The Power Worshippers

by Katherine Stewart

  Upon his return, Domen also revealed a sharply partisan aspect to his personality. He fell into clashes with the leadership and culture of Rose Drive Friends Church and developed a reputation as an outspoken, political person. “Rose Drive was full of mainly white folks and older leadership, and Jim wanted to shake things up,” says Onishi.

  At the same time, with reparative therapy, Domen claims, his sexuality began to shift toward heterosexuality. “I had a blast dating all kinds of women, white, black, short, skinny, godly and ungodly,” he told a radio interviewer in 2013. But, he added, “I really kept my sexual purity and wanted to honor my body and save myself for marriage.”

  As religion became ever more central to his identity, Domen decided it was time to enroll in a seminary. He chose Azusa Pacific University, a private evangelical Christian university in Azusa, California, to obtain an advanced degree in theology. It was at Azusa that he met Amanda Stanfield, his future wife.

  With his theological credentials and pastoral experience in hand and a family life on the way, Domen took to organizing political rallies, which soon led to a position at the California Family Council, a state affiliate of Focus on the Family.

  With an annual budget of approximately $90 million, the national right-wing powerhouse Focus on the Family produces a variety of media programming that promotes traditional “family values.” The organization has funded campaigns against state legislators who support LGBT rights and anti-bullying programs in public schools. Focus on the Family aggressively supported Proposition 8, the 2008 statewide ballot measure that sought to eliminate the rights of same-sex couples to marry. Domen was all in. A photo from election night shows him celebrating the passage of Proposition 8 with fellow activists, arms raised high in victory.

  In more than one sense, the man in the photo was starting to resemble a grown-up Michael J. Fox from Family Ties. Domen, just like his hero on the show, was a precocious young man defending conservative values against the misguided relativism of the liberal community that had once welcomed him in Palm Springs. He loved them—truly he did!—but he knew they were wrong.

  Domen believes same-sex attractions to be a consequence of poor or unresolved parent-child bonding. “I wasn’t athletic like my brother,” he explains, referring to his previously strained relationship with his own father. Now the prodigal son had transformed himself into an athlete, too. From 2011 to 2014, Domen served as leader of Multisport Ministries, “running, biking, and swimming to win as God’s men, competing in the character of Christ,” according to the website. In describing his own journey, Domen says, “The need for connection with other men was real, but sexual activity is wrong.” Today, he says, he enjoys “hanging around healthy heterosexual men really teaching on me what it is to be a true man, the true masculinity.” Posing for the cameras with the famously pious athlete Tim Tebow, Domen wears a slightly startled expression, his arm lightly draped around Tebow’s waist.

  Today, Domen makes regular appearances at government buildings and other public spaces in Sacramento and Santa Ana, often bringing with him squadrons of fellow ex-gay allies, or “formers,” as they sometimes identify themselves. In 2018 he staged an event at Los Angeles’s Pershing Square with eighteen speakers including two survivors of the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, Florida, all sharing their “stories of transformation from homosexual, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender lifestyles.”

  A popular guest speaker at churches in California and beyond, Domen continues to disparage same-sex relationships and their acceptance in the wider culture. “Now you’ve got [the popular television show] Modern Family and you’ve got two homosexual men and they have two children,” he said from a Texas pulpit in 2018. “This is horrible. It’s horrific. It is abnormal.” As of this writing, his Twitter bio reads: “Pastor, Ironman, Husband, Daddy, Triathlete and Deplorable. I want the world to know I live for the glory of Jesus Christ.”

  Although the trajectory that led Jim Domen to the forefront of evangelical political activism has its share of idiosyncratic twists, the place in which he has landed must seem familiar to anyone who travels in conservative evangelical circles. Hypermasculinity, if not always drawing from the same sources, is a leitmotif of conservative Christianity in America. Reverend Jerry Falwell disdained androgynous, gentle representations of Jesus, insisting that his savior was hypermasculine. “Christ wasn’t effeminate,” Falwell asserted. “The man who lived on this earth was a man with muscles … Christ was a he-man!”2 The Family Research Council’s Jerry Boykin said Jesus “was a man’s man, but we feminized him in the church,”3 adding, “I believe that sword he’ll be carrying when he comes back is an AR-15.”4 Mark Driscoll, a celebrity preacher who cofounded the Acts 29 parachurch network, got the point across in flowery language: We “live in a completely pussified nation,” he said.5 If Christian men “do not man up soon,” he warned, “the Episcopalians may vote a fluffy baby bunny rabbit as their next bishop to lead God’s men.”6

  The testosterone rhetoric reflected a renewed forcefulness in cultural and political engagement as well as anxieties about gender, sexuality, and family structure that preoccupy religious nationalists around the world.

  In America, at least in part, it was a response to a gender gap in church attendance that has tended to skew female. At the Yorba Linda Friends Church (which is close to but not affiliated with Domen’s Rose Drive Friends Church), director of the men’s ministry Steve Craig said in 2006, “We’re beginning to take out the flowery songs and replace them with the warrior-type lyrics and more masculine things that men identify with.”7 Today, many conservative evangelical networks promote the idea of “male headship” at church and in the home as part of “God’s created design”—even as more women than men fill their pews.

  Jim Domen’s remarkable ability to step outside of himself, to shed an earlier personality like an old skin then hold it up to his own contempt—this, too, has ample precedent in a tradition that loves nothing more than tales of souls redeemed for their opposites. His irrepressible drive to share his beliefs, to convert others so that he may believe in himself, is equally characteristic of a religion that is, after all, built to proselytize. But in recent years, at least, the most familiar aspect of the life that Domen has carved out of a conflicted childhood in Orange County is the strangest one: namely, the way in which his religious, sexual, and personal concerns are inseparable from his politics.

  Notwithstanding the successful campaign for Proposition 8, it wasn’t until 2014 that Domen founded Church United and really hit his stride in the political arena. It is in this capacity that Domen has become someone to know for those who want to understand American political life today. If the Republican Party enjoys electoral success in the future, it will be thanks to the efforts of Domen and others like him.

  “Goliath must fall in California,” Domen has written on his blog, explaining the mission of Church United.8 “California’s progressive Legislature is defiling the armies of God.” Shortly after founding the group, he added: “The state’s liberal leadership has persistently—and consistently—stripped away those values we hold closely to our core: life, traditional marriage, and religious freedoms. Let’s face it: at the core of our struggle is a mighty spiritual battle between light and darkness.” Borrowing from the same playbook that so many other Christian nationalist leaders have turned to, Domen rhetorically asked, “Who better to lead us in these battles than our spiritual shepherds?”

  Church United started with six affiliated pastors in 2014. In 2015 it counted twenty-seven affiliated pastors. By 2018 the number had grown to approximately five hundred pastor members, all organized into “pastor clusters,” each with a leader who answers to a central committee.

  The clusters are established up and down California’s coastal and inland areas. “These slow, intentional, servant-heart, relationship-building efforts have resulted in successful statewide senior pastor and regional pastor relationships,” Domen wrote on his blog, “reach
ing Redding, San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, the Central Valley, Los Angeles” and other locales.9 Dozens of sub-networks create a dense infrastructure crisscrossing the state.

  Church United members meet with elected officials to discuss issues of local and statewide concern and attend gatherings at the state and national capitols. They also offer support to the growing numbers of Christian nationalists holding public office. “Briefings” draw representatives of church and state together, so that “members of Congress, the California Legislature, and county and city elected officials speak to the pastors about their faith and how they implement a biblical worldview in policy.”10

  The rapid success of the Church United model has inspired Domen to embrace a breathtakingly ambitious goal: “Imagine if we grew and replicated these efforts in each of the 50 states!” he wrote. For the time being, to be sure, Domen remains focused on California.

  California may look to the world like a blue state. But one in five adults are evangelical Christian, and the state has more megachurches than any other. Although Orange County angled blue in the 2018 midterm elections, the margins were wafer-thin. As far as today’s Christian right is concerned, California remains a battlefield.

  David Lane is one of many evangelical leaders who see the state as political territory ripe for conquest. In the 1990s, Lane first coordinated gatherings of evangelical pastors in California and Texas with the aim of organizing them to get out the vote on behalf of conservative religious causes. The effort was expanded in the 2000s with funding from the American Family Association. Lane founded the American Renewal Project, “people of faith positively affecting public policy,” and has led an estimated 15,000 pastors in “Pastors and Pews” dialogues with politicians such as Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, and Ted Cruz, along with figures like the Christian nationalist historian David Barton. In 2010, he coordinated pastor gatherings in politically contested states, including New Hampshire, Ohio, and Iowa. In advance of a July 2016 Pastors and Pews gathering in Orlando, Florida, Lane spelled it out in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network. “Our goal is to restore America to a Biblically based culture,” he said. “Somebody’s values are going to reign supreme.”

  “What we’re doing with the pastor meetings is spiritual, but the end result is political,” Lane said in 2011.”11

  Pastor Jim Garlow has also recognized political opportunity in the Golden State. The former leader of a San Diego-area megachurch who coauthored a book with David Barton in 2018, Garlow played a key role in organizing pastoral support for Proposition 8, California’s constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. Proposition 8 passed but was subsequently voided by the Supreme Court.

  Franklin Graham foresaw electoral fortunes in California, too. One of Trump’s earliest and most enthusiastic evangelical defenders, Graham led a three-bus caravan up the center of California in advance of the 2018 election with the goal of turning out the evangelical vote for Republican candidates. “Progressive?” he said, railing against the state’s supposedly secular values. “That’s just another word for godless.”12 For the tour, which he called Decision America, Graham and his team produced ten campaign-style rallies, complete with worship music and slick videos. Most of the rallies took place in swing districts.

  It is Domen, however, who has opened up the most fruitful strategy for the Christian right in California. His Church United initiative rests on two simple insights. The first, which he shares in common with other activist groups, is that pastors drive votes. Church United’s raison d’être is to politicize pastors—in the “right” direction. The second insight, which distinguishes Domen from the field to some degree, is that the future of Christian nationalism is not all white. To be sure, other leaders accept this demographic reality, but Domen acts on that strategic insight in a systematic way.

  Racial unity in Christ is one of Church United’s core themes. When Domen assembled several dozen pastors and “former homosexuals” on the steps of the Ronald Reagan federal building in Santa Ana to oppose California’s Assembly Bill 2943, which would have enhanced California’s existing prohibition on “sexual orientation change efforts,” he made a point of highlighting that diversity. “There are pastors of every color or creed on the steps with us today,” he said. “Members of the press, I ask that you use this word for us, as ‘formers.’ ”

  To be clear, real power in the Christian nationalist movement is still largely white and male. Yet Domen is a new and different sort of creature in the same movement. As Bradley Onishi observes, “Domen didn’t grow up with that southern, segregated racial framework. So he is way more effective than he might be if he were from Texas or Virginia or Georgia. He doesn’t come from a context where strict racial binaries are built into the church every Sunday. He is comfortable with Latino people because they are an unmovable part of his community. It is not surprising to me that he has found a way to expand.

  “That’s not to say that there wasn’t a subtle racism at play,” Onishi adds. “I’m a biracial American, and I’d say, casually, that attending Rose Drive made me more white than Japanese American because all of my mentors and my culture became white. It was an implicit agenda, more than an explicitly segregationist agenda. But it wasn’t like going to Jerry Falwell’s church, or a place where there was a segregation academy.”

  Like the most famous son of Yorba Linda, Domen seems to have politics in his bones, even as he remains an outsider of sorts. He is fully committed to the politics of division and conquest. But with the benefit of perspective that distance supplies, he understands that the sorting of the pure and impure now answers to different rules. “For the evangelical church right now, membership is no longer based on color,” Onishi notes. “It is also not really based in religion anymore, either. Your litmus test for religious belonging comes via your political beliefs.”

  Inside the Ocean View Church in San Diego, a series of Latino and Anglo speakers take their turns at the podium. Craig Huey, a laconic white-haired businessman, starts off with a presentation of voter guide material.

  Speaking through an interpreter, he tells the crowd, “You need to be able to explain to your fellowship these issues. When we talk about abortion, for example, what is more important, talking about the minimum wage, or about ‘life’?”

  It’s all spelled out, in Spanish, in the voter guide pamphlets distributed among the audience. Huey also invites the crowd to consult his own group’s website, which rates candidates on “biblical issues.” “All people have to do is log in to see how to vote their values,” he says. “Other issues are important, but biblically based principles are clear.”

  Huey impresses on the group the importance of voting these biblical principles. “Muslims vote 84 percent. Only about 40 percent of Christians in California voted. As a result, we see our Christian rights going away,” he says. As the audience groans, he runs through a litany of frothy complaints: “Recently they tried to stop homeschooling. They tried to ban the Bible. They just almost passed a bill in California that would have put out of business Christian colleges, like Azusa, Biola, because the people in Sacramento, like many of those in Congress and the Senate and in Washington, D.C., have an ideology that discriminates against Christians and want to take away our rights.” To judge from the sighs in the crowd, it appears that these preposterous allegations are accepted here as mostly true.

  “I spoke at a Hispanic church. About seven hundred people were in tears because they never heard this before,” he adds. “They were in tears because they never knew how to vote their values. They realized that they were voting against their values! They were voting against what was really in their self-interest. And they were not honoring God with their vote.”

  Huey assures the audience that they need not feel powerless.

  “If in your area we had twenty-five churches where we went down the ballot in the church, a good candidate who believes in a biblical worldview would win an election,” he says. “Take a stand that you�
��re going to help transform the politics of your community in the state of California!”

  Huey also volunteers his services to the group. “My wife, Shelly, and myself or one of our associates would be glad to come to your church and have an election forum,” he says. “And you don’t have to worry about it. We can do it for you. And if you want to do it, we have a PowerPoint that you can use to go straight down the ballot.”

  Another Anglo speaker, Jack Hibbs, pastor of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills, takes the stage and continues with a message, also delivered through an interpreter, that reduces both the Bible and politics to a few key issues with yes-or-no answers.

  “Regardless of the party, I vote my biblical worldview,” says Hibbs. “Why? Because I can stand before God at the end of my life, having lived it without trying to please any man.”

  Hibbs has made a point of flouting IRS rules on political activism from the pulpit. The IRS requires that certain charities, nonprofits, and other tax-exempt organizations, including houses of worship, refrain from partisan political activism if they wish to maintain their privileged tax status. So, in 2012, Hibbs forwarded to the IRS a video of himself engaging in a sermon that unmistakably favored the Republican platform. “That’s the whole point, to cross the line, to draw fire,” Hibbs said at the time. “We want to draw the IRS out.”13

  The IRS declined to take the bait. But Hibbs still seems determined to establish a precedent that would allow his church and like-minded religious organizations to operate as taxpayer-funded extensions of the political party of their choice.

  His speech to the crowd at the Church United and Alianza de Pastores Unidos event is only fifteen minutes long, yet it packs a day’s worth of whoppers.

  “Years ago, our church was made aware of the fact that churches in California would have to be funding and paying for abortions,” Hibbs claims. “So I refused,” he says, “and so we lost our insurance coverage because God is for ‘life.’ ”