What Everybody Wants
They are drawn as if by magnetic forces; they speak of Colo-
rado Springs, home to the greatest concentration of fundamen-
talist activist groups in American history, both as a last stand and as a
kind of utopia in the making. They say it is new and unique and pre-
cious, embattled by enemies, and also that it is “traditional,” a blue-
print for what everybody wants, and envied by enem ies. The city
itself is unspectacular, a grid of wide western avenues lined with
squat, gray and beige box buildi ngs, only a handful of them taller
than a dozen stories. Local cynics point out that if you put Colorado
Spri ngs on a truck and carted it to Nebraska, it would make Omaha
look lovely. But the architecture is not what draws Christians looking
for clean living. The mountains help, but there are other mountain
towns. What Colorado Springs o ers, nally, is a story.
Lori Rose is from Minnesota and heard rumors about t his holy
city when she lived on an air force base near Washington, D.C. Her
husband isn’t a Christian, refuses Jesus, looks at things he shouldn’t;
but she has fou nd a church to attend without him. “I want a rela-
tionship like my relationship wit h God,” she says. “It’s almost like
an a air.” Ron Poelst ra came from Los Angeles. Now he volunteers
at his church, selling his pastor’s books on “free-market theology”
after services. His two teenage boys stand behind him, d isplay
models for the bene ts of faith. They fold their hands in front of
themselves and both smile whenever Ron glances t heir way. L.A.,
Ron says, would have eaten them up: the gangs. Adam Taylor grew
292 | JEFF SHARLET
up in Westchester County, an heir to the Bergdorf Goodman for-
tune, the son of artists and writers, a pri nce of the city. He lived
the life of Augustine, and it nearly killed him. He came to Colo-
rado Spri ngs to learn the Bible the hard way, each word a nail
pounded into sin. Now he’s a pastor, and the Bible doesn’t hurt
anymore.1
The story they found in Colorado Springs is about newness: new
houses, new roads, new stores. And about oldness, imagined: what is
thought to be the traditional way of life, families as they were after
the world wars, before the culture wars, which is to say, during the
brief, Cold War moment when America was a nation of single-
breadwi nner nuclear families.
Crime, of course, looms over this story. Not the actual facts of
it—the burglary rate in and arou nd Colorado Springs exceeds that
in New York City and Los Angeles—but the idea of it: a faith in the
absence of crime. And of politics, too: Colorado Springs’ funda-
mentalists believe they live i n a politics-free zone, a carved-out
space for civility and for like-mi nded dedication to commonsense
pri nciples. Even pollution plays a part: Christian conservatives
there believe that they breathe cleaner air, despite the smog that
collects against the foothills of the Rockies and the cyanide, from a
century of mining, that is leaching into the aquifers and mountain
streams.
But those are facts, and Colorado Springs is a city of faith. A
shining city at the foot of a hill. No one there believes it is perfect.
And no one is so self-centered as to claim the perfection of Colorado
Spri ngs as his or her ambition. The shared vision is more modest, and
more grandiose. It is a city of people who have ed the cities, people
who have fought a spiritual war for the ground they are on, for an
interior frontier on which they have built new temples to the Lord.
From these temples they will retake their forsaken promised lands,
remake them in the likeness of a dream. T hey call the dream Chris-
tian, but in its particulars it is American, populated by cowboys and
Indians, monsters and prayer warriors to slay them, and ladies to
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 293
reward the warriors with chaste kisses. Colorado Springs is a city of
moral fabulousness. It is a city of fables.
The city’s mightiest megachurch crests silver and blue atop a gentle
slope of pale yel low prairie grass on the outskirts of town. Silver and
blue, as it happens, are the air force colors. New Life Church was
built far north of town in part so it could be seen from the Air Force
Academy. New Life wanted that kind of character in its congrega-
tion.2
Church is insu cient to describe the complex. There is a perma-
nent structure called the Tent, which regularly lls with hundreds or
thousands of teens and twentysomethings for New Life’s various
youth gatherings. Next to the Tent stands the old sanctuary, a gray
box capable of seating 1,50 0; this juts out i nto the new sanctuary,
capacity 7,500, already too small. At the complex’s western edge is
the World Prayer Center, which looks l ike a great iron wedge driven
into the plains. The true architectural wonder of New Life, however,
isn’t a physical structure but the pyramid of authority into which it
orders its roughly 12,000 members. At the base are 1,300 cell groups,
whose leaders answer to section leaders, who answer to zone, who
answer to district, who used to answer to Pastor Ted Haggard, New
Life’s founder.
In late 2006, Pastor Ted achieved a notoriety that surpassed the
fame he had won as a preacher, when a middle- aged prostitute named
Mike Jones played for the press answering machine messages from a
regular client of his, “Art,” whom Jones had just learned was Ted
Haggard, one of the most powerful fundamentalist leaders in the
country. That wasn’t all. It turned out that Pastor Ted had been using
methamphetamine—speed—as well. At rst, Ted denied every-
thing; but there was too much evidence, and he soon resigned. Since
then, Ted, married and a father, has been “healed,” according to a
panel of fundamentalist leaders charged with his cure; he is now “100
percent heterosexual.” But he is not back in his pulpit. And yet the
294 | JEFF SHARLET
pulpit itself—the fundamentalist experiment known as New Life—
endures. Pastor Ted’s ideas survive, even prosper, for Ted’s downfall
was taken by many within his congregation as evidence of the great
works he had been doing. So great, that is, that the Enemy, Satan
himself, targeted Ted above all others. The two antigay initiatives on
the 2006 bal lot, which Jones hoped to defeat by outing Ted’s hypoc-
risy, passed with greater support than their backers—including
Ted—had imagined possible.
When I met him, Pastor Ted was a handsome forty-eight-year-
old Indianan transplanted to Colorado, a casual man most comfort-
able in denim. He insisted he was an ordinary man, in an ordinary
church, in an ordinary city. On the other hand, he also wanted me to
know that he talked to George W. Bush in a conference call every
Monday. He liked to say that his only disagreement with the presi-
dent was automotive; Bush drove a Ford pickup, whereas Pastor Ted
loved his Chevy. At the time, Pastor Ted presided over the National
Association of Evangelicals, whose 45,000 churches and 30 m illion
believers make up the nation’s most powerful religious lobbying
group. The NAE had come a long way since its creation in 1942,
when its leaders had to ask Abram for help in making contact with
U.S. government o cials. Under Pastor Ted, the NAE was a force
unto itself, no longer in need of favors from anyone.
Under Ted, the NAE made its headquarters in Colorado Springs.
Some believers call the city the “Wheaton of the West,” in honor of
Wheaton, Illinois, once the headquarters of a more genteel Christian
conservatism. Others call Colorado Springs the “evangelical Vati-
can,” a nickname that says much both about the city and about the
easeful orthodoxy with which the movement now views itself. Cer-
tainly the gathering there has no parallel in this country, not in
Lynchburg, Virginia, nor Tulsa, nor Pasadena, nor Orlando, nor any
other city that has aspired to be the capital of evangelical America.
Fundamentalist activist groups and parachurch m inistries in Colo-
rado Spri ngs number in the hundreds. Groups migrate there and
multiply. They produce missionary guides, “ family resources,” school
curricula, nancial advice, athletic traini ng programs, Bibles for
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 295
every occasion. The city is home to Young Life, to the Navigators, to
Compassion International; to Every Home for Christ and Global
Ethnic Missions (Youth Ablaze). Most prominent among the minis-
tries is Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Fam ily, whose radio pro-
grams (the most extensive in the world, religious or secular),
magazines, videos, and books reach more than 20 0 m illion people
worldwide. It was Pastor Ted who persuaded Dobson to relocate
from Pasadena to Colorado Springs, where his operation is so vast it
earned its own zip code.
Whereas Dobson plays the part of national scold, promising to
destroy pol iticians who defy the Bible, Pastor Ted quietly guided
those politicians through the ritual of acquiescence required to save
face. He did n’t strut, like Dobson; he gushed. When Bush invited
him to the Oval O ce to discuss policy with seven other chieftains
of the Christian Right in late 2003, Pastor Ted regaled his congrega-
tion with the story via e-mail. “Well, on Monday I was in the World
Prayer Center”—New Life’s high-tech, twenty-four-hour-a-day prayer
chapel—“and my cell phone rang.” It was a presidential aide. The
president, said Pastor Ted, wanted him on hand for the signi ng of the
Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Pastor Ted was on a plane the next
morning and in the president’s o ce the following afternoon. “It was
incredible,” wrote Pastor Ted. He left it to the press to note that
Dobson wasn’t there.3
Moreover, it was Pastor Ted, not Dobson—a child psychologist
with a Ph.D.—who proved most comfortable in the secular atmo-
sphere of Washington politics, where he was as likely to lobby for his
views on international trade negotiations as on sexual morality. In Ted,
the popul ist and elite strands of American fundamentalism had merged.
At the height of his power, no pastor in America held more sway over
the political direction of fundamentalism than did Pastor Ted, and no
church more than New Life. It was by no means the largest mega-
church, but New Life was a crucible for the ideas that inspire the move-
ment. Fundamentalism is as much an intellectual as an emotional
movement; and what Pastor Ted built in Colorado Springs was not just
a battalion of spiritual warriors but a factory for ideas to arm them.
296 | JEFF SHARLET
New Life began with a prophecy. In November 1984, a mission-
ary friend of Pastor Ted’s named Danny Ost—known for his gifts of
discernment—asked Ted to pull over on a bend of Highway 83 as
they were drivi ng, somewhat aimlessly, in the open spaces north of
the city. Pastor Ted—then twenty-eight, married, father to Christy
and Marc us, given to fasting and oddly pragmatic visions (he believes
he foresaw Internet prayer networks before the Internet existed) —
had been wondering why God had called him to this bleak city, then
known as a “pastor’s graveyard.” Ost got out of the car and squinted.
“This,” said the missionary, “this will be your church. Build
here.”4
So Pastor Ted did. First, he started a church in his basement. The
pulpit was three ve-gallon buckets stacked one atop the other, and
the pews were lawn chairs. A man who lived in a trailer came round
if he remembered it was Sunday and played guitar. Another man got
the Spirit and lled a ve-gallon garden sprayer with cooking oil and
began anointing nearby intersections, then streets and buildings all
over town. Pastor Ted told his ock to focus their prayers on houses
with For Sale signs so that more Christians would come and join
them.
He was always on the lookout for spies. At the time, Colorado
Spri ngs was a small city split between the air force and the New Age,
and the latter, Pastor Ted believed, worked for the devil. Pastor Ted
soon began upsetting the devil ’s plans. He staked out gay bars, invit-
whole congregation pitched itself
ing men to come to his church;5 his
into invisible battles with demonic forces, sometimes in front of pub-
lic buildings. One day, while Pastor Ted was working i n his garage, a
woman who said she’d been sent by a witches’ coven tried to stab
him with a ve-inch knife she pulled from a leg sheath; Pastor Ted
wrestled the blade out of her hand. He let that story get around. He
called the evil forces that dom inated Colorado Springs —and every
other metropolitan area in the country— Control.
Sometimes, he says, Control would call him late on Saturday
night, threatening to kill him. “Any more impertinence out of you,
Ted Haggard,” he claims Control once told him, “and there will be
unrelenting pandemonium in this city.” No kidding! Pastor Ted
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 297
hadn’t come to Colorado Springs for his health; he had come to wage
“spiritual war.”6
He moved the church to a strip mal l. There was a bar, a liquor
store, New Life Church, a massage parlor. His congregation spilled
out and blocked the other businesses. He set up chairs in the alley. He
strung up a banner: SIEGE THIS CITY FOR ME, signed
JESUS.7
He assigned everyone in the church names, taken from the phone
book, they were to pray for. He sent teams to pray in front of the
homes of supposed witches—in one month, ten out of fteen of his
targets put their
houses on the market.8 His congregation “prayer-
walked” nearly every street of the city.
Population boomed, crime dipped; Pastor Ted bel ieved that New
Life helped chase the bad out of town. His church grew so fast there
were times when no one knew how many members to claim. So they
stopped tal king about “members.” There was just New Life. “Are you
New Life?” a person might ask. New Life moved into some corporate
o ce space. Soon it bought the land that had been prophesied,
thirty- ve acres, and began to build what Pastor Ted promised would
be a new Jerusalem.
JERUSALEM, COLORADO. To the east is sky, empty land, Kan-
sas. To the west, Pike’s Peak, 14,110 feet above sea level, king of a
jagged skyline of the lower forty-eight states’ tallest mountains. The
old city core of Colorado Spri ngs withers into irrelevance thirteen
miles south; New Life leads the charge north, toward fusion with
Denver and Boulder and a future of one giant front-range suburb, a
muddy wave of big-box stores and beige tract houses eddying along
roads so new they had yet to be added to the gas- station map I bought.
Sunday mornings, tra c backs up from the church half a mile in all
four directions. When parents nally pull into a space am id the thou-
sands of cars packed into a gray ocean of lot, their kids tumble out
and dash toward the ve silver pillars of the entrance to New Life,
eager to slide across the expanse of tiled oor, run circles around The
Defender, a massive bronze of a glowering angel, its muscular wings in
298 | JEFF SHARLET
ful l ex, and bound up the stairs to “Fort Victory,” whose rooms are
designed to look like an Old West cavalry outpost where soldiers
once battled real live Indians, back when Colorado still had Indians
to conquer and convert.
There were no kids in Fort Victory on my rst Sunday at New
Life, the rst Sunday of the year. It was a special day, “ Dedication,”
the spiritual anoi nting of the church’s new sanctuary. Metallic and
modern, laced with steel girders and catwalks, the sanctuary is built
like two great satellite dishes clapped belly to belly. It was designed,
I was told, to “ beam” prayer across the land. (New Lifers always turn
to metaphors to describe their church and their city, between which
they make little distinction. It is like a “training camp” in that its
young men and women go forth on “missions.” It is like a “ bomb” in
that it “explodes,” “gifting” the rest of us with its fallout: revival,
which is to say, “values,” which is to say, “ the Word,” which is to say,
as so many there do, “a better way of l ife.”)
At the heart of the sanctuary rises a four- sided stage, on either
side of which are two giant cross- shaped swimming pools with me-
chanical covers. Above the stage a great assemblage of machinery
hovers, wrapped in six massive video screens. A woman near me
compared it to Ezekiel’s vision of a metallic angel, circular and “full
of eyes all around.” When the lights went down and the screens
buzzed to life, the sanctuary turned a soft, silvery blue. Then the six
screens lled with faces of tribute, paying homage to New Life and
Pastor Ted: a senator, a congressman, Colorado’s lieutenant gover-
nor, the city’s mayor, and Tony Perkins, Dobson’s enforcer on Capi-
tol Hill; denominational chieftai ns, such as Thomas E. Trask, “general
superintendent” of the 51 million worldwide members of the Assem-
blies of God; and a succession of minor nobles from the nation’s
megachurches. These I know now by numbers: Church of the High-
lands, in Alabama—pastored by a New Life alumnus —that has
grown from 34 to 2,500 souls i n the last four years; a New Life
look- alike in Biddeford, Maine, that has multiplied to 5,000; Rocky
Mountain Calvary, the New Life neighbor that has swelled in a de-
cade from a handful to 6,000.
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 299
Kyle Fisk, then the executive administrator of the National As-
sociation of Evangelicals, had guided me to a seat i n the front row,
which meant I had to crane my neck back ninety degrees to follow
the video screen above me. The worship band, dressed in black, goa-
teed or soul-patched or shag-headed, lay at on their backs, staring
straight up. To my right sat a m iddle- aged woman in a oor-length
ower-pri nt dress with shades of orange and brown. Her hair was
thick, chestnut, wavy, her face big-boned and raw and beautiful, her
eyelids electric blue with eyeshadow when she closed them in prayer,
her eyes dark and wide as she tilted her head back to watch the trib-
utes roll past. Her mouth hung open.
The band stood. A skinny, chinless man with a big, tenor voice,
Ross Parsley, directed the musicians and the crowd, leading us and
them and the choi r as the guitarists kicked on the fuzz and the drum-
mer pounded the music toward arena-rock frenzy. Two fog machines
on each side of the stage lled the sanctuary with white clouds. Pod-
shaped projectors cast a light show across the ceiling, giant spinning
white snow akes and cartwheel ing yel low owers and a shimmering
blue water-e ect. “Prepare the way!” shouted Worship Pastor Ross.
“Prepare the way! The King is com ing!” A man in a suit in the east-
ern front row shuddered and shot his right foot forward and fell into
a kickboxi ng match with the air, keeping time with the rhythm.
Across the stage teens began leaping straight up, a dance that swept
across the arena: kids hopped; old men hopped; middle- aged women
hopped. Spinners wheeled out from the ranks and danced like der-
vishes around the stage. The dark-eyed woman next to me swayed,
her hips lling one side of her dress, then the other, her hands wav-
ing like sea grass. The light pods dilated and blasted the sanctuary
with red. Worship Pastor Ross roared, “Let the King of Glory enter in!”
The woman beside me screamed, fell down to her knees, rocked
back and forth until her arms slid out before her and her forehead
tapped the carpeted oor. The guitars thickened the fuzz, and ushers
rushed through the crowds throwing out rainbow glow strings, glow
necklaces, glow crowns. The arena went dark, and 8,0 00 New Lifers
danced with their glow strings, like a giant bowl of rainbow sorbet.
300 | JEFF SHARLET
White light ared, blinding us, and then disappeared, leaving us
in darkness again. Fog pumped out double-time. We would have
been lost had it not been for the blue video glow of the six big screens.
All heads tilted upward again. Watching the screens, we moved in
slow motion through prairie grass. A voiceover announced, “The
heart of God, beating in our hearts.” Then the music and video
quickened as the camera rose to meet the new sanctuary. The woman
beside me gasped. Images spliced and jumped over one another:
thousands of New Lifers holding candles, and dozens skydiving, and
Pastor Ted, Bible in hand, blond head thrust forward above the Good
Book, smiling, nger-shaking, singing, more smiling, lling half of
his face with perfect white teeth. His nose is snubby and his brow
overhung, lending him an impishness crucial to the smile’s success;
without that edge he would look not happy but stoned. Now Pastor
Ted, wearing a pu y ski jacket in red, white, and blue, took us to the
suburban ranch house where he stayed on his fateful visit to Colorado
Spri ngs; then on to another suburban ranch house, nearly indistin-
guishable, where he made plans for the church. Then to a long suc-
cession of one- story corporate o ce spaces and strip-mall storefronts,
the “sanctuaries” Pastor Ted rented as his congregation grew, each
identical to the last but for the greater oor space.
The lights came up. Pastor Ted, now before us in the esh, intro-
duced a guest speaker, one of his mentors, Jack Hayford, founding
pastor of the ten-thousand- strong Church On The Way, in Van Nuys,
California. Hayford is a legend among evangelicals, one of the men
responsible for the revival that made Bible- believing churches—what
the rest of the world refers to as fundamentalist—safe for suburbia.
He is a white-haired, baldi ng, ea gle- beaked man, a preacher of the
old school, which is to say that he delivers his sermons with an actual
Bible in hand. (Pastor Ted uses a PalmPilot.) Pastor Hayford wanted
to “wedge” an idea in our minds. The idea was “Order.” The illustra-
tion was the Book of Revelation’s description of four creatures sur-
rounding Christ’s throne. “The rst . . . was like a l ion, the second
was like an ox, the third had a face like a man, the fourth was like a
ying angel.” Look! said Pastor Hayford, his voice sonorous and
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 301
digni ed. “All wonderful, all angels.” The angels were merely di er-
ent from one another. Just, he said, as we have di erent “ethnicities.”
And just as we have, in politics, a “ hierarchy.” And just as we have, in
business, “di erent responsibi lities,” employer and employees. An-
gels, ethnicities, hierarchy, employers and employees—each cate-
gory must follow a natural order.
Next came Pastor Larry Stockstill, from Ted’s old church in Ba-
ton Rouge, presenting yet another variation of preacher. He took the
stage with his wi fe, Melanie, who wore a pink pantsuit. Pastor Larry
wore a brown pinstripe suit over a striped brown shirt and a golden
tie. His voice was Louisiana; the word pulpit came out as pull- peet.
“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 shes, there
are strange people. Too many churches, he said, focus on the Over-
world. “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 c rowd, the people into
drugs, the people into sex. You nd ’em . . . in the Underworld.”
After church, I crossed the parking lot to the World Prayer Cen-
ter, where I watched prayers scroll over two giant at- screen televi-
sions while a young man played piano. The Prayer Center—a joint
e ort of several fundamentalist organizations but located at and pre-
sided over by New Life—houses a bookstore as well as “corporate”
prayer room s, personal “prayer closets,” hotel rooms, and the head-
quarters of Global Harvest, a ministry dedicated to “spiritual war-
fare.” The atrium is a soaring hall adorned with the ags 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 i n muted red, white, and blue- black stone. Each point directs the
302 | JEFF SHARLET
eye to a contemporary pai nting, most depicting gorgeous, muscular
men—one is a blacksmith, another is bound, fetish-style, in chains—in
various states of u ndress. My favorite is The Vessel, by Thomas Black-
shear, a major gure 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 slabl ike pecs and his six-pack abs and over-
ows 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 to-
ward Jesus.
In the chapel are several computer term inals, where one can sign
on to the World Prayer Team and enter a prayer. Eventually one’s
words will scroll across the large at 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 any-
one 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 pol itics 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
sta of the World Prayer Center. Sometimes these are domestic —USA:
Pray for the Arlington Group, pastors working with White house to renew Mar-
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 303
riage 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. KO-
REA: Pray God will crush demonic stronghold and communist regime of Kim
Jung Il.
The Iraqis come up often, particularly with regard to their con-
version: Despite the e orts of the news media, believing soldiers and others
testify to the e ective 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 Bi-
bles in the Arabic language distributed by Christians in Iraq. And one ex-
plicitly aligns the quest for democ racy 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.
Behi nd the piano player in the main hall of the World Prayer
Center, the front range of the Rocky Mountains stretched across a
oor-to-ceil ing, semicircular window with a 270-degree view. Above
him, a globe fteen feet in diameter rotated on a metal spindle. He
played songs that sounded familiar but unnamable, the sou ndtrack 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- ve,
and he worked at Red Lobster. He wasn’t from Colorado Springs,
and he knew very few people who were. He’d grown up i n San Di-
ego, and once, he said, he’d been good enough to play Division I col-
lege basketball. But he broke his ankle, and because the marines
prom ised him court time, he joined. There didn’t turn out to be
much basketbal l for hi m 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 hi m to the mountai ns. He discovered that a lot of
304 | JEFF SHARLET
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 spi ritual Gettysburg.” Why here? I asked. He thought about it and
rephrased his answer. “This place is just a watering hole for Chris-
tians. For God’s people. Something extra powerful’s about to pour
out of this city. I hope not to stay i n 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 trai ning ground.”
“There was,” Pastor Ted said one afternoon in his o ce, “a signi -
cant in uence exerted on the [2004] election by Colorado Springs.”
He was meeting with me and another reporter, an Australian from a
nancial paper.
“You mean,” the Australian asked, “almost like a force going out
from Colorado Springs?”
A force—Pastor Ted liked that. He smiled and o ered other ex-
amples. 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 Ukrai-
nian evangelical population has grown more than tenfold, from
250,0 00 to 3 mill ion. According to Ted, it was this army of Chris-
tian capitalists that took to the streets. “They’re pro–free markets,
they’re pro –private property,” he said. “ That’s what evangel ical
stands for.”
In Pastor Ted’s book Dog Training, Fly Fishing, & Sharing Christ in
the 21st Century, he desc ribes the church he thinks Christians want. “ I
want my nances 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 fam ily and me should li fe become di cult 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
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 305
live life well, not exhaust me with endless ‘worthwhile’ projects.” By
worthwhile projects Ted means new bui lding 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 ben-
e ts, risks, and maybe above all, the excitement of a free-market so-
ciety.” They like the stimulation of a new brand. “Have you ever
switched your toothpaste brand, just for the fun of it?” Pastor Ted
asks. Adm it 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 ock can start organizing itself accord-
ing to each member’s abilities and tastes.9
Which brings us back to “Order.” Key to the growth of evangeli-
calism during the last twenty years has been a social structure of cell
groups that allows churches to grow endlessly while maintaining or-
thodoxy 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 inti-
mate involvement feasible. He may have been correct at the time.10
Pastor Ted’s i nsight was that the very growth of consumer soci-
ety itself had conditioned ordinary Americans to perceive themselves
306 | JEFF SHARLET
as decision makers. “Free-market globalization” has made Americans
so free, he concluded, that a populist cell-group system could func-
tion 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 read-
ing for the hundreds of pastors under Ted’s spiritual authority across
the country. From Friedman, Pastor Ted says he learned that every-
thing, including spirituality, can be understood as a commodity.
Friedman may have been the transmitter, but it was elite funda-
mentalism’s belief that international capitalism is at the heart of the
Gospel that migrated from Abram’s cells into the seminaries and ser-
mons 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 spi ritual freedom. His real chal-
lenge became one not of policing individual morality but of persuad-
ing 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 bibl ical and in thei r interest. The for-
mer was the easier task, as the Fam ily 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 inter-
est of its elite members, but Ted faced a more di cult challenge,
since the economics of globalization have not so much increased
competition and opportunity as squashed it, ushering in an age of
unpre ce dented corporate consolidation. T he cell-group system, which
functions much like consumer capitalism—o ering the semblance of
“choice” even as it forecloses genuine alternatives —proved the per-
fect 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 rst
job in professional Christendom was smuggling Bibles into Eastern
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 307
Europe—a project with which the Fam ily 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 politi-
cal aims and then convinced himself that the hybrid was objective
truth, much l ike what Abram had once called the universal inevitable,
much like Sam Brownback’s conviction that free trade is foretold in
the Bible. The pro cess of economic globalization, Ted believed, is a
vehicle for the spread of Christ’s power.
By that, he meant Protestantism; Catholics, he believed, “con-
stantly look back. And the nations dominated by Catholicism look
back. They don’t tend to create our greatest entrepreneurs, inven-
tors, research and development. Typically, Catholic nations aren’t
shooti ng 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 happen-
ing 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 thi ng.”
For Ted, though, the battle boils down to evangelicals versus Is-
lam. “My fear,” he said, “is that my children will grow up in an Is-
lamic 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 mil itary 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 “speci cally called by
God” to Colorado Springs seventeen years ago. Linda was not a
Christian back then. She had married young and moved west from
Bu alo so her husband could work for Martin Marietta, a defense
308 | JEFF SHARLET
contractor. He wouldn’t let her go to church because he was deter-
mined to forget his Baptist past, and she was a Catholic, which he
considered simply “Roman” and bad. That was ne with Li nda.
Church didn’t feel m iddle-class. Linda never did nd 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 ed 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 Bu alo to this point
high up in the Rockies, and there, for the rst time, she had felt close
to God. Years later, when she had to run, she went where she re-
membered God had been.
At rst, 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 worki ng seventy hours a week, and she was
still broke. A friend at the hotel invited her to New Li fe. She didn’t
want to be arou nd all these people weeping and babbling and shak-
ing. 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 speci cally 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 child-
care 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
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 309
novels. But he’s a good church boy: he loves most of all his youth cell,
and readi ng the Bible, and talking with his mom about how to be a
fol lower 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 mu ns 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 lled with the sound of
explosions.
“No,” said Linda. “ To my Spirit.” She opened her eyes and ex-
plained the pro cess she had undergone to reach her re ned 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 grue-
some; but she did not name them, for she would not “give demons
glory.” They are all the same, she said. “It’s rad icalism.”
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 di erent 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 mi x 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. When-
ever I asked where to eat, they would warn me away from down-
town’s neat little grid of cafés and ethnic joints. Stick to Academy,
310 | JEFF SHARLET
they’d tell me, referring to the vein of superstores and prepackaged
eateries —P. F. Chang’s, Cali fornia Pizza Kitchen, Chili’s—that by-
passes the city. Downtown, they said, is “confusi ng.”
Part of thei r antipathy is literal ly biblical: the Hebrew Bible is the
scripture of a provincial desert people, suspicious of the cosmopoli-
tan powers that threatened to destroy them, and fundamentalists
read the New Testament as a catalog of urban ills: sophistication,
cynicism, lust. But the anti-urban sentiments of modern fundamen-
talists are also more speci c to the moment in which they nd them-
selves.
In the 2002 election, fundamentalists swept Georgia’s elected
o ces. They toppled an incumbent Democratic governor, a war-
hero Democratic senator, the Speaker of the state house, the Demo-
cratic leader of the state senate, and his son, the Democratic candidate
for Congress in a majority- black district that state Democrats had
drawn up especially for him. The new Republican senator, Saxby
Chambl iss, and the new governor, Sonny Perdue, both conservatives
and Christian, won not on “moral values” but on an exurban plat-
form. The mastermind behind the coup was Ralph Reed, once of the
Christian Coal ition, who had been reborn as Georgia’s Republican
chairman. Reed remains a fundamentalist, the same man who once
tested employees’ commitment to “Christian values” by asking them
if they supported the death penalty for adultery, but he was too canny
to talk like that in public. The term Christian, he’d learned, is a “di-
vider,” not a “uni er,” so he had left overt faith behind. He backed
candidates who ran under the mantra of the exurbs: “Shorter com-
mutes. More ti me with family. Lower mortgages.”
This troika of exurban ambition worked on multiple levels. Just
as Nixon used marijuana and heroin in the 1960s as code for hippies
and blacks, Reed devised a platform that con ated ordinary personal
goal s with fundamentalist values. Shorter commutes is a ploy that any
old-time ward heeler would recognize. It means “Let’s move the
good jobs out of the city.” Atlanta, like Colorado Springs, has an ur-
ban core that conservatives would just as soon see wither. More time
with family extends that prom ise of exurban jobs but al so speaks in
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 311
code to the fundamentalist preoccupation with “ family”—that is,
with de ning it, with excludi ng not just gay couples but any combi-
nation not organized around “ biblical” principles of “male headship.”
As for lower m ortgages, they are lower in exurbs because cities sub-
sidize them. The city pays the taxes that build the sewers and the
roads for the exurbs. The city provides the organization that makes
them possible. Exurbs are parasites. And what else does lower mort-
gages mean? More land. More space between you and your neighbors.
And this, too, is necessary for fundamentalism, which depends on
the absence of con ict—the Fam ily’s reconciliation—as one of its
main selling points. For all its talk of community, it is wary of com-
munity’s main asset: the con ict, and the resulting cultural innova-
tion, born of proximity. Such cultural innovation is death to today’s
populist fundamentalism, which tosses a gauzy veil of tradition over
the big-box consumerism of its megachurches, much as the Family’s
elite fundamentalism once cast big-business conservatism as “ rst-
century” Christianity.
As contemporary fundamentalism, populist and elite, has be-
come an exurban movement, it has reframed the question of
theodicy—if God is good, then why does He allow su ering?—as a
matter of geography. Some places are simply more blessed than oth-
ers. Cities equal more fallen souls equal more demons equal more
temptation, which leads to more fallen souls. The threats that su use
urban centers have forced Christian conservatives to ee—to Cobb
County, Georgia, to Colorado Springs. Hounded by the sins they see
as rampant in the cities (homosexuality, atheistic schoolteachi ng,
ungodly imagery), they imagine themselves to be outcasts in their
own land. They are the “persecuted church”—just as Jesus prom-
ised, and just as their cell-group leaders teach them.
This exurban exile is not an escape to easy living, to barbecue
and lawn care. “We [Christians] have lost every major city in North
America,” Pastor Ted writes in his 1995 book Primary Purpose, but he
believes they can be reclaimed through prayer—“violent, confron-
tive prayer.”11 He e ncourages believers to obtain maps of cities and to
identify “power points” that “strengthen the demonic activities.” He
312 | JEFF SHARLET
suggests especially popular bars, as well as “cult-type” churches.
“Sometimes,” he writes, “particular government buildi ngs . . . are
power points.” The exurban position is one of strategic retreat, where
believers are to “plant” their churches as strategic outposts encircling
the enemy.
I returned to the World Prayer Center for a church sta meeting.
More than one hundred employees began with “worship”—which
means they started with a band, one of New Life’s many “worship
teams” of musicians. This one was composed of students in New
Life’s Worship and Praise School, a one-year college-credit program
created to train and sta churches around the country. The students
were all young and attractive, dressed in the kind of quality-cotton
punk cloth ing one buys at the Gap. “Lift up your h ands, open the door,”
crooned the lead singer, an ino ensive tenor. Male singers at New
Life and other megachurches are almost always tenors, their voices
clean and indistinguishable, R&B-in ected one moment, New Coun-
try the next, with a little bit of early 1990s grunge at the beginning
and the end.
The worship style was a ki nd of musical correlate to Pastor Ted’s
free-market theology: designed for total accessibility, with the illu-
sion of choice between strikingly similar brands. (Pastor Ted pre-
ferred the term avors and often used Baskin- Robbins, the chain of
ice cream stores, as a metaphor when explaini ng his views.) The
drummers all stuck to soft cymbals and beats anyone could handle.
Lyrics tended to be rhythmic and perfectly pronounced, the better
to sing along with when the words were projected onto movie
screens. There are no sad songs in a megachurch, and there are no
angry songs. There are songs about desperation but none about de-
spair; songs convey longing only if it has already been ful lled.
The idea of applying market economics to church origi nated not
within fundamentalism or evangelicalism, nor even in the petri
dishes of the laissez-faire think tanks in D.C., but with a sociologist
from the University of Washington named Rodney Stark, whose
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 313
work has won a broad readership beyond his discipline. Stark (who
now teaches at Baylor, a Baptist university i n Texas) and various col-
laborators began interpreting religious- a liation data through the
lens of neoliberal market theory in the 1980s.12 The very best sort of
religious economy, insists Stark, is one unregulated by either the
state or large denom inations. Left to form, change, and die organi-
cally, Stark believes, churches will naturally come to meet the popu-
lace’s diverse spiritual needs, which he divides into a spectrum of six
“niches” akin to a left/right political scheme. He argues that the law
of the market spurs new religious movements, which start out small,
in “ high tension” with the society around them, at the “ultraconser-
vative” end of the spectrum. As these sects grow, their tension usu-
ally decreases—that is, writes Stark, they dilute the “seriousness” of
their faith—until they eventually drift to the “ultraliberal ” end. Im-
plicit is that there is a natural and fairly steady demand for religion
that needs only to nd expression in a properly varied supply.13
Despite its academic prose, Stark’s work has won a wide reader-
ship among local pastors, who have propagated his ideas through the
cell-group structure. On the surface, at least, the evangelical enthu-
siasm for Stark’s work might seem somewhat puzzling. Certainly
Stark does celebrate the entrepreneurial, “ultraconservative” church
as the engine of religious vigor. And yet he also seems to promise
fundamentalists that their eventual fate wil l be moderation, or plu-
ralistic irrelevance, or both.
In fact, the analogy with free-market econom ics holds up quite
neatly. Stark is an economist of religion; his theory tells him that
unfettered markets will lead to competition, diversity, pluralism.
His fundamentalist adherents, by contrast, are like businessmen,
who understand and approve of where the theory leads in practice:
toward consolidation, control, manufacture of demand. What the
most farsighted are doing is fostering something like Stark’s spec-
trum of “niches,” but all withi n the con nes of their individual mega-
churches. They are building aisles and aisles in which everyone can
nd somethi ng, but behi nd it all a single corporate entity persists,
and with it an ideology.
314 | JEFF SHARLET
In devising New Life’s small-group system ( Pastor Ted preferred
small- group to cell, but he considered the terms interchangeable), Ted
asked himself and his sta a simple question: “Do you like your
neighbors? ” And, for that matter, “Do you even know your neigh-
bors? ” The answers he got—the golden rule to the contrary—were
“Not really” and “No.”14 Okay, said Pastor Ted, so why would you
want to be in a small group with them? Ted deduced a few “rules.”
One was, “ I Want to Meet with People I Like.” That is, he didn’t want
to be forced into fellowship with people who weren’t his type. That
wasn’t un-Christian, he decided; it was bibl ical. God loves everyone,
Ted decided, but God likes some people more than others. And so
did he. Another rule was, “I Don’t Want to Study Something I’m Not
Interested In.” Ted, for instance, got mad when he thought of all the
dull Bible studies he’d sat through that had ignored his passion, free-
market economics.15 His point was that arbitrary small groups would
make less sense than self- selected groups organized around common
interests. Hence New Li fe members can choose among small groups
dedicated to motorcycles, or rock climbing, or homeschooling, or
protesting outside abortion cli nics. There are even stealth small
groups, such as a lm club created to draw in people unaware that
they’ve joined a Christian group, much less a New Life evangelical
e ort. The New Lifers involved simply “choose movies with subtle
Christian themes [and] gently nudge the conversation toward spiri-
tual themes.” An ostensibly secular group created to help young
couples with their nances teaches that the primary cause of poverty
is divorce; from there it’s a short leap to Christian “fam ily values”
such as male authority.16
Pastor Ted’s true genius lay in his organizational hierarchy, which
ensured ideological rigidity even as it allowed for individual expres-
sion. For all his talk about “ free markets,” Pastor Ted was oddly de-
termi nistic. Not just in his assumption that social networks should
remain entrenched along class lines, but in his belief that social sci-
ence provides the tools with which to quantify the condition of the
soul and to direct it—some might say “engi neer” it—accordi ngly.
Absent the societal vetting of the elites gathered in the Fam ily’s
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 315
prayer cells, the aspiring group leaders of populist fundamentalism
must undergo a battery of personality and spiritual tests, as well as an
o cial background check. Once chosen, they meet regularly with
their own leaders in the chain of command, and members are en-
couraged to jump the chai n and speak to a higher level if they thi nk
their leader is strayi ng into “ false teachings”: moral relativism, ecu-
menism, or even “Satanism,” in the form of New Age notions such as
crystal healing.
Whether the system is common sense or heresy itself—the Body
of Christ atomized—is beside the point; New Lifers found it power-
fully persuasive. Pastor Ted instituted a semester system, so that no
one needed to be locked into a group he or she didn’t like for too
long. And since New Life’s cell groups didn’t limit themselves to Bi-
ble study, they functioned as covert evangelizing engines. In return,
what Pastor Ted gave his ock, and American fundamentalism, were
lifestyle choices.
Commander Tom Parker and his family live a long way from New
Life, far south i n a neighborhood of postage- stamp yards and houses
without foundations and streets without sidewalks. Not because
they’re suburban but because nobody bothered to pour concrete.
Com mander Tom used to make computer chips; his wife is a maid.
Their l iving room set is comprised of two couches a leg-stretch apart,
with Commander Tom’s recliner between. An upright piano, painted
red-and-white, is backed against one wall; a TV, no longer much
used, squats agai nst the other. When I visited, Commander Tom’s
wife stayed in the kitchen, but his son, Junior Commander TJ, joined
us in the l iving room. The two men—TJ is only fteen, but he’s been
bar mitzvahed, about which more i n a moment—owe their o cer’s
ranks to the Royal Rangers, a Christian alternative to the Boy
Scouts.17 The largest “outpost” of the Rangers in the country, 475
boys and men, rallies at New Life.
Royal Rangers wear khaki military uni forms and black ties.
They study rope c raft and smallbore shoot ing and “American
316 | JEFF SHARLET
Cultures.” There is a badge for “Atomic Energy,” which boys can
earn by making scale models of a nuclear reactor. Mai nly, though,
Rangers earn merit badges for reading the Bible. Most boys go book
by book, which earns them a special vest stitched over entirely in
badges, but truly dedicated Rangers take it all i n one giant swallow,
a feat of reading for which they earn a si ngle Golden Achievement
Badge. TJ, who t raveled to Los Angeles last year to claim second
place in the regional Ranger of the Year competit ion, has such a
Golden Achievement Badge. He is a stu rdy boy, with a swimmer’s
shoulders and an honest, rectangular face, baby fat all gone but for
plump roses over his cheekbones. His blue eyes have more focus
than that of most boys his age, and his smi le is shy but sweet and
wide. In another setting, he’d be a teen dream, but TJ doesn’t meet
many girls. He is homeschooled, and most of his out-of-the-house
hours are dedicated to t he Rangers, an all-male organization. TJ’s
purity ring, which he wears on a delicate silver chain, is a symbol
of his commitment to virgi nity until marriage. It was given to him
two years ago by Commander Tom on the occasion of TJ’s bar
mitzvah.
The bar mitzvah was Tom’s idea. A heavier, darker-haired ver-
sion of TJ plus glasses and a mustache, Tom decided his son deserved
a ritual to mark his entrance into manhood, just li ke the Jewish peo-
ple have. TJ took as his text not a portion of Torah but the song
“Shine,” by a Christian rock band called the Newsboys.
The Kind of Light
That might persuade
A strict dictator to retire
Fire the army
Teach the poor origami.
TJ and Com mander Tom are both members of an elite Ranger
cadre known as the Frontier Christian Fellowship, in which boys and
men regress to pioneer li fe in pursuit of ultimate Christian manhood.
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 317
Father and son are still Frontiersmen, which is the lowest level, but
they dream of becoming Buckskin Men. “ The problem,” said TJ, “ is
that it takes time and money. Because you have to make an out t.
And it has to be out of leather.”
“If you’re a Frontiersman, you can’t wear regular clothes,” Tom
explained.
“You don’t have to catch the deer yourself,” said TJ. “You can just
buy the leather at a store. But you gotta learn how to sew it.”
“And you gotta make up something you can live o .”
“A tr ade.”
“Like making candles,” said Tom.
You also have to choose a special name. TJ was thinking about
“White Flame,” to follow up on his bar m itzvah theme of “Shine.”
Tom had chosen “Rain Bolt.” Rain came from his favorite contempo-
rary Christian song. “Word of God speak,” he sings gently, “Let it fall
down like rain, open my eyes to see His majesty.” Bolt, he adds, “is
just the awesome power of God.”
Tom thought that power was misunderstood, even by his fellow
Christians. It’s about being in the Father, he said. In the sabbath,
too, but he couldn’t really explain this in-ness. “At the end of Hebrews
4, it has this verse”—he looked to TJ, who recited from memory:
“The Word of God is livi ng and active, sharper than any double-edged
sword, cutting until it divides soul from spirit, joints from mar-
row.”
TJ is the kind of boy who always has a book with him. Dickens’s
Old Curiosity Shop sat on the couch in case the conversation grew
boring, and on the co ee table between TJ and his father was a pile of
Christian thrillers Tom was reading on TJ’s recommendation. Mostly,
Tom read the Bible, and The Lord of the Rings, over and over. He
would have liked to have joined the Riders of Rohan, a New Life cel l
of suburban bikers that took its name from Tolkien’s noble horsemen,
but he couldn’t a ord a motorcycle. He couldn’t a ord much of any-
thing but religion itself. Tom’s favorite book of the Bible is the Gospel
of John. “It’s dying to yourself, so you can be with Jesus, going into
318 | JEFF SHARLET
the throne of God. It says don’t be ashamed, going into the throne of
God. But how can you not be ashamed? ”
One day the previous August, Tom had been at work, making
computer chips, when for no apparent reason his m ind said good- bye
to his body and left it standi ng there with no power to move. He told
it to turn, but it wouldn’t turn. Blink, but it wouldn’t blink. When
he regained control, the rst thing he did was take hi mself to the
doctor for an MRI. But the moment the nurse turned on the ma-
chine, his eyeballs felt as if they were popping; his hands clenched
into claws. All he could do was whisper, “ Turn . . . it . . . o .”
Electronics seemed to exacerbate the condition. “I’m allergic,” he said.
He believed that years of working with powerful magnets have bro-
ken his “polars.” His company moved him to a desk job, but the com-
puter made his eyes wobble. He can’t talk on a cell phone, and TV
causes a meltdown. His company pays hi m a modest sum for disabil-
ity. He wouldn’t dream of suing. New Li fe helps out when his -
nances get close to nothing. “God keeps saying to me, ‘Tom, this is
not about you. It’s about Me,’ ” he told me. “ There’s something going
on. And God is just trying to get me ready.”
In December, Tom received a vision. It is not unheard of for or-
dinary New Lifers to experience visions, but most are wary about
their provenance; what a secularist would call psychological they call
satanic. But Tom thought that this one was real. He told two New Life
pastors about it, and he told his mother, because, he said, “ it was so
threatening to me.” His voice trembled with the recollection, and
grew quieter, shy and childish, and he seemed close to tears. This is
what he had seen: “Complete darkness over all of America. But there
was a light coming down to the center of America,” that is, Colorado
Spri ngs. “And it was just a circle. And in it there were angels, and the
angels were battling. And they were ghting hard as they could”—
here Tom’s voice broke—“but they couldn’t hold back the dark, and
the Lord said to me, ‘America has to repent, or this hole will
close.’ ”
Tom returned to the moment. “I’m not even saying I know what
to do with it. It’s just—that’s what I see. And I pray. There’s some-
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 319
thing going on here, and God’s gonna explode it. There’s gonna be an
explosion from here bigger than anyone’s ever seen.”
New Life, he believed, would marshal the shock waves. “I think
Pastor Ted is Gandalf,” the wizard of The Lord of the Rings, he said.
Tom had received a few minivisions, just glimpses really, and in them
he saw a pastor kneeling, praying, in spi ritual battle with a demon
trying to pull him into a aming abyss.
I grew up reading Tol kien, too. “Who’s the Balrog? ” I asked, re-
ferring to a demon that nearly kills Gandalf. I expected Commander
Tom to reply with the usual enemies: “the culture” and the homo-
sexuals and the humanists. But the Balrog, he said, is inside Pastor
Ted, inside New Life, inside every follower of Christ.
On any night of the week in Colorado Springs, if one knows where
to look, one can join a conversation about God that will stretch late
into the eve ning. Some of these are cell groups, spin-o s from New
Life or from the city’s other churches, but others are more free-form.
On a Thursday, I joined one as the guest of a friend of a friend named
Lisa Anderson. Lisa is an editor at the International Bible Society. A
few nights earlier, after I bought her several rounds of mojitos, she
had promised to send me Our City, God’s Word, a glossy New Testa-
ment produced by the IBS and included not long before as an insert in
the local paper. “Colorado Springs is a special place,” declares the in-
troduction. “ The Bible is a special book.”18
Lisa’s Thursday-night group met in a town house owned by a
you ng couple with two children, Alethea (Greek for Truth), age
three, and Justus ( Justice), age one and a half. The father is assistant
to the president of the Navigators, a conservative parachurch minis-
try, and the mother works for Head Start. Also in attendance were
two graduates of the Moody Bible Institute and Lisa’s boyfriend, a
graduate student and a writer for Summit Ministries, a parachurch
organization that creates curricula on America’s “Christian heritage”
for homeschoolers and private academies. There was also a gourmet
chef.
320 | JEFF SHARLET
When I walked in, an hour late, they were tal king about Chris-
tian lm criticism—whether such a thing could, or should, exist.
Then they talked about the tsunami that had just hit South Asia and
wondered with concern whether any of the city’s preachers would
try to score points o it. When I mentioned that Pastor Ted already
had, they cringed. I told them that at the previous Sunday’s full-
immersion baptism service, Pastor Ted had noted that the waves hit
the “number-one exporter of radical Islam,” Indonesia. “That’s not a
judgment,” he’d announced. “It’s an opportunity.” I told them of
similar analyses from Pastor Ted’s congregation: one man said that
he wished he could “get in there” among the survivors, si nce their
souls were “ripe,” and another told me he was “psyched” about what
God was “ doing with His ocean.”
“That’s not funny,” one woman said, and the room fell silent.
James, an aspiring lm critic with oval glasses and a red goatee,
spoke up from the oor, where he’d been sitting cross-legged. “You
know that Bruce Springsteen song on Nebraska, about the highway
cop?” he asked. He was referring to a song called “Highway Patrol-
man,” in which the patrolman’s brother has left “a kid lyin’ on the
oor, lookin’ bad,” and the patrolman sets out to chase him down.
Instead, he pulls over and watches his brother’s “taillights disappear,”
thinking of “ how nothin’ feels better than blood on blood.”
“He can’t arrest his brother,” James said, and quoted the song: “a
man turns his back on fami ly, well, he just ain’t no good.”
“I think that’s how it is,” James continued. “That’s how I feel
about Dobson, or Haggard. They’re fam ily. We have loyalties, even i f
we disag ree.”
I told James about a little man I had met in the hallway at New
Life who, when I said I was from New York City, said, simply, “Ka-
boom!” I told him also about Joseph Torrez, a New Li fer I had eaten
dinner with, who, when describing the evangelical gathering under
way in Colorado Springs, compared it to “Shaquille O’Neal driving
the lane, dunking on you.” Torrez had said, “ It’s ti me to choose sides,”
a refrain I had heard over and over again during my time in Colorado
Spri ngs.
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 321
“So which is it? ” I asked. “Which side are you on? Theirs? Are you
ready to declare war on me, on my city?”
“No —”
“Then choose.”
“I—”
“We can’t,” Lisa interrupted, from the corner.
“We can,” said John, another Bible Society editor. “ We do. Just by
being here.”
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