My late father-in-law, an Episcopal priest, had a cartoon taped to his kitchen wall in Sherman that skewers an obnoxious feature of American religion. In the cartoon, a grinning devil, sitting on a throne surrounded by flames, instructs a horned apprentice, suitcase in hand, who is about to head upstairs to torture the human race.
“Remember to quote lots of Scripture,” Satan says.
If you work as a reporter for more than four decades in Texas, as I have, you will—regularly—encounter the most inappropriate, unfortunate and downright bizarre invocations of the Almighty. It’s enough to make me, a church-going Episcopalian who has—until now—kept my beliefs in the closet as a reporter, ruefully agree with the quip I saw on a refrigerator magnet. A man says to the Prince of Peace: “Please Jesus, protect me from your followers.”
Case in point: my interview years ago with an ambitious Texas Baptist pastor who had his eyes on the prized presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention. He was—surprise, surprise!—virulently anti-gay. So I asked him, if Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount was all about agape, compassion, and selflessness, why did the preacher so forcefully condemn homosexuality?
“God did not intend for the human anus to be a sex object!” he blurted.
I thought to myself, “That’s the money quote.” Too bad NPR will never let that on the air. But the parson, apparently, worried more how his proctological outburst would be received by his Baptist brethren. As soon as the interview ended and I’d put my microphone away, he asked brightly, “John, would you mind striking the anus quote?”
But wait, there’s more! Did you know that Jesus, who said the truth shall make you free, is also into banning books? Just ask right-wing Christians in Llano County who objected to a list of books in the public libraries in 2021.
I thought to myself, “That’s the money quote.” Too bad NPR will never let that on the air.
The controversy began with a series for children: My Butt Is So Noisy!, I Broke My Butt!, and I Need a New Butt! (titles that I found satisfying to recite on the earnest airwaves of public radio.) Critics called the crude illustrations of bare bottoms “child porn.”
“I wrote the Butt Books for fun,” the bewildered author, Dawn McMillan, emailed me from her home in New Zealand. “They are silly stories bringing laughs while getting kids, especially boys, into reading.”
As I was covering that story, the role of the Divine in banning books eluded me, but not so for Bonnie Wallace, a conservative activist later appointed to the local library advisory board. In an email to county commissioners, she urged local pastors to “organize a weekly prayer vigil on this specific issue,” and concluded, “May God protect our children from this FILTH.”
The Llano County Commissioners Court ended up removing or restricting the Butt books and others about the KKK, racial castes in America, and teen sexuality. And in 2023, Texas—represented by self-anointed Christian book reviewers–still leads the nation in the spreading bonfire of book censorship.
The genius of aberrant Christianity, throughout history, seems to be how effortlessly it accommodates whatever the prophet du jour wants to get away with.
Part of the reason this bothers me is that, as a Christian, I find it repugnant to see the loving, peaceable teachings of Jesus distorted over and over. Worse, reporters often let conservative Christians get away with speaking for all believers.
Consider Heritage USA, one of my first stories for NPR, when I was a freelancer living in Atlanta. Back in the mid-1980s, televangelist couple Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker built this Christian wonderland in Fort Mill, South Carolina, to glorify God and line their pockets. It became America’s third-most popular theme park.
“If Jesus were walking the earth today, John, I believe he would want a water park to minister to his followers.”
I had just been baptized and I was trying to figure out what it meant to live your faith, when I beheld Heritage USA. There was the “Christian shopping mall” and the Southern-baroque Heritage Grand Hotel where a guest told me, “The King’s kids deserve the best.” I interviewed Rev. Richard Dortch, PTL executive vice president, at the Heritage Island water park. Should the millions spent on Heritage USA have been better directed to relieving suffering and poverty? I asked. He flashed a million-dollar smile and, without a note of irony, replied, “If Jesus were walking the earth today, John, I believe he would want a water park to minister to his followers.”
Bakker and Dortch ended up in federal prison for duping believers into investing in the development. Thanks to Bakker, PTL, which he intended to be Praise the Lord, has become known as Pass the Loot.
Remember David Koresh, the madman who led his Branch Davidians to mass immolation at their religious compound outside Waco in 1993? That was my first mega-story for NPR, and I practically lived at a cheap hotel in Bellmead throughout the 51-day standoff.
A lot has been written about the two disastrous raids launched by federal agents, but let’s not let Koresh off the hook. He was a beer-drinking, guitar-playing, skirt-chasing, gun-collecting rogue whose ability to quote long passages of Scripture apparently convinced his cult that he was a messianic figure right out of the Book of Revelation.
Koresh, né Vernon Howell, stockpiled assault rifles, raped underage girls, cuckolded male followers by sleeping with their wives, and told the Waco Tribune-Herald, “Y’know, bein’ Christ ain’t nothin’.”
Since I retired from NPR in January after 36 years, I’ve been trying to process all the church scandals and schisms and falls from grace that I’ve covered. They all shared the same throughline: People of faith trusted a man with Rev. before his name who seemed to have a hotline to God. I’ve asked myself how these charismatic figures, reeking with the musk of prophecy, led their gullible flocks into dark places over and over?
I posed that question to my friend, the Rev. Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, dean of the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest in Austin.
“People are attracted to certainty, to non-ambiguity,” she said. “Making decisions for yourself and doing the work of discernment, that’s really hard work. When someone comes and says, ‘I have all the answers,’ that’s seductive, especially for people who feel vulnerable.”
Of all the misguided religious movements I’ve chronicled, none comes close to the white evangelicals that currently espouse Trumpism within the ideology of Christian Nationalism.
Early last year I traveled to Lenoir City, Tennessee—in the shadow of the Smoky Mountains—to attend a Sunday service at the Patriot Church, a barn-like building with a huge American flag painted on the outside. The name conflates Christian fervor with a truculent brand of American patriotism.
I asked a congregant, “Is this a Donald Trump church?”
“Yes,” replied Murray Clemetson, a law school student and father of three.“You go to flyover country and people have good moral values. They love the Lord and they want the best for our country. And that’s what Donald Trump represented,” he added, referring to the most explicitly self-interested president in American history.
The Patriot Church believes that vaccinations violate religious freedom, the Jan. 6 rioters were freedom fighters, the Biden administration is illegitimate, and the media is the voice of evil. The Rev. Ken Peters said as much in his sermon, “How Satan Destroys the World.”
I was sitting self-consciously on the front row, recording the service and taking notes.
“The first lie was when the serpent told Eve to eat the apple!” thundered Peters, prowling the stage with a wireless mic. “And the second lie? The mainstream media. And NPR is sitting right over there.”
The congregation eyed me suspiciously. I waved and smiled. When I finished my interviews and headed for the parking lot, several folks said they would pray for me. I’ve heard that line while reporting on religion for years. I’m gonna pray fer yew, John. To which I respond, “Great! I need the prayers and you need the practice.”
My wise father-in-law, the Episcopal priest, used to wince whenever I covered a Jim Bakker or a Jimmy Swaggart, because those scandals hurt all of Christendom and reinforced the age-old cynicism that organized religion is a con and all preachers are corrupt. I wish I had done more in my reporting life to quote the many inspiring, tolerant religious leaders. And I wish I had objected when conservative Christians piously purported to speak for all believers.
Here’s where I get in trouble. I am a Christian so this might seem mildly heretical, but I disagree with people who say Christianity is the only way. Having reported on calamities in 30 countries, I’ve seen God at work in the world in myriad ways. At the end of the day, I agree with the sentiments of a popular muezzin (Muslim cantor) I interviewed at a Los Angeles mosque. Abdelwahab Benyoucef is an Algiers-born Hollywood actor who gets cast over and over as a Middle Eastern terrorist. Here’s what he had to say about the world’s major monotheistic religions.
“Think of Wilshire Boulevard as Christianity. Santa Monica Boulevard is Islam. Montana Boulevard is Judaism. Take any of those boulevards and they all reach the Pacific Ocean, which is God.”
