WHERE TWO OR three are gathered together in My name for eggs and bacon, there am I.—Matthew 18.20.
The elegant Gothic script signaling the return of Evan Whittaker and Jeanine Sabbath to the Risen Lamb Prayer Breakfast Club crawled across my laptop. I was sprawled in bed three weeks after my encounter with Kali, Goddess of Destruction and Syntax, trying hard not to think of how nice it would be to start the seventh day of Hanukkah with a large, lightly chilled gin. Not that I was Jewish, but my few remaining friends mostly were, and at holiday time it’s important to celebrate other people’s beliefs—even if they did give them up at Princeton.
“Big news this morning,” said Evan, “in the Pastor Bob blasphemy scandal. The Third Circuit Court turned down his appeal of a decision ordering that his trademark slogan be removed from all White Light golf products. White Lightning golf balls alone—over two hundred million are estimated to be in circulation—will cost billions to recall and replace.”
Normally I’d sooner watch a chicken being plucked in slow motion than any webcast produced by the Reverend. But a headline about Pastor Bob’s problems had caught my eye, and it linked me to the Prayer Breakfast Club. The story, which I hadn’t known about, made me sit up. It looked like the First Shepherd was about to lose major ground in his twenty-year battle with the Reverend for control of the Ocracy.
Pastor Bob was crazy about golf. God, for Pastor Bob, was the Divine Golfer, driving, chipping, and putting the golf ball of each human soul through the eighteen holes of life, before it relaxed for all eternity at His Nineteenth Hole. A huge publishing enterprise churned out products that conflated God, golf, and Pastor Bob’s taste for comedy: books, posters, paperware, video games, and other rib-tickling items by the million. All bore his trademark slogan: ONE NATION UNDER GOLF.
According to Evan, a little-known group called Golf Moms for Family Values had accused Pastor Bob of Felony Blasphemy One because of this slogan. Civil and criminal charges had been successfully prosecuted. Pastor Bob could be facing financial ruin and fifteen-to-life in the big house. The GMFV were supposedly White Lighters, but to a longtime Reverend watcher like me, this Golf Moms group had his fingerprints all over it. If that was the case, the Rev had crossed a line scrupulously observed to date by the Christian Right: You don’t accuse your own of blasphemy.
“Jeanine, this is a dark day for our good brother,” said Evan, who, within the limits of Christian charity, hated Pastor Bob’s guts. Others might have forgotten the Aryan Knights of America (which Pastor Bob had never renounced); Evan hadn’t.
“I’m with God on this one, Evan,” replied Jeanine, in her down-state Georgia singsong, an accent so strong some said it could crack pecans. “If I was God, and God knows I’m not, I wouldn’t want My almighty works being compared to hitting little balls with sticks.”
She gave him a sidelong look that suggested this was an obligatory rather than sincere opinion, and Evan, normally a very serious young man, allowed himself a tiny smile. They were an unlikely pair, these two, but they always seemed to be sharing unspoken confidences.
Evan Whittaker was intriguing. It was hard to understand how someone who’d recently been so supercool had fallen into the Reverend’s clutches. A wild child in his football-playing days, all women and cars and bling, Evan had cut a couple of platinum albums even before he led the Atlanta Patriots to their first Superbowl in their new home. His plan had been early retirement and a second career as a hip-hop singer, but something went wrong. The rumor was that an old steroid bust in Boston had been discreetly taken care of by the Reverend, putting the ex-star wide receiver permanently in his back pocket. I didn’t subscribe to that—it sounded too underhanded for Evan—but, whatever happened, he’d discovered not long after that he’d been born again. The Reverend himself had baptized Evan into the Church of the Risen Lamb. He’d joined the Angelic Choir of the Reverend’s weekly Sabbath Hour and its eyeballs had skyrocketed, flattening every other Bible-believing Sunday webcast in creation. Then—big news in Christian circles—the Reverend, who’d been doing the Prayer Breakfast Club with his wife for fifteen years, stepped down in favor of Evan.
Jeanine had always been a second banana, occasional comic relief from the Reverend’s Bible-based gravitas, but she blossomed in the presence of a six-foot-five African-American athlete half her age. She’d always been a bohemian presence in the emotionally corseted world of the fundos; with Evan across the desk, the Prayer Breakfast Club must have seemed, to its core audience, downright daring. Its eyeballs skyrocketed also.
A petite redheaded ball of fire, Jeanie—as she was known to le tout America—had successfully preserved, past menopause, the cuteness of her cheerleader childhood. The lost souls I hung with dismissed her as a right-wing ditz, but I thought there was more to her than met the eye. She once said, “I put the fun [or “furn”] back into fundamentalism.” For my pals this proved she was a moron. To me it proved just the opposite. That furn wasn’t the point, but putting it back. When in its long history had fundamentalism ever been fun? It was deliciously sly, the kind of joke she shared with Evan that she never had with her husband.
While it was easy to see where the ribald rumors came from, I didn’t respond to them. They seemed just plain wrong. For all his ardent Pro-creationism, the Rev had never managed to sire a child with Jeanie (giving rise to still more ribald rumors), and they’d never adopted, although she seemed like a mom to the manner born.
Jeanie’s relationship with Evan struck me as maternal, not sexual. Given its genetic impossibility, the bond was fascinating. For his part, Evan, who’d been brought up by his widowed father, clearly responded to her warmth, even looked to her for signals. In bearing he could hardly have been more masculine, but offsetting that was a restless seeking quality, as if he was always looking for answers about his purpose in life. He was so powerful a presence he could get away with what might in others have looked like uncertainty. A year earlier, discussing his conversion and future plans on FoxWeb’s Sunday show Faith the Nation, he’d said something revealing: “I’m not a quarterback, I’m a receiver. My job begins when someone throws me a ball.”
On his and Jeanie’s first appearance together, which I’d watched along with most of the nation, Evan read a news story about a multiple-vehicle collision in Texas that was supposedly caused when one of the drivers was Raptured. No one had been killed, but there were many serious injuries. Evan was listing the carnage when Jeanie suddenly burst out, “Rapture Helmets!”
“Rapture helmets?” repeated Evan, without batting an eye.
“If folks’d wear Rapture Helmets,” she explained, “they wouldn’t be turned into vegetables in these collisions.” She and Evan had then exchanged an innocent look, and one of those tiny smiles flickered across Evan’s lips. You knew that, devout Pure Holy Baptist though she was, Jeanie had never believed in the Rapture for a second. And now, neither did Evan.
“Pastor Bob’s out of options,” said the Wall Street analyst whom Evan was interviewing on the implications of the First Shepherd’s dire situation. “Whatever he does,” continued the analyst, “he’ll have to step down as CEO of the White Light conglomerate. And guess who’s waiting in the wings.”
There was a far bigger prize, apparently, within the Reverend’s grasp than the mere satisfaction of seeing his nemesis slapped in the slammer.
Pastor Bob’s breakthrough twenty years earlier had been the discovery that while Americans were hungry for spiritual nourishment, they wanted it bland and easy to digest—the religious equivalent of fast food. All that New Testament stuff about self-sacrifice and forgiveness puzzled them mightily. So Pastor Bob preached the Christian virtues of feeling good, relieving stress, getting rich, and hiring abundant deadly force to protect the good people from the bad. Nothing embodied this simple faith like his nationwide chain of gated communities called Heavenly Gates.
All Heavenly Gates communities had massive golden gates as their point of entry; all were manned by a robed and bearded security chief—PETER read his name tag—with similarly robed (and armed) seraphim enforcing his directives. Tight security and comprehensive municipal services provided Pastor Bob’s flock with peace and certainty in an ugly and uncertain world. The chain was incredibly successful.
The Reverend’s Pure Holy Baptists watched in dismay as Heavenly Gates prospered. The Reverend launched a rival outfit called Pearly Gates, but it didn’t take off. Pure Holy Baptists just didn’t have the laid-back comfort thing down the way Pastor Bob did. Besides, the faux-pearl finish on the Reverend’s gates looked tacky and peeled easily. So the Reverend had taken a different tack: If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em.
“Pastor Bob’s commitment to Ownership Christianity,” said the analyst, “is his Achilles’ heel. Every Heavenly Gates community is a public corporation. The Reverend has been quietly taking them over. He now controls seventy-eight percent of Heavenly Gates. If Pastor Bob steps down, the Reverend will become, de facto, the owner of the Church of White Light.”
I sat up even straighter. He’d done it, by God! He was about to become the supreme pontiff of the Eastern and Western churches, the Protestant pope. Doctrinally he would have to merge New Age Rock and the Rock of Ages, but that wasn’t hard. White Lighters would believe anything you wanted, so long as you didn’t take away their barbecues.
Sure enough, a few hours later, Pastor Bob resigned all his positions at the Church of White Light and announced a plea bargain that kept him out of jail. The Reverend was now the undisputed number-one Christian heavyweight in America.
I’d put Jay completely out of my mind, but the Reverend’s ascension to the very pinnacle of power put him back, front and center. I might not have a job but I did have a story, possibly a great story. I needed to get on it.
I owned part of my living boxes and most of my car. I could unload both, rent, use mass transit, keep sober. Since the bastard was pretty much responsible for getting me fired, I might as well put all my eggs in his messianic basket.
Sell all you have and follow me.
The starting point was the medium-security jail where Jay was paying the price for his contempt, Taborsky Corrections Center in Middlesex County, Connecticut. It was there I headed one bitter December morning a week later.
I’d met Jay’s group briefly in Hartford Criminal Court, after he was hustled off to the pokey. At that time there were ten or more disciples following Jay around, an eclectic lot from all over the social map. I gathered that their intention was to camp outside the jail, visit him as often as possible, and await his return to the fold.
By the time I arrived, Jay had been in Taborsky more than a month, and most of the disciples had scattered. A core group was still waiting faithfully, sleeping in Jay’s van or local churches and shelters, getting moved on from time to time but refusing to be discouraged.
They were very reluctant to talk. At first they wouldn’t even give me their names. No one had been allowed a visit with Jay, not even María, who showed up the second time I was there and gave me a very cold shoulder. Apparently she believed that my coming to see her was somehow connected to Jay’s falling afoul of the law. Her hostility colored the whole group’s attitude. For them, I was trouble.
I persisted. I took a room at a local Days Court 6, showed up every day, offered them coffee and meals. Sometimes when it was really cold they’d go back to the Bronx and sack out for the night in María’s place. I’d make it a point to be waiting for them when they got back to Taborsky the next morning. I knew I’d break them down eventually; being a pain in the butt is one of the few things I’m good at.
Two weeks into my stakeout, persistence paid off. They’d had some kind of meeting. They were worried about Jay, who still hadn’t been allowed a visit. Jail for contempt of court was often used as a way to silence troublemakers; the months had a way of becoming years. The group figured Jay might be getting into still deeper trouble; perhaps somehow, sometime, I might be able to help.
So they began to talk.