “I want an attacking church!” he shouts. Cue Christian metal on two mammoth screens on either side of the stage: “Frontline,” a video produced at Luce’s Honor Academy in East Texas for the metal band Pillar. “Frontline” opens with a broken guitar magically reassembling itself, a redemptive reversal of three decades of rock-and-roll nihilism. In its place? Crotch rock, gritty pretty boys thrusting and pumping the gospel of Luce’s crusade: “Everybody with your fist raised high / Let me hear your Battlecry!”

  In the hall outside the arena kids line up to buy BattleCry T-shirts and hoodies and trucker caps, a dozen designs scrolled with Goth and skater patterns, the Christianity implicit and titillating. A brown T for boys features a white silhouette of a kid with a baseball bat, a devil behind him rubbing his horns after a beat-down. no more lies, reads the legend.

  When the time comes for even the youngest to pledge their devotion to Luce’s crusade, I find myself sitting on the main floor of the arena next to a couple of twelve-year-olds, Hanneh and Mallory. Hanneh has straight blond hair and feet that don’t touch the ground; Mallory’s a redhead with curls. Mallory wants to borrow my pen. “I have to write a message to MTV,” she says. She hunches over in her seat, her hair hiding her hand as she scratches it out. “Dear MTV,” she reads aloud. “Leave those kids alone!” Then Mallory adds a kicker: “Repent!” I ask her what she means. She giggles as if I’m teasing her. “Ron Luce said so!”

  Luce knows that most of the kids who attend his shows come for the music and for the flirty glances that fly between the rows at moments of spiritual ecstasy. But he also knows that from their numbers, he’s growing a new hard core for American fundamentalism. The adults are stuck like hamsters spinning the wheels of electoral cycles. Luce cares more about kids who can’t vote. “That makes ’em want to fight,” he tells me backstage. “They get so livid. They’re mad.” Luce loves that anger. He calls his crusade a “counter-rebellion,” or a “reverse-rebellion,” or sometimes simply “revolution,” with no qualifiers. This event in Cleveland, Acquire the Fire, only one stop in what is becoming Luce’s permanently touring road show, is not meant to save souls—most of the kids I speak to say they got Jesus when they were four or five—but to radicalize them.

  He’s been doing this for two decades, but it didn’t take off until the day after the Columbine school shootings of 1999, when Luce rallied seventy thousand sobbing kids at the Pontiac Dome in Michigan. In 2006 he brought his shows to more than two hundred thousand kids. Overall, he’s preached to at least twelve million. They’re the base. Out of that number Luce has sent fifty-three thousand teen missionaries around the globe to preach spiritual “purity”—chastity, sobriety, and a commitment to laissez-faire capitalism—in Romania and Guatemala and Thailand and dozens of other “strongholds” that require young Americans to bring them “freedom,” by which the young Americans mean a Christ they believe needs no translation (literally; they don’t study languages). Luce has selected nearly six thousand for his Honor Academy, the best of whom become political operatives and media activists and preachers who funnel fresh kids into BattleCry. It’s a vertically integrated operation, a political machine that produces “leaders for the army,” a command cadre that can count on the masses conditioned by Luce’s rallies as their infantry.

  Luce says that only 4 percent of the United States will be Christian when the millennial generation comes of age. To understand how a nation more actively Christian than at any point in its past is about to become some vast Sweden—Luce’s archetypal wasteland of guilt-free sex and socialized medicine—you have to know that his antagonism toward secularism is dwarfed by a contempt bordering on hatred for what he dubs “cultural Christians.” He considers them traitors.

  At Acquire the Fire he tells the kids to make lists of secular pleasures they’ll sacrifice for the cause. Hanneh starts with hip-hop heartthrobs Bow Wow and Usher, bites her pen, and then decides to go big: “Music,” she writes. Beneath that, “Friends”—the nonfundamentalist ones—and “Party.” This, she explains, is a polite way of saying “sex.” Not that she’s had any, or knows anyone her age who has, but she’s learned from Luce that “the culture” wants to force it upon her at a young age. “The world,” he tells her, is a forty-five-year-old pervert posing as another tween online.

  Luce sometimes brings a garbage truck onto the floor to cart the lists away, but this is a relatively small event, so Hanneh and Mallory trot over to one of the trash bins stationed around the arena and drop theirs in. “I feel so much better,” Mallory tells Hanneh. Hanneh nods, smiling now. “I feel free,” she says.

  Later one of Luce’s PR reps takes me backstage to sift through the bins of rejected affections. Most kids mention music, or movies, or girlfriends and boyfriends, or sex, or, surprisingly often, just condoms, but a number of new warriors are oddly precise about their proposed abandonings. They cast into perdition Starbucks (multiple votes) Victoria’s Secret (ditto; Luce encourages kids to confront the managers of their local lingerie stores), breakfast cereal—Special K and Cap’n Crunch—hip-huggers, “smelling amazing,” 99.3 FM, “Eric,” vengeance, “medication,” and A&W root beer. “I would say it’s ridiculous what they are doing to root beer,” wrote a boy who
will drink A&W no more. Also on the block: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “the image of hos,” bulimia, McDonald’s (“Why are you so addictive?”), and romantic comedies, written with a big turquoise heart over the i ’s.

  Most of the messages, though, are junior versions of adult fundamentalist anger, such as the note from “Alison, Child of God,” that reads: “If this keeps up there won’t be kids to buy your stuff. It’s the same for the kids who have AIDS who are dying of sex that you promoted. So I say now in the name of Jesus, Stop.” Or this, unsigned, to MTV: “Are you really willing to risk the destruction of humanity?” Or this: “To the media—stop spreading your infectious filth.” Or this: “We WILL take action.”

  “This is a real war,” Luce preaches. When he talks like that he growls. “This is not a metaphor!” In Cleveland he intercuts his sermons with videos of suicide bombers and marching Christian teens. One of the most popular, “Casualties of War,” features an elegiac beat by a Christian rapper named KJ-52 laid over grainy flickering pictures of kids holding signs declaring the collapse of Christendom: “1/2 OF US ARE NO LONGER VIRGINS,” reads a poster board displayed by a pigtailed girl standing in a field; “40% OF US HAVE INFLICTED SELF-INJURY,” says a sign propped up over a sink in which we see the pale wrists of a girl about to cut herself; “53% OF US BELIEVE JESUS SINNED,” declares the placard of a young black man standing in a graffiti-filled alley.

  A secular adult might miss the narrative; the kids in the crowd are desperate to follow along. Luce doesn’t make it easy. Either you see the connections or you don’t. He doesn’t explain, he warns. To the crowd of watery-eyed teens he recites letters he says their peers have sent him, souls lost to what he calls, over and over—sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting—the “pigpen” of secularism. It’s a reference to the sorry fate of the prodigal son in the Gospel of Luke, who wound up tending hogs until he submitted to the authority of God and was restored to his riches. There’s an unnamed girl who left Jesus and then “got date-raped.” There’s “Emily,” who dated a non-Christian boy—“now she works in pornography and lives a bisexual lifestyle.” Luce sneers: “Pigpen.” There’s “Heather,” who wrote to Luce to complain that “my father is passive and my mom is controlling.” “Pigpen,” Luce says, his voice filled with sorrow for the girl with the sissy dad.