The Romance of American Fundamentalism
After New Life banished Pastor Ted from his pulpit in late 2006,
the press wondered if this glaring evidence of hypoc-
risy would spell the end of fundamentalism’s broad appeal. The
press had asked the same question many times during the televange-
list sex scandals of the 1980s and ’90s —Jimmy Swaggart’s motel
rendezvous, Jim Bakker’s hush money for his secretary—and, long
forgotten now, another decade earlier when Time reported that two
students at the evangelist Billy James Hargis’s American Christian
Col lege, married by Reverend Hargis himself, had discovered on
their honeymoon that neither was a virgin; Hargis not only had mar-
ried the pai r but had de owered both husband and wife.1 Hargis’s
reputation never recovered, but his cause survived; so did the col-
lege vice president to whom the students confessed, David Noebel,
who used Hargis’s downfall to consolidate his own power. Today,
Noebel is president of Summit Ministries, headquartered just west
of New Life, where he oversees the education of 2,000 students a
year and the distribution of fundamentalist homeschooling materials
to thousands more. His most in uential book is The Homosexual Revo-
lution.
Scandal does not destroy American fundamentalism. Rather, l ike
a natural re that purges the forest of overgrowth, it makes the move-
ment stronger. And ercer. Such was the case in the aftermath of the
Hargis a air, when Noebel managed to convince millions that Har-
gis’s fall was not an occasion for a reconsideration of fundamentalism’s
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concept of sexuality but rather a call to action. Noebel’s subsequent
antigay manifesto, The Homosexual Revolution, helped make sex one of
the movement’s most potent political causes.
Somethi ng sim ilar happened after Ted Haggard’s disgrace. The
Reverend Mel White, a former ghostwriter for Jerry Falwell who has
since come out and now leads Soulforce, a pro-gay evangelical minis-
try, told me that Ted’s ordeal would serve only to drive more gay
fundamentalists into the closet. Nobody would want to face the pub-
lic sham ing Ted endured, while the fact that fundamentalist leaders
embraced Ted and promised to cure hi m would o er queer funda-
mentalists hope that they, too, could be made pure again by one of
the many “ex-gay” ministries that have arisen in recent years.
Following the end of the Cold War, during which anticommu-
nism was the organizing principle of American fundamentalism, sex
provided a new battleground. No longer would fundamentalism pre-
sent itself primarily as against an enemy, godless communism; after
the fall of the Berlin Wall, fundamentalism looked to sex as the new
frontier of its empire, and “purity” as the prom ise of its campaign.
Sexual purity also lends to the movement a radical tenor that’s thrill-
ing to young believers eager to distance themselves from the clumsy
politics of the old Christian Right. It is, one vi rgin told me, a rebel-
lion against materialism, consumerism, and “the idea that anything
can be bought and sold.” It is a spiritual war against the world, against
“sensuality.” This elevation of sexual purity—especially for men—as
a way of understanding yourself and your place in the world is new.
It’s also very old. First-century Christians took the idea so seriously
that many left their wives for “ house monasteries,” threatening the
very structure of the family. The early church responded by institu-
tionalizing virginity through a priestly caste set apart from the world,
a condition that continues to this day within Roman Catholicism.
Now, though, the Protestants of American fundamentalism are re-
claiming that system, making every young man and woman within
their sphere of in uence part of a new virgin army.
Real sex is no more endangered by such an ambition than the
political corruption—or, for that matter, radicalism—that Abram
324 | JEFF SHARLET
once dreamed he could abolish through the patient construction of a
voluntary theocracy. The chaste spiritual warriors of populist funda-
mentalism continue to experience all the same desires as the rest of
us, a fact they readily admit. The sexual purity they’re pursui ng isn’t
so much a static condition as a perpetual transformation, Charles
Finney’s revival machine rebuilt withi n one’s own soul. Purity lends
to populist fundamentalism the intensity of Jonathan Edwards’s Great
Awakening, the intimacy of Abram’s prayer cel ls. To be pure is to be
elite, or so chaste believers, looking at a world su used with sex,
may easily tell themselves.
Matt Dunbar was a short and ruddy- faced twenty- three- year- old,
a little shy, a man who kept his hands in his pockets. He was also
funny and smart and possessed of excellent conversational timing. He
had grown a small brown soul patch beneath his lower lip, and his
voice was smooth. When he talked to you, he held your eyes as if he
trusted you, which he did; Du nbar, wary of the world since he was a
boy, had decided to trust people. He studied religion through an an-
thropological lens as a graduate student at New York University,
where his friends called him Mr. Dunbar. He said in a matter-of-fact
manner that women liked him, and it was true. Mr. Dunbar was a
gentleman.
He lived in Brooklyn with his childhood best friend, Robin
Power. Sometimes Robin had a thick brown beard, and sometimes
he shaved himself clean and dyed his hair black and spiked it up, like
Johnny Rotten. He usual ly worked a gutterpunk look—a ratty, lay-
ered look of sweatshirts and buttons advertising obscure bands.
Sometimes, he wore eyeliner. He taught ninth-grade English at Mar-
tin Luther King High, in Manhattan, and he liked the fact that some
of his students thought he was gay.
Robin, like Dunbar, was a conservative Christian, but he wasn’t
allowed to talk about that at school. He was permitted to talk about
“values,” though, and to him, loving everyone, even gay men—his
students called them “ faggots,” but he considered them sinners, and
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 325
to him this was the di erence between secularism and Christianity—
was a value he wanted to share with his pupils. Once, he went to
school in drag to teach them a lesson, about judging a soul based on
appearances.
When I rst met Dunbar and Robin at their church—“The Jour-
ney,” a fundamentalist congregation of actors, dancers, and young
professionals who want to know actors and dancers—Robin got
most of the glances, the smiles, the cute little laughs that said, “Call
me.” But Robin was engaged. Dunbar didn’t do badly himself; the
women who knew Robin was taken gravitated toward him, and dur-
ing the time I knew him, he met a church girl, an actress named
Anna, blonde, broad-faced, and beautiful, quiet like Dunbar. He
thought she was a godly woman. He had been “waiting” for a long
time—“saving himself,” as an older generation might have said—and
now he had someone to wait for.
Dunbar and Robin grew up together in Visal ia, California, a hard
little agricultural town far from the coast. They were not part of the
megachurch nation; Dunbar was raised by a single mother, who took
him to a traditional Episcopal church, and Robin’s parents and sib-
lings were all musicians. They had their own little recording studio,
and they rocked, more Ramones than Partridge Family. Dunbar al-
ways wanted to be in thei r band. He and Robin went to the same
conservative, Christian college and moved to Manhattan afterward
with two other childhood friends, also Christians. They came be-
cause one of the men had a girlfriend here—the two are now
engaged—but the city has proven to be a sort of calling. “New York,”
said Du nbar, “is a great town for virgins.”
We were sitting on a bench after church, watching Sunday tra c
stream up and down Broadway. “Cleavage everywhere,” noted Dun-
bar. He had learned to look without desire. Robin held up his right
hand. Wrapped around his wrist, in a gure eight, was a black plastic
bracelet. “This,” he said, “is a ‘masturband.’ ” One of their friends at
college came up with the idea. As long as you stayed pure—resisted
masturbating—you could wear your masturband. Give in, and o it
went, like a scarlet letter in reverse. No masturband? Then no one
326 | JEFF SHARLET
wanted to shake your hand. “It started with just four of us,” said
Dunbar. “Then there were, l ike, twenty guys wearing them. And
gi rls too. The more people that wore them, the more people knew,
the more reason you had to refrain.” Dunbar even told his mother.
He lasted the longest. “ Eight and a half months,” he said. I notice he’s
not wearing one now. He wasn’t embarrassed. Sexuality, he believed,
is not a private matter.
The other night, he said, he’s out drinking, with “secular friends.”
They were al l a little drunk—Dunbar was fond of Bible verses about
wine—and they’re tal king about sex.
“Dunbar,” volunteers one of the secular guys, “is a virgin.” The
jerk is laughing. “By choice,” he says.
Huge mistake. All female eyes leave the man who wants their at-
tention and rotate Dunbar’s way. “Four girls surround me. They
want to know everything.”
Is he embarrassed? (“I’d only be embarrassed if I was trying to get
some.”) Is oral okay? Anal? ( He doesn’t l ike to be “legalistic,” caught
up in rules, and he has friends who enjoyed anal sex and still called
themselves virgins, but—no.) Has he always been a virgin? (“Uh,
yeah. That’s what ‘virgin’ means.”) Why? (Jesus, “romance,” it all
blends together . . . )
One of Dunbar’s room mates had recently found himself in the
same situation: young man from the sticks in a big-city bar, sur-
rounded by women who genuinely want to know if anything can
tempt him. They were tempting him, of course, which was the
point. He was in trouble. One woman gave hi m the kind of look usu-
ally used only by teen movie seductresses. “Sex,” she said, “ is just
something I do.” Lucifer himself could not have whispered more
sweetly. And then—the material world ruined it all. Satan’s angel
took a chip o a plate of cheesy nachos. “ Like eating,” she said. “ It’s
easy.”
Dunbar’s virgin comrade took a big breath of virtue and girded
his loins for continuing chastity. “ The whole sex/nacho thing?” Dun-
bar said. “It just doesn’t make sense to a virgin.”
Food, after all, belongs to the mundane real m. Sex, on the other
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hand, is supernatural. Dunbar read the biblical Song of Solomon—lovers
rhapsodizing over each other, he obsessed with her breasts l ike “two
fawns” and her “rounded thighs like jewels”; she with his legs like “ala-
baster columns” and his lips l ike lilies, “dripping sweet- smelling
myrrh”—not as erotica but as a metaphor for the love between man
and God. Sex that is just two bodies in motion struck him as empty,
even if love was involved. Every encounter must be a kind of three-
some: man, wife, and God. Without Him, it’s just fucking.
“Suckers for romance,” Leslee Unruh, the founder of Abstinence
Clearing house, described men like Dunbar and Robin. She meant it
as praise, since she considers them the vanguard of a desexed revolu-
tion. “We want authenticity,” she told me. “We want what’s real.” It’s
“safe sex,” she explained, that requires faith, since there is “no evi-
dence” that safe sex “works.” Unruh is a youthful-looking grand-
mother from South Dakota wit h a big mouth, literally—outlined
in re-engine red for public performances—and dyed blonde hair.
Si nce her early days as one of the most fervent antiabortion crusad-
ers of the 1980s, she’s made over her politics, too. She still ghts
abortion—she was one of the activists behind South Dakota’s ban
on all abortions, revoked by referendum in 2006 —but she’s discov-
ered that she c an win more converts by going to the root cause, sex
itself.
So, in 1997, she launched Abstinence Cleari ng house in Sioux
Falls. She’d been a self-declared “chastity” educator since the early
1980s, but it wasn’t until the Cl inton years that American fundamen-
talism fully discovered sex as a weapon in the culture wars. In 1994,
a Southern Baptist celibacy program, True Love Waits, brought
200,000 virgi nity pledge cards to Washington, D.C. In 2004, the
group brought a million to the Olympics in Athens. Now, Abstinence
Clearing house acts as a nexus for activists and as their voice in Wash-
ington, claiming as “ friends” a slew of o cials with unrecognizable
names, abstinence crusaders in the Departments of Health and Hu-
man Services, Education, and even State. Family members li ke
328 | JEFF SHARLET
Brownback and Representative Joe Pitts used their Value Action
Teams to insert chastity into foreign a airs.
Uganda, which following the collapse of Siad Barre’s Somalia
became the focus of the Family’s interests in the African Horn, has
been the most tragic victim of this projection of American sexual
anxieties. Following implementation of one of the continent’s only
successful anti-AIDS program, President Yoweri Museveni, the
Family’s key man in Africa, came under pressure from the United
States to emphasize abstinence instead of condoms. Congressman
Pitts wrote that pressure into law, redirecting millions of dollars
from e ective sex-ed programs to projects such as Unruh’s. This
pressure achieved the desired result: an evangelical revival in Uganda,
and a stigmatization of condoms and those who use them so severe
that some college campuses held condom bon res. Meanwhile, Ugan-
dan souls may be more “pure,” but their bodies are su ering; follow-
ing the American intervention, the Ugandan AIDS rate, once
dropping, ne arly doubled. T his fact goes unmentione d by activists
such as Unruh and politicians such as Pitts, who continue to promote
Uganda as an abstinence success story.
The actual fate of Ugandan citizens was never their concern.
Pitts, in the Family tradition, may have had geopolitics on the mind:
with Ethiopia limping along following decades of civil war and dicta-
torship and Somalia veeri ng toward a Taliban state, tiny, Anglophone
Uganda has become an American wedge into Islamic Africa. But the
American uses and abuses of Uganda are still more cynical: Christian
Africa has been appropriated for a story with which American funda-
mentalists argue for domestic policy, a parable detached from Afri-
can realities, preached for the bene t of Americans. In Unruh’s
telling, the ostensible “success” of Uganda’s abstinence program jus-
ti es the miseducation of American schoolchildren.
Under the Bush administration, Abstinence Clearing house helped
the federal Centers for Disease Control establish a “gold standard ” for
abstinence-only sex education programs. A student in one of these
programs may hear that sex outside of marriage can lead to suicide;
that condoms don’t prevent AIDS; that abortion often results in
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sterility; and that men’s and women’s gender roles are biologically
determined as “ knights” and “princesses,” which, if violated, cause
depression. And the Clearing house continues to lobby for more,
bringing politicians together with activists at conferences intended to
win support not just for abstinence curricula but for the privatization
of public schooling altogether: vouchers for Christian academies,
“character” charter schools such as those promoted by the Fam ily’s
Eileen Bakke (who has become a Family prayer partner of Janet Mu-
seveni, Uganda’s rst lady), and homeschooling. The Clearing house
hosts “purity balls” and abstinence teas. It sponsors “power vi rgins”
arou nd the country, good-looking young men and women who work
the fundamentalist lecture circuit spreading the no- sex gospel. It also
operates as a one-stop shop for abstinence paraphernalia, much of it
fundamentalist despite the group’s allegedly secular orientation: 14-
karat gold “What Would Jesus Do” rings; books such as Single Chris-
tian Female; ready- to- go absti nence PowerPoint pre sen ta tions. There’s
abstinence chewing gum, abstinence stickers in batches of 1,0 00,
abstinence balloons in batches of 5,000. There’s even an abstinence
pencil.
Unruh considered herself broad-m inded enough for the demands
of an ostensibly secular society. If religion is to be kept out of the
schools, she said, “shame and conscience are important tools” in its
place. But “romance,” more than anything else, guided her under-
standing of sexuality. This is what she found romantic: a father who
gives his teenage daughter a purity ring only to take it back on her
wedding day and hand it over to his daughter’s new husband, her vir-
gi nity passed from man to man like a baton.
Therein lies the paradox of the purity movement. It’s at once an
attempt to transcend cultural in uences through the timelessness of
scripture, and a pai nfully speci c response to the sexual revolution.
Populist fundamentalism grew into a political force in almost direct
proportion to the mainstreaming (and subsequent weakening) of
various sexual liberation movements, and as it did so it led the elites
of American fundamentalism, so closely aligned with the secular
conservatives as to be nearly invisible, out of the establishment
330 | JEFF SHARLET
co alition. Absent the sexual revolution, populist fundamentalism
might still thrive only in enclaves, and elite fundamentalism sti ll
coexist easily with secular politics, as it did during the early days of
the Cold War.
But the sexual revolution hardly invented sex or the anxieties it
results in when mixed with conservative Christianity. The com-
plaints of today’s purity crusaders echo those of Abram’s men in the
1930s when they resolved to meet in all-male cells rather than sub-
mit to the authority of churches in which women comprised the clear
majority, if not the leadership. “Christianity, as it currently exists,
has done some terrible things to men,” writes John Eldredge, the
author of a best- selling manhood guide called Wild at Heart. He
thinks that church life in America has made Christian men weak.
Women who are frustrated with their girlie-man husbands and boy-
friends seize power, and the men retreat to the safe haven of porn
instead of whipping the ladies back into line. What women really
want, he says, is to “be fought for.” And men, he claims, are “ hard-
wired” by God for battle; Jesus wants them to be warriors in the vein
of Braveheart and Gladiator.
Wild at Heart and Eldredge’s other best sellers, The Journey of De-
sire and The Sacred Romance (as well as “ eld manual” workbooks that
can be purchased separately), address sexual “purity” as part of the
fabric of Christian manliness. Other books, such as God’s Gift to
Women: Discovering the Lost Greatness of Ma sculinity and Every Man’s Bat-
tle, by Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker, make sex their central
concern. Every Man’s Battle has become almost a genre unto itself,
with dozens of Every Man spi n- o titles: Every Young Man’s Battle, Every
Woman’s Battle, Every Man’s Challenge, Preparing Your Son For Every Man’s
Battle, and on and on. The Every Man premise is that men are sexual
beasts, so sinful by nature that, without God in their lives, they don’t
stand a chance of resisting temptation. But the temptation they most
fear is not the age-old seduction of the esh but the image of the
esh. They are not opposed to modernity, but to postmodernity and
what they perceive as its free- oating symbols. The books are anti-
media manifestos, warning that we are prey to any media we look at;
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images, they preach, are forever. One author confesses to being
plagued by a picture of the sitcom actress Suzanne Somers, nude in a
“surging mountain stream,” that he had seen twe nty ye ar s earlier. For
the authors, the solution is simply not to look, an anti-iconographic
stance that belongs more to the Old Testament than the New.
I rst heard about the Every Man books from a volunteer at Dun-
bar and Robin’s church, a twenty- ve-year-old man who said he’d
slept with forty women before he “revirgi ned” with the help of the
series. I was more surprised to learn that Robin had been reading
Every Man’s Battle in preparation for marriage, and planned to lead a
Bible study for men in the fall using Every Man as exegetical reading.
Robin seemed too smart for these books. But then, what he wanted
from them was not subtle thinking but clarity, a law of black and
white.
“You’re sexual ly pure,” write Arterburn and Stoeker, “when sex-
ual grati cation only comes from your wife . . . [and] sexual purity
has the same de nition whether you’re married or single.” To achieve
this, they argue, men must go to a ki nd of war. “Your life is under a
withering barrage of machine-gun sexuality that rakes the landscape
mercilessly,” they report in their volume for single men. They en-
courage maki ng lists of “areas of weakness” and seem particularly
concerned with shorts: “nubile sweat- soaked girls in tight nylon
shorts,” “female joggers in tight nylon shorts,” “young mothers in
shorts,” and “volleyball shorts,” which are apparently so erotic that
they require no bodies to ll them. To avoid these temptations, men
must train themselves to “bounce” their eyes o female curves. Older
men can help, too; the coauthors urge young men to nd mentors
who will check in with them by phone about their masturbation fan-
tasies. This may be embarrassing for a young Christian, so the au-
thors suggest a code. Homosexuality is relegated to a short afterword
in which they list the number of Exodus International, a ministry
dedicated to “ freeing” people from homosexual desires.
What’s really strange about all this is that it works. Not in the
sense of de-eroticizing the world but in the sense of reinvigorating
American fundamental ism with a new generation of foot soldiers,
332 | JEFF SHARLET
men and women who respond to a hypersexual consumer culture by
making sex, in its absence, a top priority of their religion. “Absti-
nence,” Du nbar told me, “is countercultural,” a kind of rebellion, he
said, against materialism, consumerism, and “the idea that anything
can be bought and sold.”
Every Man operates a hotl ine, 1–800 NEW LIFE, for men who’ve
“threatened” their relationships with women through their use of
pornography. When I called to confess that reading about tight- shorted
women in Every Young Man’s Battle struck me as weirdly erotic, a pro-
fessional masturbation counselor named Jason told me that I needed
to be more like a woman. Women, he said, don’t like porn. In fact, if
I asked any woman I knew, she’d tell me that for her to “use” porn,
she’d have to fall out of love. Women are just that pure.
What if I became so womanly that I developed a desire for men?
I asked. Perfectly normal, he assured me; many men passed through
that dark corridor on their way to purity. The end result, he prom-
ised, would be total man hood. To get there, Jason suggested I sign up
for a ve-day, $1,800 Every Man’s Battle workshop (held monthly in
hotels around the country), in which I would take classes on shame,
“ false intimacy,” and “temptation cycles” and work with other “men
of purity” toward “recovery.”
Every Man’s Battle also o ered a two-day “outpatient program” for
wome n, Every Heart Restored, to help them deal with their husbands’
depravity, which is another one of the paradoxes of the purity move-
ment. Men’s sexuality, according to the movement, is on the one
hand all-encompassing, capable of eroticizing nearly anything, and at
the same time so simple and dumb that the best they can hope for is
to adjust themselves to their wives’ slow simmer. Women, mean-
while, are i nherently purer than men and thus simpler, and yet their
sexuality is complicated and subtle, a story in which husband and
wife must play carefully scripted roles. Books such as Wait For Me, a
tie-i n to a Christian pop hit of the same name by the Christian singer
Rebecca St. James, What Every Woman Wants in a Man, by Diana Ha-
gee, and W hen God Writes Your Love Story, by Eric and Leslie Ludy—not
to mention the numerous Every Woman’s Battle titles and countless
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Christian romance novels —peddle a soft-focus vision of female de-
sire drawn not from scripture but from fairy tales. Wait For Me opens
with the claim that God has planted in every man and woman a
dream in which women long to be rescued by a “champion warrior”
with a “ double-edged sword” from the towers i n which they’ve been
imprisoned by the “Dark Lord.” All women, writes Lisa Bevere in
Kissed the Girls and Made Them Cry: Why Women Lose When They Give
In, “long to be rescued by a knight in shining armor.”
And yet Kissed the Girls and Made Them Cry goes deeper than chiv-
alrous clichés. Bevere’s description of the love of Christ isn’t lled
with the inadvertent innuendos that plague the men’s guides ( “true
manhood,” prom ises one Christian manhood guide, gets “polished by
the hand of God”) but rather an eroticism, studiously gentle and
mysterious, that is revealing of chastity’s allure. Ri ng on the scene
from the Gospel of John in which Jesus refuses to condemn an adul-
teress, Bevere writes, “At rst, He is not willi ng to look at her or to
answer them. He bends down and writes in the dust. The nger of
God etches in dust letters that are not recorded for our knowledge.”
Jesus, Bevere supposes, is thinking about man’s rst love, Eve. “Per-
haps, in His memory He is seei ng another who attempted to cover
her nakedness in a Garden long ago.” She imagines every woman in
the crowd waiting to hear what Jesus will say; she hears in Christ’s
rebuke to the men a secret message for women. “Let He who is with-
out sin cast the rst stone,” Jesus preaches. For most people, the
story ends there, but Bevere li ngers until the frustrated accusers have
left, and there is just Jesus and this naked woman, and nally “she
lifts her head and meets His gaze,” and Jesus tells her He does not
condemn her, and tells her to go, and sin no more.
It’s a beautiful scene, depicting Jesus as romantic hero. And it re-
ally is “countercultural,” an alternative not just to the sexualized
world but also to the unforgivi ng fundamentalists of generations
past. But then Bevere writes—and this is really the crux of the
whole virgi nity movement—that the problem arose not because the
woman sinned, which goes without saying for Christian conservatives,
but because “a treacherous enemy has dragged the women of this
334 | JEFF SHARLET
generation”—us, now—“naked and guilty before a holy God.”
God forgives; that’s why “revirgining” is always an option. “The
enemy” is the problem. Who is it? In the Gospel of John, the enemy,
as Bevere puts it, were Jews, those whom the gospel writer called
“the children of Satan”; but in the Gospel of Lisa Bevere, the enemy
is more abstract and more powerful. It’s sex. Not “real sex,” the kind
she enjoys with her husband, but everything else—every fantasy that
doesn’t conform to wedded bliss, every thrill that doesn’t belong in
church, the lust that spoils the romance of Christianity.
Before Robin became fully Christian—back when he cared as
much about his guitar as he did about God—he dated a non-Christian
gi rl. His voice grew husky as he remembered: “There were times,
when we were naked, and my tongue was inside her, and she’s whis-
pering for me to go further.” Dunbar stared at him. He knew this
story, but he didn’t mind hearing it again. It wasn’t prurient for
them; it was bonding. “There were times,” continued Robin, “when I
had to ask myself, ‘What do I believe?’ ”
“But you weren’t alone with her,” Dunbar said.
“No.”
Dunbar turned to me. “He had responsibility to us.” His brothers.
But Robin kept letti ng them down. After high school, he stayed at
home for a year while Dunbar and the rest of his friends went on to
college. He joined a Christian punk band, Straight Forward. He
started slipping. At college, he continued to sl ide. He began dating a
woman only recently born again, still immature in her faith. She was
thrilled by Robin’s attention; he was a man known to be on re for
God. The girl—a “ baby Christian,” in the lingo —wanted to get closer
to that warmth. She did so the only way she knew how. “A blow job,”
said Robin.
It had been one thing to go down on his girlfriend when he wasn’t
sure what he believed. It was another to let a girlfriend go down on
him after he’d committed himself to God. But then, he said, that’s
how it works all too often when a man looks like he’s devoted to
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Jesus. “It becomes more about giving than receiving”—an i mplicit
recognition of the sexism he knew permeated the best intentions.
Even among Christians, the girls “will go down on you, but you don’t
have to go down on them.” The experience, he said, broke his heart.
What it did for the girl who sucked him o and got dumped for her
impurity, he couldn’t even imagine.
That sum mer, Robin and his ancée were to marry back home in
Visalia, where Dunbar would be his best man. Power felt like he had
waited a long time. He didn’t want to marry for sex, so he’d re-
strained himself from proposing until it did not even enter his mind.
Soon he would experience his reward. A “sexual payo ,” according
to the authors of Every Man’s Battle, that wi ll “explode o any known
scale.”
Like the fundamentalists of old, today’s Christian conservatives
de ne themselves as apart from the world, and yet the modern move-
ment aims to enjoy its fruits. To the biblical austerity of chastity, they
add the promise of mind- blowing sex, using the very terms of the
sexual revolution they rally against. And that’s just the beginning.
Sexual regulation is a means, not an end. To believers, the movement
o ers a vision grander even than the loveliness of a virgin: a fairy tale
in which every man will be a spiritual warrior, a knight in the service
of the king of kings, promised the hand and the heart and, yes, the
sexual services of a “ lady.” That is the erotic dream of American fun-
damentalism: a restoration of chivalry, a cleansi ng of impurity, a na-
tion without sin, an empire of the personal as political.
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