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Sleaze: Latest Disgraced GOP Closet Queer a Big Fish

Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit

[The latest disgraced hypocrite Fundie was a Big Fish in the world
of delusional Christian Republican militants. Not only was he the
leader of some huge bunch of Christians, he was also close to George
W. Bush and his band of thieves and thugs. As the first excerpt below
shows, he was also one of those who began to wonder if Jaysus really
was a free-market exploiter and destroyer of worlds, and came out in
2005 on the side of environmentalism. Since then, a number of his
Fundie cohorts have also begun to pull away from the rapacious Bush
Gang and begun to talk about Christianity and social justice -- about
the mythical god and the planet, the poor, and peace, and to ask how
their "faith" got hijacked to the cause of political extremism.

Whatever... once a dupe, always a dupe. If it's not Gawd, it's George.
It's good to see all of these guys brought down, if belatedly. They
are slick, sickening sickos.

A longer piece (part 1 of a Harpers 2-part article follows the first
excerpt. -NY Transfer]

sent by Steven Robinson (activ-l) - Nov 3, 2006

[Fair is fair, Although Ted Haggard is now disgraced because of a sex
scandal, it should be remembered that he played a prominent role in the
recent opening among Evangelicals to environmental concerns. That was
certainly positive and something to be welcomed, A mitigating factor to be
sure. See the article below, SR]

Excerpted from The Washington Post, Feb 6, 2006
Full article at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1491-2005Feb5.html

The Greening of Evangelicals Christian Right Turns,
Sometimes Warily, to Environmentalism

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer

"The environment is a values issue," said the Rev. Ted Haggard, president of
the 30 million-member National Association of Evangelicals. "There are
significant and compelling theological reasons why it should be a banner
issue for the Christian right."

In October, the association's leaders adopted an "Evangelical Call to Civic
Responsibility" that, for the first time, emphasized every Christian's duty
to care for the planet and the role of government in safeguarding a
sustainable environment.

"We affirm that God-given dominion is a sacred responsibility to steward the
earth and not a license to abuse the creation of which we are a part," said
the statement, which has been distributed to 50,000 member churches.
"Because clean air, pure water, and adequate resources are crucial to public
health and civic order, government has an obligation to protect its citizens
from the effects of environmental degradation."

Signatories included highly visible, opinion-swaying evangelical leaders
such as Haggard, James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Chuck Colson of
Prison Fellowship Ministries. Some of the signatories are to meet in March
in Washington to develop a position on global warming, which could place
them at odds with the policies of the Bush administration, according to
Richard Cizik, the association's vice president for governmental affairs.

Also last fall, Christianity Today, an influential evangelical magazine,
weighed in for the first time on global warming. It said that "Christians
should make it clear to governments and businesses that we are willing to
adapt our lifestyles and support steps towards changes that protect our
environment." [...]

Haggard, the leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, concedes
that this thinking "is a problem that I do have to address regularly in
talking to the common man on the street. I tell them to live your life as if
Jesus is coming back tomorrow, but plan your life as if he is not coming
back in your lifetime. I also tell them that the authors of the Left Behind
books have life insurance policies."

Harpers via The Revealer - May 13, 2005
http://www.therevealer.org/archives/main_story_001945.php

[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 Harper's.

The second half of this article can be found in the May, 2005 Harper's, a
special issue that also features a report from a meeting of the National
Religious Broadcasters, by Chris Hedges; an essay on the evangelical roots
of free market economics by Gordon Bigelow; and an essay on the Christian
right by Lewis Lapham.]

Inside America's Most Powerful Megachurch

By Jeff Sharlet

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 isnt a
Christian, refuses Jesus, looks at things he shouldnt; 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 pastors 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.

The citys mightiest megachurch crests silver and blue atop a gentle slope
of pale yellow prairie grass on the outskirts of town. Silver and blue, as
it happens, are Air Force colors. New Life Church was built far north of
town in part so it would be visible from the Air Force Academy. New Life
wanted that kind of character in its congregation.

Church is insufficient to describe the complex. There is a permanent
structure called the Tent, which regularly fills with hundreds or thousands
of teens and twentysomethings for New Lifes various youth gatherings. Next
to the Tent stands the old sanctuary, a gray box capable of seating 1,500;
this juts out into the new sanctuary, capacity 7,500, already too small. At
the complexs western edge is the World Prayer Center, which looks like a
great iron wedge driven into the plains. The true architectural wonder of
New Life, however, is the pyramid of authority into which it orders its
11,000 members. At the base are 1,300 cell groups, whose leaders answer to
section leaders, who answer to zone, who answer to district, who answer to
Pastor Ted Haggard, New Lifes founder.

Pastor Ted, who talks to President George W. Bush or his advisers every
Monday, is a handsome forty-eight-year-old Indianan, most comfortable in
denim. He likes to say that his only disagreement with the President is
automotive; Bush drives a Ford pickup, whereas Pastor Ted loves his Chevy.
In addition to New Life, Pastor Ted presides over the National Association
of Evangelicals (NAE), whose 45,000 churches and 30 million believers make
up the nations most powerful religious lobbying group, and also over a
smaller network of his own creation, the Association of Life-Giving
Churches, 300 or so congregations modeled on New Lifes free market approach
to the divine. Pastor Ted will serve as NAE president for as long as the
movement is pleased with him, and as long as Pastor Ted is its president
the NAE will make 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 Vatican, a phrase that says
much both about the city and about the easeful orthodoxy with which the
movement now views itself. Certainly the gathering there has no parallel in
history, not in Lynchburg, Virginia, nor Tulsa, nor Pasadena, nor Orlando,
nor any other city that has aspired to be the capital of evangelical
America. Evangelical activist groups (parachurch ministries, in the
parlance) in Colorado Springs number in the hundreds, though a precise
count is hard to specify. Groups migrate there and multiply. They produce
missionary guides, family resources, school curricula, financial advice,
athletic training programs, Bibles for 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 ministries is Dr. James Dobsons Focus on the Family, whose radio
programs (the most extensive in the world, religious or secular),
magazines, videos, and books reach more than 200 million people worldwide.

The press tends to regard Dobson as the most powerful evangelical Christian
in America, but Pastor Ted is at least his equal. Whereas Dobson plays the
part of national scold, promising to destroy politicians who defy the
Bible, Pastor Ted quietly guides those politicians through the ritual of
acquiescence required to save face. He doesnt strut, like Dobson; he
gushes. When Bush invited him to the Oval Office to discuss policy with
seven other chieftains of the Christian right in late 2003, Pastor Ted
regaled his whole congregation with the story via email. Well, on Monday I
was in the World Prayer Center New Lifes high-tech, twentyfour- hour-a-day
prayer chapel and my cell phone rang. It was a presidential aide; the
President, says Pastor Ted, wanted him on hand for the signing of the
Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Pastor Ted was on a plane the next morning
and in the Presidents office the following afternoon. It was incredible,
wrote Pastor Ted. He left it to the press to note that Dobson wasnt there.

No pastor in America holds more sway over the political direction of
evangelicalism than does Pastor Ted, and no church more than New Life. It
is by no means the largest megachurch, nor is Ted the best-known man of
God: Saddleback Church, in southern California, counts 80,000 on its rolls,
and its pastor, Rick Warren, has sold 20 million copies of his book The
Purpose-Driven Life. But Warrens success has come at the price of passion;
his doctrine, though conservative, is bland and his politics too obscured
by his self-help message to be potent. Although other churches boast more
eminent memberships than Pastor Tedsnear D.C., for example, McLean Bible
Church and The Falls Church (an Episcopal church that is, like many
mainline churches today, now evangelical in all but name) minister to the
powerful such churches are not, like New Life, crucibles for the ideas that
inspire the movement, ideas that are forged in the middle of the country
and make their way to Washington only over time. Evangelicalism is as much
an intellectual as an emotional movement; and what Pastor Ted has built in
Colorado Springs is not just a battalion of spiritual warriors but a
factory for ideas to arm them.

New Life began with a prophecy. In November 1984 a missionary friend of
Pastor Teds, respected for his gifts of discernment, made him pull over on
a bend of Highway 83 as they were driving, somewhat aimlessly, in the open
spaces north of the city. Pastor Tedthen twentyeight, 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 from
near Baton Rouge, where he had been associate pastor of a megachurch, to
this bleak city, then known as a pastors graveyard. The missionary got out
of the car and squinted. He crouched down as if sniffing the ground. This,
said the missionary, this will be your church. Build here.

So Pastor Ted did. First, he started a church in his basement. The pulpit
was three five-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 filled a
fivegallon garden sprayer with cooking oil and began anointing nearby
intersections, then streets and buildings all over town. Pastor Ted told
his flock to focus their prayers on houses with FOR SALE signs so that more
Christians would come and join him. Once Pastor Ted and another missionary
accidentally set off an alarm and hid together in a field while the police
investigated. It was for a good cause, Pastor Ted would say; they were
praying for the building to be taken off the market so it could someday be
purchased for a future ministry. (It was.)

He was always on the lookout for spies. At the time, Colorado Springs 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 devils plans. He staked out gay bars, inviting men to come to his
church; his whole congregation pitched itself into invisible battles with
demonic forces, sometimes in front of public buildings.

One day, while he was working in his garage, a woman who said shed been
sent by a witches coven tried to stab Pastor Ted with a five-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 dominated
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 hadnt come to Colorado Springs for his
health; he had come to wage spiritual war.

He moved the church to a strip mall. 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. He assigned everyone in the church
names from the phone book they were to pray for. He sent teams to pray in
front of the homes of supposed witchesin one month, ten out of fifteen of
his targets put their houses on the market. His congregation prayer-walked
nearly every street of the city.

Population boomed, crime dipped; Pastor Ted believes to this day that New
Life helped chase the bad out of town. He thinks like that, a piston: less
bad means more good. Church is good, and his church grew, so fast there
were times when no one knew how many members to claim. So they stopped
talking about members. There was just New Life. Are you New Life? a person
might ask. New Life moved into some corporate office space. Soon they
bought the land that had been prophesied, thirty-five acres, and began to
build what Pastor Ted promised would be a new Jerusalem.

*

JERUSALEM, 2005--To the east is sky, empty land, Kansas. To the west, Pikes
Peak, 14,110 feet above sea level. The old city core of Colorado Springs
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. Some Sundays traf- fic backs up from the church half a mile in
all four directions. The congregation creeps up the highways. When parents
finally pull into a space amidst the thousands of cars packed into a gray
ocean of lot, their kids tumble out and dash toward the five silver pillars
of the entrance to New Life, eager to slide across the expanse of tiled
floor, to run circles around The Defender, a massive bronze of a glowering
angel, its muscular wings in full flex, arms at the zenith of what will
undoubtedly be a smiting blow of his broad sword; to run laps around the
new sanctuary, built in the round; and to bound up the stairs to Fort
Victory, whose rooms are designed to look like an Old West cavalry outpost,
the kind they used to fight real live Indians, back when Colorado still had
Indians to conquer and convert.

There were no kids in Fort Victory on my first Sunday at New Life, the
first Sunday in 2005, it being a special day: Dedication, the spiritual
anointing of the churchs 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 life.)

At the heart of the sanctuary rises a foursided stage, and above the stage
a great assemblage of machinery hovers, wrapped in six massive video
screens. A woman near me compared it to Ezekiels 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 filled with faces of tribute, paying homage to New
Life and Pastor Ted: a senator, a congressman, Colorados lieutenant
governor, the citys mayor, and Tony Perkins, Dobsons enforcer on Capitol
Hill; denominational chieftains, such as Thomas E. Trask, general
superintendent of the 51 million worldwide members of the Assemblies of
God; and a succession of minor nobles from the nations megachurches. These
I know now by numbers: Church of the Highlands, in Alabama, pastored by a
New Life alumnus from 34 to 2,500 souls in 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 decade from a
handful to 6,000.

Kyle Fisk, executive administrator of the National Association of
Evangelicals, had guided me to a seat in 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, goateed or soul-patched or shagheaded,
lay flat on their backs, staring straight up. To my right sat a middle-aged
woman in a floorlength flower-print dress with shades of orange and brown.
Her hair was thick, chestnut, wavy, her face big-boned in a raw,
middle-aged party-girl way. She tilted her head back to watch the tributes
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
choir as the guitarists kicked on the fuzz and the drummer pounded the
music toward arena-rock frenzy. Two fog machines on each side of the stage
filled the sanctuary with white clouds. Pod-shaped projectors cast a light
show across the ceiling, giant spinning white snowflakes and cartwheeling
yellow flowers and a shimmering blue water-effect. Prepare the way! shouted
Worship Pastor Ross. Prepare the way! The King is coming! 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 dervishes around the stage. The light pods
dilated and blasted the sanctuary with red. Worship Pastor Ross roared: Let
the King of Glory enter in! Ushers rushed through the crowds throwing out
rainbow glow strings.

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.
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, fingershaking, singing, more
smiling. (His nose is snubby and his brow overhung, lending him an
impishness crucial to the smiles success; without that edge he would look
not happy but stoned.) Now Pastor Ted, wearing a puffy ski jacket in red,
white, and blue, took us to the suburban ranch house where he stayed on his
fateful visit to Colorado Springs; then on to another suburban ranch house,
nearly indistinguishable, where Pastor Ted made plans for the church. Then
to a long succession of one-story corporate office spaces and strip-mall
storefronts, the sanctuaries Pastor Ted rented as his congregation grew,
each identical to the last but for the greater floor space.

The lights came up. Pastor Ted, now before us in the flesh, introduced a
guest speaker, one of his mentors, Jack Hayford, founding pastor of the
10,000-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 churcheswhat the rest of the world refers to as
fundamentalistsafe for suburbia. He is a white-haired, balding, eaglebeaked
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 wants to wedge an idea in our minds. The idea is Order. The
illustration is the Book of Revelations description of four creatures
surrounding Christs throne. The first... was like a lion, the second was
like an ox, the third had a face like a man, the fourth was like a flying
angel. Look! said Pastor Hayford, his voice sonorous and dignified. All
wonderful, all angels. The angels were merely different from one another.

Just, he said, as we have different ethnicities. And just as we have, in
politics, a hierarchy. And just as we have, in business, different
responsibilities, employer and employees. Angels, ethnicities, hierarchy,
employers and employees each category must follow a natural order.
Next came Pastor Larry Stockstill, presenting yet another variation of
preacher. He took the stage with his wife, 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, with pulpit pronounced
pull-peet.

Theres 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 fishes, theres strange people.
Too many churches, he said, focus on the Overworld. Thats where the nice
people are. The successful people. But the Lord said, Im not sending you to
the Overworld, Im 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 crowd, the
people into drugs, the people into sex. You find em... in the
Underworld.

One last item on the agenda: Pastor Ted got a new Bible. A very big Bible:
it took two sturdy men to lift it onto the stage. The members of New Lifeas
well as evangelical celebrities, such as Dr. Dobson and Oral Robertshad
secretly handwritten the entire Good Book. Later, Pastor Ted will show me
this marvel in his office. Neat, huh? hell say.

*

After church, I walked across the parking lot to the World Prayer Center,
where I watched prayers scroll over two giant flat-screen televisions while
a young man played piano. The Prayer Centera joint effort of several
fundamentalist organizations but located at and presided over by New
Lifehouses a bookstore that when I visited was called the Arsenal (its name
has since been changed to Solomons Porch), as well as corporate prayer
rooms, personal prayer closets, hotel rooms, and the headquarters of Global
Harvest, a ministry dedicated to spiritual warfare. (The Prayer Centers
nickname in the fundamentalist world is spiritual NORAD.)

The atrium is a soaring foyer adorned with the flags of the nations and
guarded by another bronze warrior angel, a scowling, bearded type with
massive biceps and, again, a sword. The angels pedestal stands at the
center of a great, eightpointed compass laid out in muted red, white, and
blue-black stone. Each point directs the eye to a contemporary painting,
most depicting gorgeous, muscular menone is a blacksmith, another is bound,
fetish-style, in chainsin various states of undress. My favorite is The
Vessel, by Thomas Blackshear, a major figure 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 team-pouring an urn
of honey onto the shaved head of a naked, olive-skinned man below. The
honey drips down over his slab-like pecs and his six-pack abs into the
eponymous vessel, which he holds in front of his crotch. But the vessel
cant handle that much honey, so the sweetness oozes over the edges and
spills down yet another level, presumably onto our heads, drenching us in
golden, godly love. Part of what makes Blackshears work so compelling is
precisely its unabashed eroticism; it aims to turn you on, and then to turn
that passion toward Jesus.

In the chapel are several computer terminals, where one can sign on to the
World Prayer Team and enter a prayer. Eventually ones words will scroll
across the large flat screens, as well as across the screens around the
world, which as many as 70,000 other Prayer Team members are watching at
any point in time. Prayers range from the mundane (realestate 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. Wont eat.

Or this one from Lauralee of Vermont: If you never pray for anyone else,
please choose this one! Im in such pain I think Im going to die; pray a
healing MIRACLE for me for kidney problems (disease? failure?); Im so
alone; no insurance!

One might be tempted to see an implicit class politics 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 staff of the World Prayer Center.
Sometimes these are domesticUSA: Pray for the Arlington Group, pastors
working with Whitehouse to renew Marriage 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. KOREA: Pray God will crush demonic stronghold and
communist regime of Kim Jung Il.

The Iraqis come up often, particularly with regard to their conversion:
Despite the efforts of the news media, believing soldiers and others
testify to the effective 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 news900,000 Bibles in the
Arabic language distributed by Christians in Iraq... And one explicitly
aligns the quest for democracy 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: BaghdadGod, press back the enemy...

Behind the piano player, the front range of the Rocky Mountains stretched
across a floorto- ceiling, semicircular window with a 270-degree view.
Above him, a globe fifteen feet in diameter rotated on a metal spindle.
When he took a break, I sat with him in the front row. His name was Jayson
Tice, he was twenty-five, and he worked at Red Lobster. Hed grown up in San
Diego and once, he said, hed been good enough to play Division I college
basketball. But he broke his ankle, and because the Marines promised him
court time, he joined. There didnt turn out to be much basketball for him
in the Marines, just what he described as making bombs and missiles, so he
didnt recommit, and 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 him to the mountains. He discovered that a lot
of 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
battlegroundhe pausedbetween good and evil. This is spiritual Gettysburg.
Why here? I asked. He thought about it and rephrased his answer. This place
is just a watering hole for Christians. For Gods people. Something extra
powerfuls about to pour out of this city. I hope not to stay in Colorado
Springs, because I want to spread whats going on here. Im a warrior, dude.
Im a warrior for God. Colorado Springs is my training ground.

THIS STORY CONTINUES IN THE MAY, 2005 ISSUE OF HARPERS...
much of it devoted to Pastor Teds ideas about free market theology...

Of special relevance, though, are these thoughts from Pastor Ted on
Catholicism, Islam, and holy war: Free-market economics is a truth Ted says
he learned in his first job in professional Christendom, as a Bible smuggler
in Eastern Europe. Globalization, he believes, is merely a vehicle for the
spread of Christianity. He means Protestantism in particular; Catholics, he
said, constantly look back. He went on: And the nations dominated by
Catholicism look back. They dont tend to create our greatest entrepreneurs,
inventors, research and development. Typically, Catholic nations arent
shooting 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 happening 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 thing. But with
the influx of people from Mexico, they dont tend to be the ones that go to
universities and become our research-and-development people. And so in that
way I see a little clash of civilizations.

So the Catholics are out, and the battle boils down to evangelicals versus
Islam. My fear, he says, is that my children will grow up in an Islamic
state.

And that is why he believes spiritual war requires a virile, worldly
counterpart. I teach a strong ideology of the use of power, he says, of
military might, as a public service. He is for preemptive war, because he
believes the Bibles exhortations against sin set for us a preemptive
paradigm, and he is for ferocious war, because the Bibles bloody. Theres a
lot about blood.

Published by the Department of Journalism and the Center for
Religion andMedia at NYU.

The Revealer