[lbo-talk] Inside America's Most Powerful Megachurch

[snitsnat]

Two items on religion from the revealer. One, a commentary on how 
uncritical the press is toward religion. The other is from the Harper's Mag 
feature by Jeff Sharlet, "Inside America's Most Powerful Megachurch." 
Sharlet wrote a great article for Harper's last year on the connections 
between various religious orgs and the Busheviks that's worth looking up, too.

The Valuable Value of Values
19 May 2005
http://www.therevealer.org/archives/today_001951.php

http://www.therevealer.org/archives/main_story_001945.php

Inside America's Most Powerful Megachurch
13 May 2005

By Jeff Sharlet

The following is the first half of "Soldiers of Christ: Inside America's 
Most Powerful Megachurch," a feature by Revealer editor Jeff Sharlet in the 
May, 2005 issue of <http://harpers.org/Newsstand2005-05.html>Harper's.

They are drawn as if by magnetic forces; they speak of Colorado Springs, 
home to the greatest concentration of fundamentalist Christian 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 precious, embattled by 
enemies, and also that it is "traditional," a blueprint for what everybody 
wants, and envied by enemies. The city itself is unspectacular, a grid of 
wide western avenues lined with squat, gray and beige box buildings, only a 
handful of them taller than a dozen stories. Local cynics point out that if 
you put Colorado Springs 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 offers, ultimately, is a story.

Lori Rose is from Minnesota and heard rumors about this 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 found a 
church to attend without him and joined a marriage study group there. Ron 
Poelstra 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, display models for the benefits of faith. 
L.A., Ron says, would have eaten them up: the gangs. Adam Taylor, now a 
pastor, grew up in Westchester County, an heir to the Bergdorf Goodman 
fortune, the son of artists and writers. In Colorado Springs he learned the 
Bible the hard way, each word a nail pounded into sin.

The story they found in Colorado 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 before the culture wars, 
after the World Wars, which is to say, during the brief, Cold War moment 
when America was a nation of single-breadwinner nuclear families.

Crime, of course, looms over this story. Not the actual facts of it­the 
burglary rate in and around Colorado Springs exceeds that in New York City 
and Los Angeles­but the idea of crime: a faith in the absence of it. And of 
politics, too: Colorado Springs' evangelicals believe they live without it, 
in a carved-out space for civility and for like-minded dedication to 
common-sense principles. Even pollution plays a part: Christian 
conservatives there believe that they breathe cleaner air, live on ground 
untainted by the satanic fires of nineteenth-century industry­ 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 Springs as his 
or her ambition. The shared vision is more modest, and more grandiose. It 
is a city of people who have fled 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. They call the dream "Christian," but in its particulars it is 
"American." Not literally but as in a story, one populated by cowboys and 
Indians, monsters and prayer warriors to slay them, and ladies to reward 
the warriors with chaste kisses. Colorado Springs is a city of moral 
fabulousness. It is a city of fables.

<more at link above>

"We live under the Confederacy.
We're a podunk bunch of swaggering
pious hicks."

                --Bruce Sterling