Dares the bear slouch into the lion’s den?
One downward plunge of his paw would rend away
Eyesight and manhood, life itself, from thee.
Go, lest I blast thee with anathema,
And make thee a world’s horror.
—Alfred Lord Tennyson, Becket, 1884
The same brutal winter that made Jessica Soule ache in early 2012 was also keenly felt by John Connell.
By day, Connell enjoyed the way the thick layers of fallen snow warped the landscape into something that was both pristine and playful. Free to spend his hours as he chose, he walked through the silent icy cathedrals of the pine forests and climbed hilltops on snowshoes to see the shining winter landscape laid out beneath him. Closer to home, he exercised by shoveling out the church parking lot until his face glowed beet-red beneath his whitening hair, the tip of his nose burning with the cold. He piled up slabs of ice to create Zen-like art sculptures and snapped pictures of them, displaying the eye of an amateur photographer with artistic aspirations.
Those types of activities kept hot blood pumping through his every extremity, but the cold was harder to deal with when he was inside at night. Right from the beginning, he’d learned that the church building’s walls functioned like a sieve: a large percentage of the warm air generated by the ancient furnace bled straight to the frozen world outside, leaving him chilled. He spent many hours shivering beneath the drafty roof of the Peaceful Assembly Church in his guitar-strewn sleeping quarters, which adjoined the large cluttered space of the main meeting room on one side and a small food pantry on the other.
He was rapidly running out of money to pay for the building’s utilities. In fact, he was rapidly running out of money to pay for anything. He sent out a message on social media channels, warning supporters of the church that his funds were dwindling.
“This will not last,” he said.
To make matters worse, the town’s municipal government seemed intent on dragging Connell deeper into financial trouble. In December, he’d received a $2,186 tax bill, and he knew there were many more bills on the way. Once again, he submitted a form to the town seeking a tax exemption, and once again, without IRS-sanctioned nonprofit status, the town’s selectboard voted to reject the application.
It seemed a no-win situation.
He posted frequently on social media and freedom forums, railing against town officials to his supporters.
“This is for real,” he wrote. After sacrificing his retirement savings to fund the church, he said he was more than willing to put all that he had left—“my life, my fortune and my sacred honor”—on the line in the battle against taxes.
All along, Connell kept trying to build up the church’s activities. On a Thursday evening, he hosted a choir practice for Rich “Dick Angel” Angell and friends to rehearse “Weeda Claus’s Chronic Christmas Carols,” a series of parodic songs that subbed libertarian-themed lyrics into Christmas classics.
When winter finally began to loosen its grasp, springtime brought Connell not only warmth but hope. His salvation came, as it often seemed to, from above.
God spoke to Connell, using that same inner voice with which he’d instructed the former factory worker to purchase the church.
When God spoke directly into Connell’s mind, they were using a well-established communication method among the faithful called interior locution, which, the Catholic Church firmly believes, allows one to hear directly from God. The biggest pitfall, though, is that not all of the voices one hears are divinely inspired. Some people can’t differentiate the legitimate messages from “spurious locutions,” which either come from evil spirits or arise subconsciously from their own human desires.
Though interior locutions have sparked worldwide religious movements (including the Unification Church, which revolved around revelations God made to Reverend Moon), the words that God offered to John Connell were much more limited in scope.
Connell had made the natural assumption that, when God told him to abandon all concern for the future and invest his life savings in the church, he would live out his days in said church, doing the work of God.
But in the summer of 2012, as heat and drought began to stir the bears of the forest into a sweltering desperation, Connell received a message that the Peaceful Assembly Church’s pure mission was not, in fact, a long-term deal. It was only meant to last for about three years, two of which had already passed.
The time line laid out in Connell’s interior locutions neatly corresponded with August 1, 2013, which he understood to be the date the town could exercise its authority to seize the church property for unpaid taxes.
Connell received more messages. He should prepare to give everything away rather than let the “Gov-Almighty worshiping, thug allies” (as God called them, according to Connell’s posts on internet freedom forums) steal from Connell.
As Connell explained it, God then got very specific. He told Connell not to actually give things away—just to be prepared to do so. When the time came, God would pass the word to Connell, and then he could execute the plan to divest himself of all his earthly possessions. God also told him not to set a deadline for the individual members of the town selectboard (who God, with divine wit, referred to as “select-thugs”) to do the right thing.
God also had a little emotional messaging for Connell. When he’d told Connell to buy the church, the message had been: Don’t worry.
And Connell hadn’t worried.
Now God said to him: Be patient and still.
So Connell resolved to be patient and still. As he began to mull over what he knew of God’s plan, any trepidation he might have felt must have melted away. The plan wasn’t going to leave him homeless and penniless; instead, it would allow him to escape the pressures of his tax bill and stick it to the government officials who had been harrying him for the past two years.
Here’s how it would work: Connell’s principles prohibited him from dealing with the IRS directly. But perhaps he could do an end run around those principles by giving the church to someone else, someone who did not share his concerns about dealing with a federal agency.
If he could find a trustworthy group to form a nonprofit, they would be able to jump through the paperwork hoops necessary to establish the Peaceful Assembly Church as a nonprofit, thereby skirting the tax issue.
The idea seems to have first come up in a conversation Connell had with Jeremy Olson, a computer engineer who moved to the area from Massachusetts in 2007. Olson was a rising star within the libertarian activist community; he had updated his résumé to include everything from planning motorbike events at the Canaan Lions Club to directing research for the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance. He was also a director for the Citizens for Criminal Justice Reform and held a couple of minor public positions in Grafton’s town government—he served as a trustee of the town’s small portfolio of trust funds and as an alternate to the planning board.
Olson helped Connell come up with a list of people who would join him in forming a nonprofit and serve as its board of directors; he suggested people who were connected to the Free Town Project. They settled on Free Town “founder” Bob Hull, whose taciturn nature had earned him the nickname Silent Bob; Jay Boucher, who lived on Hull’s property and was a volunteer firefighter for Babiarz (Boucher was the man who’d violently shoved Mike Barskey in a dispute about concrete forms the previous fall); Tom Ploszaj, who was not a libertarian but who always seemed to find himself involved in libertarian causes; and thirty-two-year-old James Reiher, another local activist who often showed up at libertarian gatherings.
The plan seemed such a perfect escape hatch that Connell was soon waxing enthusiastically about the idea, even in public. Though he was still waiting for the word from God to make it happen, he began letting people know that he was planning “changes in organizational structure.”
Connell wanted to make sure that, in the event God did tell him to sign away the church building, he would be able to continue his spiritual work. As Connell would later recount, during continued discussions with Olson and the others, he told them that he wanted ironclad assurances built into their agreement. They would have to let him live out his days as the resident pastor and sexton of the church, with free rein to continue his religious activities there. If they ever found that they couldn’t coexist alongside Connell’s activities, they would have the option to simply sign the property back over to him. And to make it more difficult for the board to deviate from this agreement, any changes would have to be agreed upon unanimously, by all the board members, rather than simply put to a majority vote.
It seemed like Connell had covered all his bases. Conveying all of that detail—lifetime appointments, unanimous decision-making process, exit clauses that would return the property to Connell—in a contract was a complicated enough endeavor to keep a professional lawyer busy for many hours. But that smacked of governmental bureaucratic jibber-jabber.
So instead, to consummate their agreement, they shook on it.