C Street

by Jeff Sharlet

  There is a modesty inherent in evangelicalism’s preference for personal stories, for every soul’s version of “I was lost, but now I’m found.” In a Protestant church without rank or reward, that story is democratic, radically so; my testimony is as important as yours, the poor man’s tale just as powerful as that of the rich one. But the marriage of evangelicalism and military rank turns public confession into projection. It is one thing for your neighbor in the pews to tell you that he was blind, and that now he sees; it is another for such vision to be described by your commanding officer.

  Young has been a Christian soldier ever since that terrible phone call. Now, he receives the second type of phone call: from his second wife, telling him she is on her knees, raising her husband up in prayer. That’s the call that makes you a warrior, Young told his soldiers. He knows he’s armored, ready to kill or be killed.

  “We are to live with anticipation and expectation of his imminent return,” he told me. “He wants us to do all things for the glory of God.” Young is particularly inspired by the work of the popular evangelical writer Joel C. Rosenberg, a former adviser for Benjamin Netanyahu who, shortly after September 11, 2001, published what would become his first bestselling end-times novel, The Last Jihad; written before the attacks of September 11, it opens with a Muslim terrorist crashing a plane into an American city. But you do not need to be a prophetic novelist to read the signs. Look, said Young: nuclear Iran, economic collapse, President Obama’s decision to “unleash science” upon helpless stem cells.

  There’s a sense, he said, in which the military is now the only safe place to be. “In the military, homosexuality is illegal. I don’t want to get into all the particulars of ‘don’t ask,’ but you can’t act on homosexual feelings. And adultery is illegal. Really, arguably, the military is the last American institution that tries to uphold Christian values. It’s the easiest place in America to be a Christian.”

  It was close to midnight when I had to sign off my first conversation with Young. The next afternoon, worried that he would be misunderstood, he called me to emphasize his commitment to the military’s General Order 1B in Iraq and Afghanistan, which forbids “proselytizing of any religion, faith, or practice.” Then, for close to an hour, he regaled me with stories of faith in action under his command. “I’m gonna tell you a story about the only time I ever had an EO concern. EO NCO”—the noncommissioned officer tasked with handling equal opportunity issues—“comes up to me and says, ‘Sir I got a soldier down in Bravo Company wants to see you about a complaint.’ I say, ‘Fine.’ I told him, ‘I don’t know what I said or did to offend you, but tell me what’s the issue.’ The kid says—he happens to be a black guy, not that that matters—he says, ‘Sir, I’m a Christian. I don’t go to church, but I read the Bible every day. But I believe when it comes to talking about God, it’s like watering a plant. You don’t want to water it too little, you don’t want to water it too much. Water it too much, you kill the plant. Sir, I think you talk about God too much.’ I say, ‘I think it’s appropriate that a Christian is the one to come up and make that complaint. Last thing I want to do is kill the plants! Thank you. Thank you.’ Then I said, ‘Do you mind if I tell you why I love God so much?’ And he didn’t, so I told him the whole story I told you, about my wife leaving me and wanting to kill my best friend. But I told him, ‘God is my governor.’ If you’re from a mechanical background you know a governor in an engine, a governor holds it back. A governor rules you and also keeps you in check. I said, ‘It stops me from doing things I might want to do. You know, like going to a strip club, or killing my best friend and my wife.’

  “That soldier says, ‘Sir, that’s awesome.’

  “Okay, now, this is where Young gets stupid. I said, ‘Every time I talk about God, you know why it bothers you? Because you’re not going to church. And you have some grandmother back home that’s praying for you to go to church.’ And he said he did have a grandmother praying for him. Okay, next time I’m at chapel, there was the guy who complained, and he said ‘Sir, wasn’t that an awesome service.’ And he gives me a big hug. That was the only formal EO problem I ever had.”

  There were more miracles, in Young’s eyes. The soldier who complained and then became a churchgoer was, through God’s grace, promoted. The NCO who brought him in to complain was mysteriously hospitalized after becoming “spiritually sick,” only to recover once he allowed Young to pray over him. Of the fourteen Americans killed in Kandahar under Young’s watch, at least six were “Bible-believing Christians,” a disproportionately large number compared to the demographics of his command. He sounded joyous. Why was this a miracle? I asked.

  “God took the ones that were ready to go!”

  Not long after our last conversation, Young was promoted. Full-bird colonel, just a star shy of general.

  * * *

  In the weeks following Obama’s election, Mikey says, he almost went to Washington. He met with campaign staffers, submitted plans, gathered endorsements from powerful insiders. His dream was a post in the Pentagon, from which he could prosecute the most egregious offenders. It didn’t seem entirely out of the realm of possibility. He could have been pitched as another gesture of bipartisanship, since Mikey is a lifelong Republican who probably would have voted for John McCain if his sons hadn’t run afoul of the Air Force Academy’s burgeoning spirit of evangelism—a culture that McCain, hardly a friend to fundamentalism, showed no interest in challenging last time around. It wasn’t clear that McCain could see it; his imagination of what life in the military is like seemed stuck before 1967, his ribald tales of U.S. Naval Academy shenanigans closer in spirit to the World War II era than the military that emerged from the Vietnam War.

  Another Vietnam veteran now serving in the Senate, who asked that he not be named so as not to compromise his close connections to today’s top officers, offers an analysis of how the breakdown of Vietnam led to a born-again military. Although the military integrated before much of the United States, he points out, it almost split along racial lines, particularly in the last days of war. If the military was to rebuild itself, the southern white men at the heart of its warrior culture had to come to an understanding of themselves based on something other than skin color. Many turned toward religion, particularly fundamentalist evangelicalism, a tradition that, despite its potent legacy of racism, reoriented itself during the post–civil rights era as a religion of “reconciliation” between the races. That faith would come to define itself in the early 1990s through the image of white men hugging black men, tears all around, at Promise Keeper rallies. “They replaced race with religion,” says the senator. “The principle remains the same: an identity built on being separate from a society viewed as weak and corrupt.”

  For decades, the military forged a sense of solidarity out of a singular purpose: the cold war struggle between free markets and state-planned economies, the shining city upon a hill versus the evil empire. In that fight, pluralism, racial or religious, was ultimately on our side, and it meshed neatly with ideologies that might otherwise be challengers, easily subsuming both nationalism and fundamentalism so long as communism was presented as an alternative should we fail to unite. Fundamentalism thrived not so much in opposition to the liberal state as in synchronicity with it, a neat, black-and-white theological correlate to a foreign policy—a vision of America’s place in the world, our purpose, you might say—embraced across the mainstream political spectrum. What’s surprising, though, is what happened after the Soviet flag slid down its pole in 1991: deprived of its godless foe, fundamentalism didn’t wither along with communism; it blossomed, free to focus its full energies on the domestic front. Absent communism, many fundamentalists within the military defined themselves not against but for: Christianity, that is.

  Much as the ominously named mercenary company Blackwater has rechristened itself Xe—hipper, less partisan, more powerful—the evangelical movement, its fundamentalist front included, is, if anything, broadening th
e scope of its concerns, mellowing its rhetoric but strengthening its roots in all corners of American society. The Purpose-Driven Life has a pulpit within the Democratic Party, via the inaugural address. Economic malaise turns out to be good for filling church pews, if not coffers. And the Christian nationalism that infused our fight with the evil empire continues to morph into the Christian internationalism of the world’s only superpower. Why? Because without a “good war” or a cold war to give it meaning, pluralism, for many Americans, is simply not enough. Nowhere is that more true than in the military, where unity of purpose is not just a feel-good political sentiment but also the very foundation for survival.

  Lacking a clear purpose, a common foe, some began to see pluralism itself as the enemy. The emergence of “radical Islam” as the object of a new cold war only complicated the matter. Rather than revealing a new enemy for us all to share, the idea of a monolithic radical Islam fractured pluralism from left to right. Many liberals abandoned even their rhetorical commitments to liberty of conscience, while the very conservatives who had favored arming militant Islamists ever since Eisenhower concluded that their universal embrace of religion in the abstract may have been naive. Perhaps pluralism, or at least the cold war variety that sustained the rise of American empire in the second half of the twentieth century, was nothing but propaganda, after all.

  That revelation forced fundamentalism’s hand. Once part of the cold war consensus, then a faith apart, American fundamentalism turned toward conquest at home. A religion based on its vigorous assertion of narrow and exclusive truth claims could no longer justify common cause with secularism. Adherents could not be against communism, godlessness—they had to be for—the active advance of a Christianity defined according to struggles not between nations but between ideas. And that, of course, closes the loop, leading believers into spiritual war against their own countrymen: “the unsaved,” as Brig. Gen. Donald C. Wurster put it, in a 2007 address to air force chaplains, who “have no realization of their unfortunate alliance with evil.”

  What is the nature of this evil? Some conservative evangelicals call it “postmodernism.” What they mean is the idea of diversity itself, its egalitarianism and its messy democracy. That is, the conviction that my beliefs have as much right to real estate in the public square as yours, that truth is always a mediated affair.

  American fundamentalism, the more zealous the better, is an ingenious solution, a mirror image of pluralism that comes with a built-in purpose. It is available to everybody. Its basic rules are easily learned. It merges militancy with love, celebrating the ferocity of spirit necessary for a warrior and the mild amiability required to stay sane within a rigid hierarchy. It’s a populist religion—anyone can talk to the top man—on a vertical axis. “It’s a Kingdom,” fundamentalist activists like to remind each other—not a democracy.

  The Air Force Academy chapel is composed of seventeen silver daggers rising above campus, veined with stained glass that suffuses the space inside with a violet and orange glow. But when one of the academy’s public relations officers takes me on a tour, it’s empty. Very few cadets worship there anymore. Instead, they meet in classrooms and dorm rooms, at mountain retreats and at the numerous megachurches that surround the academy.

  One of the most popular such services, The Mill, takes place on Friday nights at New Life, in a giant, permanent tent that, not long after academy dinnertime, fills with fake fog and power chords and more than a thousand men and women ranging in age from their teens to their early twenties—three hundred of them cadets shuttled in from the academy. I attended one Friday night in the company of Bruce Hrabak. For all his fervor, he was an excellent guide to the academy, a sports junkie who worried that his deep love for the Cowboys and Rock Chalk Jayhawk Kansas basketball crowded Christ out of his mind. His jokey amiability and natural curiosity undermined his militant intentions: he liked to be friends with everyone. But he was at the academy, he said, according to the Christian doctrine of “predestination,” or destiny chosen by God. In 2005, when it came time to pick a college, Hrabak took the question to God. “God,” he said one night before bed, “where do you want me to be? God, just please open the door you want me to walk through.” The next morning, God did. “I woke up and read this article, about a lawsuit against the Air Force Academy—it was Mikey. And I just knew—I knew!—God wanted me to come here to defend his name.”

  At The Mill, we found a few seats left close to the back, where we met Hrabak’s girlfriend, Jennifer, a petite and pretty blonde whom Hrabak had picked up by inviting her on a missionary trip to evangelize Mormons in Utah. She shot him down then, but now they were together. They swayed to the beat during the worship time, hands in the air, then got intimate for the sermon, leaning so close they were almost touching.

  The sermon that night was painful—the pastor’s wife had recently delivered a stillborn baby, and he spoke in raw, awful terms about suffering and theodicy, going over the age-old question of why a loving God permits bad things to happen to good people. It’s one of the central dilemmas of the Christian faith, and its persistence, its resistance to answers, has helped make Christianity the forge of much of the world’s great art and philosophy. By the end of this hour-long service, though, everything turned out for the best; even the dead baby had been shoehorned into God’s inscrutable plan, a rhetorical illustration of the brutal sensibility hidden within a variation of the faith that insists on both optimism and an omnipotent, interventionist God.

  Over dinner Hrabak had told me he believed that all pain, that which he endures and that which he inflicts, has a purpose. He felt this truth was of special solace for soldiers. I asked what he meant. “Well, you’re pulling a trigger, you know?” He thought about that fact a lot. He pictured the dead. In his classes, he watched videos of air strikes. He imagined suffering. He was not as afraid of dying—he believes his salvation is assured—as he was of killing unjustly. He was afraid of sin. His double identity—as a spiritual warrior and as an officer of the deadliest force in the history of the world—was his redemption. His faith in the air force followed along after his faith in Christ in an orbit of self-fulfilling prophecy, each faith confirming the other. It was a closed circuit of certainty in which the juice, the electricity, was the blood of the lamb—the price he believed Jesus had paid for his, Hrabak’s own, freedom. In turn, Hrabak was willing to pay that price, too, but not just for democracy. “You’re laying down your life for others,” he said. “Well, there has to be some true truth to put yourself in harm’s way for.” True truth; truth that requires an amplifier.

  But what would he do if he ever received an order that contradicted that truth?

  Hrabak looked shocked. He giggled, then composed himself and took a big bite of pizza, speaking confidently through his food. “Impossible, dude. I mean, I guess it could happen. But I highly doubt it.”

  What if he was ordered to bomb a building in which terrorists were hiding, even though there were civilians in the way?

  He shook his head. “Who are you to question why God builds up nations just to destroy them, so that those who are in grace can see that they’re in grace?” he asked. A smile lit up half his face, an expression that might be taken for sarcastic if Hrabak wasn’t a man committed to being in earnest at all times. What he’d just said, he thought, might be something like a Word of Knowledge, a gift of wisdom from God. It blew his mind. He had to repeat it, his voice picking up a speed and enthusiasm that bordered on joy. “He”—the Lord—“builds up an entire nation”—Iraq or Vietnam, Afghanistan or Pakistan, who are you to question why?—“just to destroy them! To show somebody else”—America, maybe, or a young man guided to college by God—“that they’re in grace.”

  6

  THE NOW

  WHAT IF Mark Sanford hadn’t gotten caught? What if C Street’s man had emerged from the woods untouched, or, at least, untainted by scandal, his secrets safe with the Coes?

  Maybe, instead of a confession, this: on
June 24, 2009, Mark Sanford calls a press conference in Columbia to address questions about his absence during the previous several days. There have been rumors, of course, but Jenny Sanford has dispatched them like the help that lingers too long after bringing tea. She knew exactly where her husband was, she told reporters: He was hiking the Appalachian Trail. A vacation without the family? Not at all. He’d been asked to write a book, and he was thinking. She knew this because he called every night to share the ideas he’d come up with during the day; they’re that kind of couple.

  “I won’t begin in any particular spot,” Sanford says. He opens the press conference with Jenny, the couple’s four boys, and his spiritual adviser, Cubby Culbertson, by his side. “Let me just start with: I love the Appalachian Trail.” What follows is a twenty-minute speech that rambles with purpose, an account of hiking the trail as extended metaphor for the governor’s vision of what conservatism could be. “Speech” isn’t really the right word; it’s more like a story. There’s a black bear who’d rustled through Sanford’s backpack; a nice young couple who’d restocked him with food; a wise old man he’d met at the foot of a thundering waterfall who’d reminded him that creation cuts its own path through the world. There are detours, off the trail and away from the straight line of time, up a mountaintop and through memory, back to his early mornings on his farm, in his tractor, beneath the morning-pink sky, listening to country music and scooping the earth; building.