A Mighty Fortress Is Our God
At the heart of Colorado Springs are tree-lined streets with century-old houses, an unusually bucolic college campus, and droves of attractive young people who look like they alternate between snowboarding, rock-climbing, and enjoying the mind-altering edibles that can be legally obtained from local pot dispensaries. In their midst are sandal-wearing tourists who stroll along scenic streets, exploring quaint hippy boutiques that sell used crystal balls “with good energy,” bits of rock candy, and homemade soaps. The city, in other words, feels like an overgrown college town, complete with the thriving alternative culture that one would expect in an eco-paradise just a few miles from Pikes Peak.
But the city center doesn’t tell the whole story, which starts to change a few miles up the interstate that runs through town. None of that counterculture funkiness is evident on the northern edge of the city, where I am heading to an evangelical megachurch, the site of a security conference in summer 2014. Out here the vibe reflects the presence not only of the sprawling hilltop compound of the influential New Life Church, but also its equally conservative neighbors—the US Air Force Academy and Focus on the Family. The service academy trains young men and women for aerial combat above Afghanistan or the Middle East, whereas the latter is an influential 501(c)(3) organization engaged in a different kind of war—a culture war that supports prayer, teaching creationism, and corporal punishment (paddling) in American schools; the single state of Israel; so-called ex-gay ministries; national radio programs; and a Christian dating service. Although not as large as the vast Air Force compound, Focus on the Family’s 47-acre headquarters still has its own zip code.
Mostly because of these three organizations, northern Colorado Springs is considered by many to be the epicenter of conservative evangelicalism in the United States. It’s the sort of place where one runs into Focus on the Family staffers gossiping about Republican presidential contenders over free waffles in a budget hotel lobby. Here, on the edge of the city, I find a version of postwar Americana that could be anywhere, characterized by dreary gas stations, random fast-food shacks, and a dying mall with oddball “tutoring academies” and half-empty gift shops, all linked by a highway system that seems designed to thwart human interaction. More than just another example of unplanned American sprawl, this part of town has a bland seediness that finds its counterpart in the faces of the young men and women working on streets named Interquest Parkway and Jet Stream Drive. Except for the length of their hair and faded Walmart clothes, these twenty-somethings might have stepped out of a photo of the 1930s Dust Bowl, whose devastation almost reached this part of the state. Although the Great Depression might seem like a thing of the past, something still haunts these parts, something that feels sad and broken and not really worth fighting for.
It might seem like a strange spot for New Life Church, with its sports-arena architecture and acres of blacktop parking. It is here that the influential and charismatic Reverend Ted Haggart, long before his public fall from grace for meth-fueled sex romps with a male prostitute, built the church into an evangelical powerhouse more than 12,000 strong. Perhaps Reverend Haggart and his flock embraced the starkness of their surroundings—after all, it is to the soulless and lost condition of modern America that New Life addressed itself with pious certainties and a clear vision of God’s path. More than simply a place to ponder the state of one’s eternal soul and form “Christ-centered relationships,” this megachurch was also a place for people worried about the state of their country.1 If the built environment offered little inspiration, the congregation could look upward, not just to their heavenly father, but also to the sublime scenery that looms over the city at almost every point. Looking from the Worship Center’s oceanic parking lot to the snowy mountains on the western edge of town, even the darkest skeptic of American society might find solace and hope for renewal in a beautiful “new life”—if only the righteous could be protected from the wicked. If only evil could be kept from the door. If only the community could feel secure.
New Life was not alone in its struggle for security against the forces of darkness in modern America. In Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism (2008), Jason Bivins traces the rise of this worldview since the 1960s from a fringe belief to a significant part of the American mainstream. Starting with a quote from Thomas Hobbes (“Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion”), Bivins describes the ways in which “the forces of secularism and moral permissiveness” became the new enemies of “a previously stable and safe ‘Christian America.’”2 Often circulating violent “monster stories” to warn the faithful about the various “barbarians at the gates,” conservative evangelicals closed ranks with a powerful rhetoric of fear, decline, and danger, often delivered with the verbal dexterity of a seasoned minister. Although Bivins was writing about the best-selling Left Behind novels, Chick comics, and Halloween “Hell Houses” for his case studies, I think his insights can be extended to the ways in which surveillance is bought, sold, and used in American churches. As will soon become clear, the business of what I call “sacred security” depends on these same tropes, which are wielded by men who envision themselves as “sheepdogs” that can save the “sheep” from the “wolves.” Such rhetoric is mild for the marketing and training related to church surveillance and security, which relies heavily on frightening anecdotes and predictions that encourage churchgoers to close ranks against the looming darkness. As Bivins puts it, “Through images of torture, death, horror, and judgment, a specific conception of moral obligation and political authority emerges, understood both as ontological truth and as rhetoric with which to denounce a political culture thought to be hostile.”3
In the case of New Life Church, such fears were not simply reflections of wider cultural and religious anxieties about imperiled Christians. Although an exaggerated rhetoric of Christian vulnerability was often at work, it was alongside something that was painfully real in the lived experience of the congregation. On December 9, 2007, a young man named Matthew Murray arrived at New Life Church with an automatic rifle and 1,000 rounds of ammunition. Moving from the frozen parking lot to the interior of the church, Murray killed three people before a volunteer security guard named Jeanne Assam returned fire and ended his rampage. Hailed as a hero at first, Assam later claimed that the church rejected her when she came out as a lesbian.4 While the church denies the charge, one thing is certain: the shooting at New Life was a sign that evangelical America’s worst fears were coming true. The wolf wasn’t simply at the door; he was inside the church, devouring the faithful. Carl Chinn, New Life’s current security chief, made this point in his 2012 book Evil Invades Sanctuary: The Case for Security in Faith-Based Organizations.5 “Faith-based organizations are in the direct line of fire in the battle raging between good and evil,” Chinn explained. “Whether from terrorists, petty criminals, fallen leaders or hurricanes, religious organizations must prepare for adversity.” Chinn had seen such threats in the flesh on more than one occasion, dating back to his time in the 1990s with the neighboring evangelical organization, Focus on the Family. After the New Life shooting, he was convinced that churches needed to prepare for the inevitable. Moving forward from the attack on New Life, Chinn and other faith-based security experts would look for new ways to protect their congregations from harm, even if it meant treating the church like a sports arena, airport, or any other public space that was vulnerable to violence. In the past decade, these men—and they are overwhelmingly men—have created companies, books, websites, conferences, and training seminars like the one I’m attending at New Life in the summer of 2014, all intended to “harden” the “soft target” of the American church.
Other denominations might have had a different response to perceived threats. Catholics, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and even Muslims, who have far more reason to feel threatened than any other religious group in the United States, have not appeared on my radar for sacred security in the past four years of collecting data and keeping track of relevant news stories. Liberal and moderate Protestants have been equally invisible, probably because they are less emphatic about their security needs compared to evangelical conservatives. For a mix of cultural and theological reasons, it’s hard to imagine Quakers or Unitarian-Universalists investing in high-resolution surveillance cameras and security teams for their facilities, which are often smaller and more modest than what New Life has built on its vast campus. Such liberal Protestants tend toward the pacifist end of the spectrum, where “turning the other cheek” and trusting in the essential benevolence of humankind is supposed to be more than a Sunday-morning truism. Not so in most conservative evangelical churches, which are more susceptible to a potent rhetoric of fear, vulnerability, and suspicion, for reasons both sociological and doctrinal. Evangelical congregations such as New Life and fundamentalists like Reverend Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority might have their religious differences, but they have shared important traits over the past forty years: they feel engulfed by a threatening secular tide; they lean hard to the political right; they favor free-market ideology; they are rarely critical of law enforcement or the US military; they are comfortable with guns for hunting and personal protection; and they expect men to protect their families and communities in the name of a patriarchal ideology of “family values” that they believe is under attack. All of these combine to produce a deep susceptibility to securitization. The results can be jarring to someone expecting a calm and welcoming congregation. Indeed, we have reached the point at which some strange scenarios are unfolding at the intersection of religion and surveillance.
As a result of the new emphasis on church security, I learned that, on Sunday mornings in some American towns, greeters have begun offering an ambiguous welcome to visitors at their church’s door. Mixed with the smiling recognition that a fellow worshipper has arrived is something decidedly less friendly: a professionally trained threat assessment. It may entail nothing more than a quick scan from a church elder with a metal detector up his sleeve, but the careful policing of sacred space does not stop there.6 Assuming that the visitor is allowed past the informal screening at the front door, she might notice a surprising number of surveillance cameras positioned inside the sanctuary, some thick-set ministerial bodyguards in the first row of pews, and even a concealed handgun on a deacon’s hip. A visitor with very keen eyes might realize that the preacher is armed with a handgun of his own and perhaps even a shield of sorts: a bulletproof Bible holder, specially designed to enhance his in-church security. Later, when services have concluded, our visitor might hear an announcement about personal safety workshops being offered on church grounds by companies with names like Cops and Cross or Gideon Protective Services: two of the faith-based companies, mostly in the South, that are pitching security services to fellow believers. She even might bump into one of the church’s security officers standing guard at the back of the pews, or catch a glimpse inside an office where a security team uses high-end CCTV monitors, not to keep watch over a stadium-size megachurch in a high-crime neighborhood but simply a midsize congregation in a quiet suburb.
These are all aspects of sacred security, a serious business that literally asks the question: “Is your church a sanctuary or a target?”7 Although secular firms are able to meet the security needs of most religious institutions in the United States, some churches are being courted by religiously identified security companies that market services primarily to spiritual brethren, often in explicitly spiritual terms. These are “God’s watchmen,” as they call themselves, each one selling a message of masculine guardianship and Christian vigilance along with the typical products of the security industry. It’s a hard sell, relying on emotional anecdotes, dramatic personal testimony, and the artful wielding of shared symbols that is often difficult to resist.
Sacred security can be found in every part of the United States, but these religiously identified firms are most often found in the so-called Bible Belt, where I have lived much of my adult life. In the thousands of pages of documents that I have analyzed, including marketing brochures, websites, editorials, training manuals, and how-to books, these companies state neither their denomination nor their political affiliation, but their language and other cues suggest evangelical conservatism with a southern or lower midwestern cast. Appalled by the perceived dangers of contemporary urban life and skeptical of government’s ability to safeguard their well-being, these “watchmen” come across as sober, heartland Americans taking personal security into their own hands—and bringing surveillance into a new context where CCTV cameras and monitors might seem out of place. To judge from the rhetoric of the marketing materials and websites, not to mention the national training seminar I attended in Colorado Springs in 2014, sacred security’s vendors are middle-aged white conservative Protestant men speaking to kindred spirits in the rural or suburban American South. Although evangelicalism includes a wide range of ideologies that can appeal to moderate women, liberal African Americans, and other groups, sacred security is not aimed at these audiences, just as it is not usually aimed at Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or liberal Protestants. Instead, its marketing seems directed at white conservative evangelical customers, especially middle-aged men with fundamentalist leanings who either feel, or can be made to feel, a sense of masculine guardianship over the women and children of their congregation. It is in the name of those older values that conservative evangelicals appear willing to accept the high-tech fortification of church property, both inside and out.
In short, this realm of sacred security provides a microcosm of America in the age of anxiety. In particular, it provides a rich example of what Zygmunt Bauman has dubbed “the institutionalization of insecurity,” which strikes me as the underlying political problem of our time in ways that should become apparent in the pages ahead.8 I suspect that the drive for sacred security reflects what Bauman calls “the aggression of the powerless,” “a deep and plentiful anxiety diverted from its genuine cause” in the structural misery of twenty-first-century American life.9 In terms of security studies, I am exploring a potentially lucrative subset of the billion-dollar security industry in the United States, one that offers on-site consultations, “Church Safety Starter Kits,” training sessions, and equipment purchase and installation, as well as books and DVDs. Churches may be late arrivals to surveillance culture, but they are following a path set by many other institutions in which CCTV once seemed unnecessary or counterproductive. Just as American public schools have increasingly incorporated aspects of law enforcement that range from hidden cameras to metal detectors, American churches are erecting high-tech walls to protect themselves from real and imagined threats, whose nature they describe with considerable drama and rhetorical flair.10 Their words and actions provide a new window on American insecurity as well as on the ideological landscape of conservative evangelicalism, where I have often found a supercharged version of the general culture of fear and suspicion that has colored American life since 9/11. Theirs is the siege mentality wedded to a narrative of cultural victimization, sometimes racialized fears of urban criminality, and communitarian desires to preserve the religious and social life of a congregation that is facing existential threats from every direction. More than an occasion to circle the wagons of evangelical identity, sacred security is also an opportunity for middle-aged white men—self-styled security experts, often with dual backgrounds in law enforcement and the ministry—to assert an ideology of quasi-military, patriarchal authority and control in response to the “evil” that they fear in contemporary America. It is a complex world that I experienced firsthand, and often quite empathetically, when I attended the security conference at New Life, one of the key sites for conservative evangelicalism in America. What I found in person, and in the many documents that I analyze in the following section, helped me to explore the powerful ideological and religious undercurrents within contemporary discussions of CCTV and other security technologies.
New Life
When I first read about right-wing Christians wiring up churches for CCTV and selling bulletproof Bible holders to vulnerable pastors across the Bible Belt, I felt waves of sadness and pique, distance and familiarity. In some deep personal sense, I know these folks, from family contexts in East Texas, even if, in cultural terms, I have become a stranger to their world. How do I understand their concerns without belittling them? How do I respectfully approach something that strikes me, at least initially, as a misguided expression of anxiety and fear in a society wracked by such feelings? It is difficult to write honestly about anything without falling into unconscious patterns of belief and prejudice, but for a project that grapples with such strong feelings (theirs and mine), the challenge is even more daunting. So after reading and watching whatever I could find for several years, I headed to a church security conference to see for myself. Having paid the $200 registration fee, I walked inside a cavernous building that would rival most college basketball arenas and joined the hundred-plus men at the 10th Annual Church Security Conference in a modest training room near the main sanctuary at New Life. Run by the Dallas-based National Organization of Church Security and Safety Management (NOCSSM), the conference was being held at New Life for the first time since the 2007 shooting—as was soon made clear to us in this very room, as we prepared for two days of speakers, tours, demonstrations, networking, and prayer.
It’s a relaxed event in many ways. We sit at long tables like students, with a three-ring binder in front of us, as well as coffee and Danish pastries on small, football-shaped napkins. When it comes to age, race, gender, religion, region, or politics, it’s not a diverse crowd—by my quick count, roughly 96 percent are white men over forty. Another commonality is that a lot of them have brought their guns to church. A few jokes make it clear that many people are “carrying” a piece, which fits the strong law enforcement vibe—short hair, conservative clothes, quiet machismo. A show of hands reveals that fewer than 10 percent are actual cops, past or present, while the remaining men—the overwhelming majority—seem to acknowledge law enforcement veterans with subtle deference and perhaps a hint of envy.
At first the mood is surprisingly light, given the sober topics on the agenda: “Crime Stats in Churches,” “Armed ‘Initial Responder’ Tactics,” “Executive Protection in a House of Worship,” and “New Life Shooting Recap.” A murmur of appreciation goes through the room when the organizers announce that lunch is coming from Chick-fil-A, whose stand against marriage equality has elevated its status in conservative circles. Small acts of symbolism are important here, even down to which corporation made the waffle fries and chicken sandwiches that will be arriving at noon.
In the meantime, we have a full morning of speakers, beginning with Chuck Chadwick, a thoughtful guy around sixty who is founder and president of NOCSSM. He’s also president of Gatekeepers Security Services, a company that has put “hundreds of armed Gatekeepers in churches across Texas,” as he puts it in his promotional materials. Although we are in the middle of Colorado, Texans have a prominent role at the conference, as they do in the world of church security in general. Chadwick is the first of several charismatic Texans telling stories that usually keep the audience rapt with attention, far more so than any academic conference audience. Including more than a hundred security professionals from other churches and some aspiring vendors in the church security business, the audience is utterly tuned in to what is being said. No one has to tell them to pay attention.
Chadwick starts his presentation with a Fox News clip of a church shooting in Illinois, the first of many church atrocities that we will hear about. While concrete numbers about church violence are elusive, the anecdotal evidence hits hard. In case any security skeptics are in the room, Chadwick warns us that church doors can no longer remain unlocked, as in the good old days, and that we need to do more than lock the doors and buzz people into the sanctuary. In a grave, authoritative voice, he tells us that churches must steel themselves for the inevitable: murders, rapes, burglaries, scams, sexual predators, suicides, and acts of vandalism. He even warns us about al-Qaeda. Arguing that terrorists have been “targeting Christians” across the United States, he warns us about “Islamic suicide bombers” who could target churches, even in the Bible Belt. Several audience members raise their hands to echo his concern, claiming that their own churches have been cased by “Middle Eastern men” in advance of an attack that, presumably, never came. In the midst of his jeremiad against inadequate security, Chadwick throws in an important disclaimer: “Not everybody needs to get shot,” he reminds us, after describing a near tragedy in which a church youth group used a fake gun for theatrical effect during a youth-minister sermon. Because the church elders were not informed in advance about the stunt, the church security team could easily have killed the teenagers on the altar of their own church. Having a well-trained security team can minimize such risks, he explains.
Next up is Carl Chinn, the security chief at New Life whose consulting work and publications have made him a central figure in church security. Quoting Nehemiah 4:9—“We prayed to our God and posted a guard day and night”—he assures us that surveillance cameras, threat assessments, and armed “life ministries” are now essential to the American church. Law enforcement won’t arrive in time to stop a Sunday morning attack, he says darkly—“they’ll just be there for the body bags.” The rest of his talk tells us how to prevent those body bags from being needed. First, he tells us that churches need to take these matters seriously, making sure the church choir doesn’t practice more hours than the church security team. Second, he tells us to follow our instincts in spotting so-called DLRs (“Don’t-Look-Rights”) as we scan the congregation for threats. Third, he says that the plainclothes security teams should wear banners that say “Don’t Shoot Me” to keep cops from assuming that they are among the bad guys during an active-shooter incident. Finally, while he talks about using red, yellow, and white alerts with his security team, depending on the severity of the threat, he reminds us to keep things subtle. Wearing SWAT-style clothes will freak out the worshippers for no good reason, he reminds us before turning to his most powerful material.
Featuring photos of where people were slain in the rooms around us, the core of his presentation is devoted to walking us through the 2007 New Life shooting in sobering detail. On a summer morning like this one, the New Life property seems so sleepy and generic that it’s hard to imagine such horrific events taking place here—but that is exactly Chinn’s point. Even New Life couldn’t imagine itself being attacked for years, until it was too late. He shows a photo of his small .32-caliber pistol next to the military-grade assault rifle that was used against the New Life congregation. His point is clear: churches are easily outgunned and quickly overwhelmed when “evil invades sanctuary,” as his book title puts it, unless they invest in the training and equipment that the sacred-security firms are able to provide.
Chinn makes it clear that the threat is not just crazed strangers, but friends and neighbors as well, before offering the first of several stories about men who kill wives and girlfriends on church property. Having collected data on church-related violence for years, Chinn concedes that church violence is far more likely to involve a senior pastor killing his own wife at his own church than an al-Qaeda operative with a suitcase bomb. For a millisecond I think the conference is going to take another direction, that this information will undercut the push to install surveillance systems that are useless to protect us from a familiar face with a concealed weapon, but soon we are back on track: the threats are everywhere, Christians are in the crosshairs, tightened security is the only response. What is sociologically accurate about the targeting of Christians or the likelihood of terrorist attacks is beside the point when strong feelings are in evidence: the emotional reality here is one of vulnerability, anxiety, and exposure. No doubt, Chinn’s stories—delivered in the somber tone of a man who has lived through tragic events—are legitimately terrifying, and his sincerity is evident. Church security may be a livelihood for these men, but it is clear that commercial motivations are working alongside powerful feelings of obligation, fear, vulnerability, and outrage.
Such feelings surge to a head with the next speaker, a charismatic former Dallas cop turned preacher/security professional by the name of Jimmy Meeks. “We know how evil men can be,” he says with a melancholy air. Almost shouting into the microphone during his slides of church-based crimes, Meeks has the passion and intensity of a revival tent minister with an abiding faith in tough-minded security measures. Almost mocking the Christian “superstition” that the steeple will protect them from harm, Meeks exhorts his brethren to “bind evil” in the name of “Jesus, our warrior king.” “Let us load our slingshots!” he roars before asserting that “80 million Christians have been killed for their faith in Jesus, including 45 million in the twentieth century alone!” We must remember that churches are “always” under threat, he says, and that 480 violent deaths have occurred in US churches since 1999 (elsewhere he puts the number at 542; other sacred-security experts put the number at 28).11 Like his colleagues, Meeks throws around disturbing statistics with little attribution, but no one asks for footnotes when the passions are flowing and he’s exhorting the crowd never to forget the fallen nature of humanity: “Trust no man, unless he has earned it!”
His long litany of atrocities, mostly taken from recent media accounts, reads like a dark epic poem of Christian victimization in the age of Obama. But it’s not all darkness, all the time. If his presentation seems overwhelmingly grim, Meeks gestures to the light when he claims that “love is the driving force behind church security” and that he only wants to “prevent the heartache” that he saw in the wake of a multiple homicide in the First Baptist Church in Dangerfield, Texas, in 1980.12 Like the 2007 New Life shooting, the Dangerfield tragedy has a mythic status here (it was even the subject of a small documentary film that is sold on sacred-security websites), and Meeks uses it as the emotional centerpiece of his presentation about the dangers churches face. With a heated barrage of anecdotal evidence, alarming statistics, and scriptural references, he presses the case we have heard throughout the morning: a day of reckoning approaches, and churches must be ready with all the tools of law enforcement.
One of the most affecting testimonials for greater security comes just before lunch. An African American pastor comes to the stage to interview David Works, a white church member who survived the 2007 New Life shooting. Works describes the agony of being shot in the parking lot and being unable to reach his daughter as she bled to death just a few steps away. With somber eloquence, he describes the unfolding horror of the shooting and his long recovery process, which included writing a book (Gone in a Heartbeat: Our Daughters Died . . . Our Faith Endures) that, like some of the books that appeared in the wake of the Columbine High School massacre, casts the shooting in a theological light.13 “The parking lot of your home church is not where you expect to be martyred,” he says mournfully, and people nod in sympathy. He doesn’t mention church security or surveillance systems per se, but he is leading us to the same conclusions as everyone else who has taken the podium: This is the evil we feared. This is why we need to ramp up our security. This is why we need surveillance systems. This is why we are here. Again, our location is significant. The residue of Columbine is everywhere in this part of Colorado, perhaps nowhere more than at New Life. A decade and a half may have passed since the massacre in the school outside Denver, but the references to Columbine are frequent and deeply felt throughout the day. “Christian America—this is your Columbine,” the New Life killer wrote before his 2007 rampage, referring to an event to which many New Life congregants had some personal connection. As quoted (without the obscenities) on the back of Carl Chinn’s book, the killer made his intentions plain: “I’m coming for EVERYONE soon, and I WILL be armed to the @#%$ teeth, and I WILL shoot and I WILL @#%$ KILL EVERYTHING.” Both in his book and in person at the New Life conference, Chinn makes one fundamental point that sums up everything we are hearing at the conference about church security: “It wasn’t the first time evil invaded the sanctuary. It will not be the last. Were we ready? Will you be?”14
It’s an immense moral burden, one that the conference participants seem ready to shoulder without complaint. Yet no one asks an underlying question: Are you sure all this stuff is really necessary? Although we get plenty of heated rhetoric and the gory anecdotes that fire-and-brimstone preachers love to share, no one tries to demonstrate that churches are vulnerable to attack in a statistically meaningful way. No one can prove that churches are facing such heightened risks, that this state of emergency really exists for buildings that often seem like the sleepiest, quietest, and safest places in town. And no one demonstrates the effectiveness of installing CCTV or well-trained “life ministry” security teams in deterring crimes in churches. Instead, sacred security is operating in an emotional register, in the realm of feelings of vulnerability, fear, distrust, anger—as well as responsibility, obligation, and love for their fellow congregants. In place of the hard facts of what works, there is a strong sense of we have to do something. Religion and high-tech security form a powerful union in such contexts.
The conference in Colorado Springs was the embodiment of what I have been seeing and reading for several years in the marketing materials for sacred-security firms, some twenty of which I’ve been following online. Across most of the United States, and especially across the American South and lower Midwest, one can find self-proclaimed Christian businesses of every possible sort, from craft-supply megastores such as Hobby Lobby to homey storefronts that offer greeting cards, cakes, books, or office supplies with a Christian twist, one that usually reflects culturally conservative Protestantism. In this regard, the mere existence of Christian-identified security firms is not entirely surprising, especially in the Bible Belt. However, I am fascinated by how they fuse their religious and cultural beliefs with the language of securitization, creating a new, theologically infused mode of insecurity in the age of surveillance. These are scary times, these God-centric surveillance companies seem to say, but the answers are at hand. The challenge to secure the faithful against so many threats might seem overwhelming, but as one church-security handbook reminds its readers, there are many ways to “harden” a church’s “soft” defenses against attack. The “good news” of securitization is available for those who will repent their complacent ways and feel the terrors of the time. As one Christian security professional puts it, perhaps inadvertently conflating himself with God: “Whoever listens to me will live in safety” (Proverbs 1:33).15
The Litany of Doom
The first commandment of sacred security is Thou Shall Fear Thy Neighbor, which is why the sales pitch begins and ends with fear. Hoping to scare the bejesus out of complacent congregations with terrifyingly vivid anecdotal evidence, the sales pitch leans heavily on what I call the “litany of doom,” an extensive list of shocking crimes against sanctuaries in the United States. This grim catalog of murders, assaults, child abuse, rapes, and robberies provides the rationale for investing in an unprecedented degree of sacred security and surveillance. For instance, the NOCSSM, founded in Grapevine, Texas, in 2002, warns that “criminals come in all forms; sexual predators who prey on both children and adults, thieves who would steal in the dead of night or in broad daylight, and con-men who prey on the trusting. All of these criminals are attracted to the seemingly low risk environment of churches.”16 Another security firm warns: “An unfortunate aspect of our current society is that nothing seems to be sacred.”17 A rueful tone marks these assertions of an ever-present threat to personal and communal safety, which is then itemized in sensational detail.
“ANOTHER VIOLENT ATTACK IN A CHURCH” is one headline on the Gideon Protective Services website, though it could describe almost anything in these litanies of doom and destruction. “This will be the 32nd violent attack this year” (2010), Gideon reminds its readers, before listing many of these atrocities, often with links to news stories that emphasize the urgency of the crisis. Similarly, the Church Security Alliance features dramatic headlines on its website: “PASTOR SHOT IN THE HEAD WHILE HOSTING YOUTH GROUP EVENT . . . MAN DRIVES CAR INTO CHURCH AND SETS BUILDING ON FIRE . . . MURDER-SUICIDE AT TEXAS CHURCH ALTAR . . . MINISTER BEATEN AFTER CLASHING WITH MUSLIMS ON HIS TV SHOW.”18 Or again in the Lone Star state, this time from a company called Safe at Church: “GUNMAN KILLS SEVEN, AND HIMSELF, IN TEXAS CHURCH.”19 To keep these warnings from seeming anecdotal, a few vendors add a veneer of social science, such as the security consultant who publishes a “comprehensive list of Ministry related deadly force incidents.” His litany purports to describe hundreds of violent crimes committed on church grounds in the United States since 1999.
The purpose of these litanies seems obvious: they are designed to establish the urgency of the threat that churches face. Like all marketers, sacred-security firms work hard to overcome consumer passivity. “Our loved ones are dying, our churches are being burned down and the gifts that God has been so gracious to give us are being taken right from under our noses,” writes one vendor before asking: “Where is the outrage?”20 Of course, if the litany succeeds in providing outrage or fear, sacred-security firms will tend to those needs. Pastoral fear will find a productive outlet in the power of surveillance technologies, which will prevent a congregation from becoming another unfortunate statistic. The essential message is clear: you don’t want to be the remorseful pastor who says to himself if only we had invested in a surveillance system. Instead, as one vendor encourages a reluctant minister, listen to Romans 13:4 and arm yourself against evil, for “God’s minister” does “not bear the sword in vain . . . he is . . . an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil.”
In the marketing materials for sacred surveillance, the attacker is inevitably male, the victim female. Horror stories in the litany of doom seem designed to arouse feelings of patriarchal responsibility for “their women.” Quoting from the Book of Nehemiah (4:14), the Cops and Cross website reminds its customers to “Fight for your daughters, your wives.” In this sense, one foundation of sacred security lies in the traditional roles that evangelical culture assigns to men and women. As with other religious conservatives in the contemporary United States, evangelicals favor traditional gender ideologies that charge “strong men” with the protection of women. Indeed, much of the sacred-security rhetoric sounds familiar to anyone who remembers the 1990s ascent of the Promise Keepers movement, whose “central theme” was that “current social problems are caused by a lack of appropriate male leadership.” Their solution, as Becky Beal points out, was a call for men to “make a commitment to assume their ‘rightful’ obligations as leaders in our society.”21 Another scholar has explored the gender ideologies in Edwin Louis Cole’s best-selling book Maximized Manhood: A Guide to Family Survival (1982), a Promise Keepers classic with almost a million copies in print. While women are stereotyped as emotional, responsive, and sensitive in Cole’s worldview, men are understood as possessing a natural sense of “aggression, strength, and rationality.” As Cole puts it: “A church, a family, a nation is only as strong as its men. Men, you are accountable.”22 Today, security firms make the same argument: strong men have a moral duty to protect their community. The founder of the Church Security Network even quoted the lyrics of a Christian rock band to inspire manly vigilance and to sell CCTV:
We were warriors on the front lines
Standing, unafraid
But now we’re watchers on the sidelines
Where are you, men of courage?
You were made for so much more.23
The patriarchal aspect is obvious. What is more nuanced is the racialization of the threat in the litany of doom. As Donald G. Mathews and other historians have shown, southern white males have long obsessed over the sexual purity of their wives, daughters, and sisters, in particular against the perceived advances of African American men. In most of the marketing material that I have studied, the racialization of the threat is subtle but persistent. The few faces of color that I came across in the sacred-security marketing materials were always suspects in custody, usually in a photograph linked to a TV news report about some heinous crime. Whereas the threat to churches is sometimes a person of color, the imagined victim is almost invariably white, as is the guardian figure. In other words, Christian-based security experts are almost invariably white men, often posed with guns, dogs, and other suggestions of military or law enforcement prowess, while their criminal litany tends to focus on white female victims and male perpetrators that are often African American—though women of color are also sometimes presented as threatening in the marketing materials. A few years ago, ABC News broadcast a story about a woman in Houston who stole money from purses during church services, even after exchanging the “sign of peace” with her victims. She was a woman of color, part of a worrisome pattern in these widely circulated news stories and the sacred-security marketing built around racialized villains. The news provides us with the church surveillance camera’s POV: we gawk in judgment from above as the petty thief helps herself to someone’s wallet. ABC’s video footage, filled with standard-issue piety about holiness debased (perhaps not too different from my own), is then used by security companies to press their case for more cameras, more training, more guns in American churches.
The purpose of these emotionally resonant stories is clear: to overcome the second thoughts of clergy and congregants who are concerned not only about the high cost of surveillance systems, but also their appropriateness in a house of worship. As one security firm’s website explained:
One stumbling block for church surveillance systems is that they look, well, too much like surveillance systems. Many people do not want the place that others come to for worship and sanctuary, to look like it is a fortress. They want people to feel at ease [in] church, and [they might] not like [that] they are being watched. However, video surveillance systems these days are meant to provide tasteful design, while including a high-tech surveillance equipment. . . . Security cameras can be designed to look like they are meant to be there. In a church, people come to worship and feel closer to God, no one wants to feel like they are being monitored by the eye in the sky (and we are not referring to the big eye in the sky that people are there to worship).24
Many companies address this issue in their marketing materials, often returning to horror stories to overcome doubts. “Church leaders have been very reluctant to install church video surveillance systems because they believe it conveys distrust and sends a message of fear to the congregants,” a website called SmartSurveillanceTips.com tells us. “The truth is, properly installed church video security monitoring systems will never affect the feeling of openness and trust that most congregations wish to experience.” Phew, what a relief! There are no side-effects to injecting another all-seeing eye into a small congregation. The marketers explain away all doubts, even as they gin up the fear with long lists of atrocities committed on church grounds. Separating media hyperbole from actual danger is impossible in the welter of emotions that sacred security generates: fear, outrage, guilt, anger, vigilance, hope. Indeed, so much of this business works on an emotional level, where religion often flourishes as well. Because we have no compelling evidence that CCTV serves as a deterrent, churches are buying it “on faith” for the feeling of security that it presumably provides (and perhaps for the small satisfaction of being able to say after the next crime that “we did all we could”). In this sense, the proposition that “CCTV will make me safer” is no different in kind than “the Lord will provide” or “everything happens for a reason”: investing in sacred security is an act of faith. (Of course, some vendors make unsupported claims that CCTV deters crime: “Don’t hide your camera systems,” one how-to book advises. “They serve as a deterrent. Let people know they are being watched. Place the camera in a secure location but out in full view.”)25 It sounds plausible enough at first glance, but the claim is never given much support, with the result being that I was quite doubtful about the claims being made for church surveillance systems.
Yet if the marketing rhetoric is any guide, I’m not the only skeptic. Doubt often remains in the hearts and minds of religious consumers, and they need something more than emotionally charged anecdotal evidence to overcome their skepticism. Again and again, I found a lingering question haunting the rhetoric of sacred security: CCTV in a church? Really? Almost every sales pitch for sacred security addresses this awkward question in some fashion. Often vendors answer this question not just with the fear-mongering and pop sociology of the litany of doom, but on theological grounds as well, opening up a surprising space in which surveillance studies and religious studies share a common interest.
What Would Homeland Security Do? The Theology of Surveillance
The second commandment of sacred security is the theological justification for surveillance, or what is sometimes described as providing “biblical clearance.” The reason is simple: many potential customers have qualms about the securitization of sacred space. Even a pastor in Fort Worth, Texas, who allows deacons to bring guns to church on Sunday, worries about taking things too far: “My ultimate conviction is what does the word of God say and what would Jesus do? Can you in your wildest imagination ever see Jesus packing a .38? I can’t imagine Peter and Paul carrying .45s.”26
No doubt, the proliferation of surveillance technologies is a source of deep conflict for many Christian conservatives. Evangelical conservatives have sometimes rejected CCTV and other security measures as diabolical tools that usurp divine judgment. In a book devoted to the topic, a “leading teacher in Bible Prophesy” has even claimed that surveillance technologies are “setting the stage for the rise of the Antichrist and world government.”27 Another Christian writer has fulminated against “the mind control that is coming under the 666 Surveillance System.”28 For some evangelical conservatives, CCTV is quite literally the mark of the beast—a sign of external control that is somehow related to the dark conspiracies of the “New World Order.”
Yet something else might trump these vivid fears about security technologies: a strong desire to impose biblical order on contemporary society. Evangelical conservatives often express dismay about a “permissive” modern society that lacks supervision, if not outright control. In this context, surveillance technologies might enable fantasies of patriarchal control that would contain the criminality and waywardness associated with secular modernity. As this punitive antimodernism overshadows libertarian or even conspiratorial concerns about surveillance leading to “world government,” so too does selective biblical quotation provide a means for winning over the theologically uncertain.
The selected Bible passages vary but the subtext is consistent: be afraid, be aware, be vigilant, be strong, be a watchman. In short, it’s something like In God We Trust—but pack a weapon just in case. At the Call2Duty conference in Carrolton, Texas, in 2012, Jimmy Meeks, the previously mentioned founder of the Texas-based Cops and Cross, explicitly argued “the scriptural validity of the need for Church Security” as the core of his presentation.29 Likewise, in its web pages devoted to church security, Christianet.com aims to dispel the myth that “Scripture never mentions a wireless security camera system.” “False,” we are told, although a skeptical reader might not be persuaded by the evidence from Mark 3:27: “No man can enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods, except he will first bind the strong man; and then he will spoil his house.”
Not surprisingly, the vendors take some liberties with their Bible verses, relying on metaphorical understandings that they might find insufficiently literal in other contexts. NOCSSM’s “founding scripture” is Chronicles 9:21, which describes “responsible men” who are “gatekeepers” around the “Lord’s tent.” There is the ubiquitous Nehemiah 4:9: “We prayed to our God and posted a guard.” The Safe at Church firm attributes this nervous-making quotation to Jesus: “BEWARE OF MEN . . . THEY WILL HARM YOU IN THE SYNAGOGUE (Matthew 10: 17).” Meanwhile, Gideon Protective Services offers a long list of “protective Bible verses” that seem to justify church security, while Church Risk Management gives several verses to augment its sales pitch: “Luke 10: 19: Behold, I give you the authority to trample on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy. . . . Luke 22: 36 . . . and he who has no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one. . . . 1 Peter 5:8- Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.”30 And what could sell the enhanced vision of CCTV more effectively than the quotation from Zecharia 9:8 at the defunct website Church-Security-Training.com: “No more shall an oppressor pass through them. For now I have seen with my eyes.”31
Sometimes the vendors engage their skeptics head-on, providing biblical chapter and verse that is intended to legitimize and even somehow consecrate their businesses. When one pastor suggested that security measures be left “in God’s hands,” a security expert shot back with a Bible verse that “each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others,” with the implication being that security consultants were using their God-given gifts in service of the Lord and thus should not be challenged. Then the consultant pushed further on the point of personal accountability, putting the moral onus on his questioner: “Are YOU being a good steward with the gifts that God has given YOU and your church?” As another company puts it, providing security is a “sacred charge,” not something to be taken lightly.32
The conversation about sacred security spills over into various blogs and writings published elsewhere. One blog post from Church Security Alliance puts it this way: “I suspect Jesus was deeply saddened any church felt it necessary to hire security. But, thank God they did. Jesus and his followers faced many of the same threats churches face today. However, Jesus didn’t face the threat of civil legal action for ‘Failure to perform due diligence’ our churches face today.”33 Another, from a journalist-politician in Canada, lamented in a letter to the editor of a provincial magazine: “When liberals destroyed faith in the real God, who watches everything we do and even think, the unintended but inevitable result was video-cameras. I agree it’s a lousy substitute. But truth, and the whole truth, we must have, or nothing works.”34
The upshot is clear: strong security is a grim necessity for these Christians. Pastors and deacons must embrace their moral duty of manly guardianship. Although the tide of sin cannot be stemmed, it can be slowed with the right technology and training—most often, practices that have weirdly devolved from the Department of Homeland Security to small suburban churches. In the meantime, pastors should use their CCTV to catch the sinners within the fold, such as teenagers having sex on the church grounds, or to protect the innocent charged with crimes on church property. One vendor points out that CCTV can clear the name of a minister falsely accused of child molestation—and thus one moral panic in twenty-first-century America fuels another.
The Architecture of Control: A Long History
Protestant churches are no strangers to the architecture of control, a culture of scrutiny that includes informal social networks, political rhetoric that centers on deviance and difference, and even designs for literally building surveillance into the church experience. From late-nineteenth-century church architecture that encouraged worshippers to scrutinize one another in pews that faced one another, to the incessant victimization rhetoric of the contemporary Christian right, American Protestants have kept a vigilant watch over their flocks’ internal behaviors as well as their perceived external enemies. Writing about eighteenth-century Virginia, historian Don Mathews has described the intense scrutiny to which congregants were subjected: “Whether wanton or wanting, the world was a disorderly place, and Evangelicals were called out of it to establish proper social relations.” This required “strict inquiry into the behaviors which affected only individuals” and “careful surveillance of antisocial behavior which threatened to disrupt the community or give it a bad name.”35 A well-established culture of ministerial scrutiny seems a natural foundation for the emerging culture of surveillance.
Historians have connected some of this fortress mentality to the racial politics of nineteenth-century southern white males, in particular their obsession with protecting the purity of white Southern women. In this sense, sacred security is interwoven with older ideas about sexual purity, racial threats, manly protection, and quasi-military vigilance, a kind of alert moral warrior posture that also animated the rhetoric of modern Promise Keepers as well as some recent politicians, such as former US senator Rick Santorum and others who cater to the conservative Tea Party.
Despite being the empowered majority throughout US history in most places and times, white Protestant conservatives have often imagined themselves as an embattled minority in the past century. The irony is obvious. Although a suburban mosque is probably a more likely target for vandalism and serious hate crimes, sacred-security firms are directing their energies toward Protestant churches in the rural and suburban South. Sacred security is endeavoring to reinforce the walls of the fortress, to train the “watchmen” to stand guard, and to explain away lingering doubts with the casuistry of the modern marketer. All for a price—and in a sales pitch that reveals a great deal about the relationship between religion and security in the contemporary Bible Belt. The friction is palpable at first, but with persistent marketing in a ripe environment, a smooth mutuality takes its place. And what this smoothness reveals, to my mind, is the underlying compatibility of old-fashioned southern Protestant religiosity, at least in its conservative form, and newfangled surveillance technologies. As one historian has put it, low-tech forms of human surveillance “undergirded evangelical morality” in nineteenth-century America. Now we have new technologies that boost the power of religious watchmen, whose gender is most certainly male and whose anxieties are most certainly real, even if their sense of imminent threat is often fueled by old habits and patterns of belief.
Fear Thy Neighbor: Religion and Social Trust
We prayed to our God and posted a guard.
—NEHEMIAH 4:9, QUOTED ON CARL CHINN’S WEBSITE
One of the best works of social science to assess contemporary religious life in America is Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell’s American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (2010), whose subtitle has particular relevance here.36 Religious identification seems to cut both ways when it comes to worrying about one’s neighbors. Although the book does not deal explicitly with security issues, it does provide an invaluable guide to the diverse cultural landscape of American religious life, one that might help us to explain the appeal of sacred security to particular communities of faith that are hardly the fringe sects that some might imagine. Instead, these are faith communities with deep pockets and considerable influence in contemporary America.
Conducting an extensive Faith Matters survey in 2006–2007 with thousands of Americans, Putnam and Campbell found that churchgoing significantly increases “social trust” more than any other factor except education; they call churchgoing “the universal predictor of good neighborliness.”37 What is it about churchgoing that makes individuals more trusting, more optimistic, and happier than nonchurchgoers? These political scientists argue that the social networks that arise from active churchgoing, rather than from the nitty-gritty of theological doctrine, are the primary ingredient for social trust. In other words, making friends in church is more important than what is preached on Sunday morning, in terms of encouraging a more secure picture of the outside world—though theology is far from meaningless in this regard.
The great exception to the correlation between neighborliness and churchgoing is among fundamentalists, and herein lies the sweet spot for sacred security. Although it is often confusing to parse these seemingly fuzzy terms, fundamentalism is generally understood as a subset of the much broader category of evangelical Protestantism (those various denominations that fall outside the designation of “mainline” Protestantism, such as Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians). Compared to the sunnier evangelicals in the Billy Graham tradition, fundamentalists are more skeptical about engagement with the modern world, put great stock in biblical “inerrancy,” interpret scripture with stringent literalism, and hold antiscientific positions on issues ranging from evolution to climate change. Perhaps we could argue that their seemingly paranoid view of security, one that requires arming oneself against an apparently exaggerated threat, is in keeping with this worldview, in which empirical data about crime can be trumped by a Bible quote. This is why I would suggest that sacred security is directed at evangelicals as its primary audience but that its strongest cultural resonance is within fundamentalism, that influential subset of evangelicalism.
Sacred security seems to gain little traction among religious liberals such as Quakers, Unitarians, and mainline Protestants, who seem almost entirely absent from this part of the security landscape. One reason for their presumably more trusting view of the world, if I can extrapolate from Putnam and Campbell’s findings, is theological (though education is surely relevant as well). “Religious liberals more often experience a loving God, and they are among the most socially trusting of Americans,” they write, “whereas religious conservatives more often experience a judgmental God, and they are the least trusting of Americans, especially if they are observant.”38 What Putnam and Campbell are suggesting is not surprising: a theology focused on a loving God who smiles in blessing and forgiveness of his children will result in a more trusting view of other people as well, while a theological emphasis on original sin, the depraved “original” nature of human beings, and constant divine scrutiny will result in a distrustful view of other people. In other words, if one imagines God as a frowning patriarch sitting in judgment over a universe filled with sin-crazed miscreants, she is likely to adopt a similar perspective on humanity—which makes for a good potential customer for sacred security. By contrast, if one is a religious liberal with a sunny view of divine forgiveness as well as a belief in innate human decency, she is probably not as worried about arming deacons or keeping video cameras trained on Sunday-school teachers. As Putnam and Campbell put it, our ideas about God are interwoven with our ideas about other people: “a comforting, avuncular God encourages social comity and confidence.”39 While most Americans report feeling God’s love “very often” (62 percent), a minority (39 percent) experience judgment very often—and this fretful minority is probably where sacred security has its greatest appeal. Where does this leave other faiths? Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and other believers may have security needs as pressing as those of evangelical megachurches in Dallas, even more so in the case of some mosques or synagogues, but I found little public evidence of their security anxiety expressed in books, brochures, or training manuals or on websites, nor did I find a significant number of religiously identified firms marketing specifically to these faiths.
As noted earlier, sacred security is a phenomenon kept afloat largely by middle-aged southern evangelical white conservatives who are concerned about personal and communal safety. Its vendors are not slick corporations staffed by Harvard MBAs, but rather former cops and part-time preachers from small towns in Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, or Florida—“God-centric” businessmen of modest educational attainment, which might include theological training at a small religious college or criminology courses at a community college (and often a combination of the two). Their small security companies are often homespun, even quaint, in their self-presentation, with clunky websites that could not have been designed professionally, each one chock-full of more Bible verses than a church newsletter. And with the litany of criminal threats warning customers of the inevitable tide of violence to come, sacred-security vendors seem to operate from a position of distrust toward those outside the congregation. Worried about the possibility of murder or pedophilia on their church’s grounds, these men seem eager to reestablish a vision of old-fashioned, quasi-military authority and patriarchal control over an ostensibly vulnerable community. These are the men who are now promoting surveillance technologies for American churches in the Bible Belt.
Putnam and Campbell’s work is relevant here as well. What their massive survey confirmed is that religious Americans are less tolerant of dissent and less supportive of civil liberties. While religious life seems to enhance civil engagement, social trust, and other forms of citizenship in general, these political scientists also describe the “darker side of religion’s link to citizenship.”40 Indeed, their Faith Matters survey confirmed what many earlier studies suggested: that there is a “fundamental correlation between religiosity and intolerance.”41 Because this intolerance is often directed at “outsiders” who appear “different,” whether because of sexual orientation or political affiliation, I suspect that this pervasive feeling of “stranger danger” is feeding the appetite for security, especially when it is combined with a strong emphasis on obedience. Referring back to earlier studies by Kenneth Wald, Stephen Mockabee, and others, Putnam and Campbell characterize the “authority-mindedness” of religious people who are “particularly concerned to safeguard authority.”42 Although Putnam and Campbell never mention security issues such as surveillance per se, and while “authority-mindedness” is not perfectly coterminous with “security-mindedness,” I think they are inadvertently describing the cultural backdrop for sacred security: religious people who are suspicious of outsiders and who put authority and control above autonomy and privacy. In this sense, what I take from Putnam and Campbell’s survey data is that sacred security is most likely to spring from, and speak to, evangelical conservatives who prize authority and fear disorder, for theological, cultural, and political reasons. Although the reassuring social networks formed during churchgoing may undercut the social distrust of even the most theologically conservative parishioner, thereby reducing the desire for high-tech security measures at church, “authority-minded” evangelical conservatives—and fundamentalists in particular—might be the ideal demographic for a faith-based security company’s sales pitch, given their theological and cultural outlook.43
Still, obvious questions remain for those who wire up their sanctuaries for CCTV and train their ushers to scan the pews for terrorists: Does it work? Does it make them safer? Does it even make them feel safer? I’m not so sure, especially not when training manuals remind us that our security training and equipment will never suffice because “there is still a seasoned and determined enemy at the gate.”44 For church members who are nervous about personal safety, who circulate horror stories about church shootings, and who are theologically and sociologically disposed to social distrust, sacred security may not solve the problem, either in terms of preventing crime or in creating a secure feeling. One of the sad ironies about surveillance is that its efficacy has never been demonstrated to the satisfaction of sociologists, whose studies tend to suggest that CCTV, in particular, is almost useless in preventing crime. But even sadder is what may be happening on an emotional level, where surveillance may prove equally problematic for those who live under its inquiring gaze. Looking at Protestant Boston in the 1850s, historian John Corrigan argues that religious devotion was offered to the divine in exchange for protection and blessing—in other words, emotions were commodified in a contractual exchange that implied “if I feel a certain way, I will receive a certain reward.”45 In a similar manner, some contemporary Christians offer a particular emotional stance—paternal protectiveness, righteous vigilance—that yields a smaller reward, if any. According to the sacred-security firms, no level of vigilance can ensure the total safety of the congregation. The threats are too grave, too implacable for that. “Hey Pastor, I will fill you in on something,” writes the head of the Church Security Network in response to one Doubting Thomas. “Security is never 100 percent, but no security is 100 percent vulnerability. I never said you can stop 100 percent of the active shooters.” At its best, high-tech vigilance will minimize the threat, keep it relatively at bay, in a manner that will allow the sacred community to survive but not really thrive. Thus, even as they make a bargain with security companies, looking to find solace in surveillance technology and quasi-military training, evangelical conservatives are probably still bedeviled by insecurity, vulnerability, anxiety, and a sense of victimhood. Even with their ideological brethren at the center of political power—from Congress to the Supreme Court to the White House—evangelical conservatives seem to retain their deeply encoded sense of vulnerability. This is true even in moments of their greatest triumph, and even when enmeshed in the increasingly high-tech web of surveillance culture. This is the tragic bargain that security often asks us to make: we spend a great deal, both financially and emotionally, for a very uncertain result.
What are the emotional implications of converting the relatively open doors of churches into something approaching a high-security camp with locks, gates, and cameras? Such confinement would seem oppressive and alienating, not only to outsiders approaching the gates of the temple but also to those inside biting their nails in anticipation of the next imagined atrocity. As this emotional shift takes place, churches may assume the least pleasant aspects of the airport, the location par excellence of control societies.46 Along with airports, gated communities, and schools, churches can now be added to the list of security-obsessed institutions in the contemporary United States. Although some forms of sacred security existed before 9/11, the ongoing war on terror seems to have been a catalyst for the expansion of the security state into every realm of American life. Two sociologists noted as much in 2005: “September 11th provided a convenient opportunity for the security establishment to lobby for increased surveillance capacity, despite lingering questions about whether such devices can achieve their professed goals.”47 Churches and other religious institutions are yet another front in the intensifying war of control, access, mobility, and identity that has marked the era of homeland security in America.
Of course, many American churches, temples, and mosques have resisted the encroaching militarization with courageous moral stands: they offer sanctuary to undocumented workers, meals to the homeless of all faiths, and a message of social hope and trust that applies equally to friend and stranger. Unafraid almost by principle, these religious institutions are small islands in the sea of insecurity in which we live our lives today. Other churches, as I’ve described above, have submerged themselves in insecurity. We will see how religious institutions are able to survive the incorporation of a fortress mentality that seems more appropriate to Christian life in early modern Europe, when some churches were literal fortresses.
Cameras and Crosses
I sense the pain in the room, the heaviness of the obligation, and the burden of serving as a “sheepdog” to protect the “flock” whenever I meet people involved with sacred security. Like me, these are ordinary people with the ordinary pains of living that they are trying to soothe in the best ways they know. I have empathy and, I hope, some degree of understanding for people who turn to sacred-security firms to solve a problem that may be grounded less in criminological facts than in certain emotional, ideological, and theological assumptions. Nevertheless, I am troubled not to hear a single reference to root causes, in a sociological sense. Church surveillance is marketed, consumed, and deployed without a nod to structural issues such as gun laws, racialized and gendered poverty, the treatment of the mentally ill, or the ripple effects of living in an increasingly militarized culture. Instead, this segment of the Christian right dismisses such concerns by simply claiming that “evil” is at work, that their congregations are staring down an implacable force so potent that nothing can stop it except, perhaps, guns, locks, and security cameras. Such measures cannot stop the evil entirely, but they are better than nothing. Such strong feelings of anxiety, vulnerability, and protectiveness seem to lead evangelical conservatives to this strange place in which “better than nothing” is something legitimate to pursue.
I’m interested in my own feelings about CCTV as well, even surprised by them. Until recently I didn’t know I cared about cameras in sacred spaces at all. Yet I keep returning to religious angles that I’ve never pursued in the past. I often wonder: Who would want surveillance cameras above the pews glaring down at the worshippers? What could be so alarming to a roomful of gun-owning, God-fearing, middle-aged white people in a small town or midsize city run by other white Christian people? In other words, what is so damn frightening that you’d replace the free-flowing calm and compassionate welcome of the idealized church with an ominous sense of lockdown? What draws me to this topic is the sheer contrast between the ideal of hopeful refuge and shoulder-to-shoulder togetherness in a sacred space versus the insinuated, carefully marketed anxiety of the security business, in which the threat of looming violence is forever amped up, and the need for eternal vigilance is well established. Must everything drip with fear? Do we really need “rules of engagement” for church security teams, who must be told that “protection of the offering (theft) is not an appropriate use of deadly force”?48
After a few years of looking at this subject from various odd angles, I can hazard this much: logic and evidence cannot compete with strong feelings and lurid stories about whatever evil is lurking outside the blessed community. For many conservative evangelicals, the enemy has a potency that is difficult to convey in secular terms.
In this distressed vision of modern America, the black cloud of evil can settle anywhere, anytime. It is the rank stranger outside the gate whom they fear. It is the vile nature of strangers, of difference, of heathens, but also the evil within: what the pastor might do to the organist, what the children might allege in the nursery—and if they don’t fear these things, the marketing of sacred security explicitly tells them that they should. Thank God—or Gideon Protective Services, or Watchman Security, or Savior Protection—that video surveillance cameras, properly installed, will protect the innocent and ward off the wicked, even if it’s only sometimes. Such is the sales pitch from the companies that I have been following in this complex economy of fear.
Deep down, I suppose what rattles me about sacred surveillance is the vague feeling of personal violation. That plastic camera near the roofline seems out of place, almost seeming to function like a rival to the crucifix—and one just as alive with potentiality. My father’s broken-down Catholicism, my mother’s stern Church of Christ, my own peevish teenage Lutheran apostasy and surreal exile to a Catholic boys’ school—all tell me that I’m looking the wrong way, that I’m responding to the wrong icon when I look past the crucifix to stare at the CCTV camera. But that camera is why I feel watched and judged. I want it to stop looking, to simply trust me not to harm, whether I’m in a church singing hymns or in the Gap shopping for socks. But it never sleeps; it never closes its glassy eye; it never stops judging, recording, archiving the face that we present to the machinery of electronic security.
Queasy as I am about the blurring of cameras and crosses, of old theology and new technology, I also wonder if they have a certain affinity. Both are emblems of judgment from afar, of an inscrutable downward gaze. Along with other forms of tracking human behavior, increasingly ubiquitous surveillance cameras represent yet another encroachment on our privacy and liberty—yet I have come across very little opposition to CCTV in churches (or in most other aspects of American life). Perhaps we would find this encroachment more disturbing if the new eye of providence didn’t feel so much like the old one—that is to say, if ancient patterns of belief hadn’t prepped the ground for this new outgrowth of the security state.49
With the expansion of our control society into every realm of American life, I fear that we’re building a gaudy Las Vegas of the mind, a slick zone of mechanized distrust in which we’re always under someone’s watchful eye. In director Martin Scorsese’s film Casino, Ace Rothstein, the savvy operator played by Robert De Niro, explains this culture of relentless scrutiny:
In Vegas, everybody’s gotta watch everybody else. Since the players are looking to beat the casino, the dealers are watching the players. The box men are watching the dealers. The floor men are watching the box men. The pit bosses are watching the floor men. The shift bosses are watching the pit bosses. The casino manager is watching the shift bosses. I’m watching the casino manager. And the eye-in-the-sky is watching us all.
Of course, the “all-seeing eye” used to refer to the divine. Now it is a small lens linked to a video monitor in the back room of a church, casino, shopping center, or office building. And therein lies the dismal bathos of the contemporary moment, in which the cross is not adequate protection, even for believers: God’s not dead—he’s just been demoted.
It’s not for me to say whether CCTV eases or intensifies the fear of crime in a particular congregation—that will have to wait for an ethnographer who can track individual responses over many months, something I have not attempted here. Perhaps the cameras will be well received in some quarters, or perhaps they will be perceived (paradoxically) as unnerving symbols of insecurity, as reflections of a history of violence in a particular location that might otherwise seem benign. I’m interested in these perceptions, as well as the other psychological baggage that accompanies the proliferation of CCTV. For instance, I’m curious as to whether the addition of video surveillance enables a kind of comprehensive, unseen seeing that humans are not used to possessing, one that far exceeds the imaging technologies of the twentieth century. Will the proliferation of small, powerful, and networked surveillance cameras represent an unprecedented expansion of vision, one that approaches certain aspects of the all-seeing divine described in Proverbs 15:3 (“The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good”)? The theology of video surveillance is my ultimate destination here.50
Indeed, how we internalize video surveillance and the other imperatives of a control society is, for me, the heart of the matter. Well before Jeremy Bentham made this internalization of the guard’s gaze a key aspect of his diabolically clever Panopticon, the fifteenth-century German monk Nicholas of Cusa disciplined an entire abbey with a single portrait of Jesus, whose eyes had been painted to appear to follow the monks wherever they went.51 As much as it inspired a greater degree of piety in the abbey, the constant gaze was also an irritant, an oppressive force for those who had to live with what I imagine as a bug-eyed Jesus. A perverse parable emerged for Nicholas of Cusa’s brethren, in which the hunger for security begat a new kind of insecurity, and I suspect that we will discover much the same thing in our mania for technologies of control. What should have offered comfort and calm (Jesus, CCTV) may end up provoking discomfort and unease, if not painful self-consciousness. Maybe we will feel clumsy and naked on this perpetual stage, or maybe we will revel in it as we embrace lives of carefree exhibitionism. Privacy be damned, some will say, relishing the sense of being watched as a way to give meaning to their lives. Perhaps our deeds, both petty and grave, will take on a greater depth of meaning that goes along with our sense of being monitored.
I’m also interested in the flip side: being the divine watcher must have its own perils. In his short story “Human Moments in World War III,” first published in Esquire magazine in July 1983, Don DeLillo imagined the God-like sensation that accompanies the rapid expansion of vision that an astronaut might experience:
Earth orbit puts men into philosophical temper. How can we help it? We see the planet complete. We have a privileged vista. In our attempts to be equal to the experience, we tend to meditate importantly on subjects like the human condition. It makes a man feel universal, floating over the continents, seeing the rim of the world, a line as clear as a compass arc, knowing it is just a turning of the bend to Atlantic twilight, to sediment plumes and kelp beds, an island chain glowing in the dusky sea.
As we increasingly scrutinize other people on CCTV in our churches, homes, and offices, or from small flying drones equipped with surveillance cameras, will we not feel this God-like perspective of gazing down from above, sitting in judgment, convinced that we are the all-seeing “I”?52 (I say “convinced” because the all-seeing eye—whether technological or theological—is always fantasy: knowledge and visibility are never coterminous.) Will we become God-like voyeurs in our desire to watch friends and neighbors, coworkers and students, studying each of them with a Stasi-like efficiency on an ever-expanding surveillance system? A popular app already enables the fantasy of anonymous global voyeurism, allowing us to tap into live surveillance feeds from around the world. Look, it’s snowing in Japan . . . a man is jaywalking in Sweden . . . a car has just been parked in Florida. We can even move these faraway cameras, changing the angles, rotating the view. Perhaps the next generation of the app will let us speak to the jaywalker in Sweden: Hey! You’re breaking the law. I see you! Shape up! And he will look up, suddenly flush with fear and trembling, scurrying away from this anonymous scolding. Eventually, the peep-junkies may be able to direct small bursts of foul odor or electric shocks in order to hassle the wicked souls appearing on their CCTV monitors, thereby adding an element of “gamification” to the disciplinary regime (I’m only half-kidding here). The possibilities are endless at the leading edge of surveillance technology.
Of course, more than petty scolding is at stake when surveillance technology allows us to watch and judge in secret—we are also being tempted to assume an authoritarian mind-set that seeks to categorize and control human behavior from above, rather than remaining in the democratic fray. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s incomparable novel about a genteel English family on holiday, includes a passage in which she describes a young girl standing over a tide pool, playing God with its tiny marine inhabitants. As she becomes bored with the little universe at her feet, she begins to fantasize about her power over all that she surveyed:
Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.
Perhaps herein lies the future of CCTV, a world in which every petty soul can play God over some private puddle. As we sit in personal judgment, seeing without being seen in the machinery of surveillance, we have taken the “first step in the construction of God,” as one of Bentham’s explicators has suggested.53 In my bleaker moments, I imagine us, increasingly, hunched over a bank of surveillance monitors in the back of a high school, private home, or church, surveying some little world through a lens as we munch on salty snacks and scratch ourselves. We’ll spend the afternoon peering dyspeptically into every crevice of human behavior that can be displayed on screen, scouring the surface of things for the merest hint of danger. Dully obsessed with our seemingly limitless gaze—neither satisfied with our digital voyeurism nor able to give it up—we’ll simply be brooding over our own little kingdoms of insecurity, struggling in vain to remember what privacy, security, and community felt like before the advent of the plastic all-seeing eye.54