by Tanya Levin
‘No,’ I said. ‘I just want to ask you one favour.’
‘What?’
‘Would you get her an email address and teach her to use the internet, please?’
He laughed. ‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘I’ve tried.’ He may well have but she was keen as mustard after he’d left for soccer to learn to Google. He’s going to kill me when he checks his web history.
I asked him what might happen if she explodes and kills him when he’s fifty. ‘I’m not the one who gave her the book on serial killers she’s reading,’ I offered. He didn’t seem worried. He’d been in that situation with her older sister. Everyone had to tiptoe around her until he put her in her place. Now they were the greatest of mates because everyone knows where they stand.
Both of their parents have been together forever, his fifty years, hers forty. He looks at his father, he said, and sees a placid man now. Jack, however, knows he himself has a bad temper. Just like her father used to. Now, his dad’s the calmest man in the world, but when he was young it was different. Jack’s wife understands this, he says, like Bobbie understands Brian.
Part of maturity is moving on, he explained. Focus on the positive. Why dwell on the negative when there’s so much good going on? Also, he didn’t want their name associated with me and affecting the whole family in Hillsong. It just wasn’t worth it. I told him I totally understood, because I did.
I asked him to say hello to her, and I thanked him for taking the time to explain to me why I had to get out of their lives. He said it was a pleasure but that he had missed half the movie. And he had been looking forward to it. It was a Friday night. Saturdays are soccer all day long. And Sundays are for church. I went back downstairs to my apartment to leave Marylou and Jimmy be and pour myself another scotch. I put my hair up in curlers, my slippered feet up on the couch and waited till the bitter, soothing alcohol took me right through until the morning.
DAVID’S PRINCESS
It doesn’t say why King David did not lead his army into war. The bible tells us only that in the spring, when kings go off to battle, David instead sent Joab out with his men.
But David remained in Jerusalem.
Getting up from his bed one night, King David took a walk around the roof of his palace. From there, he saw Bathsheba bathing. It says she was very beautiful.
King David made enquiries about her. He was informed that she was the wife of his soldier Uriah, who was away at war for Israel.
David sent messengers to get her. She came to him and he slept with her.
Bathsheba, the beautiful, who brought the King undone.
Bathsheba, the adulteress. Bathsheba, the one the King could not resist. Bathsheba, who was not given the choice to resist the King.
When Bathsheba became pregnant, King David did not know what to do. He sent for Uriah, and encouraged him to spend the night with his wife. Loyal Uriah refused to leave the King unguarded and slept at the door of the palace instead.
So King David sent orders for Uriah to be put in the front line where the fighting was fiercest and then for the troops to withdraw from him, so he would be killed. And there on the battle-field, at the orders of his general, Uriah died.
When Uriah’s wife heard that her husband was dead, she mourned for him. After the time of mourning was over, David had her brought to his house, and she became his wife and bore him a son. But the thing David had done displeased the Lord.
The Lord’s displeasure saw Bathsheba’s baby die to punish King David, and so Bathsheba was punished again. Their next child was King Solomon the Wise. David famously begged for the Lord’s forgiveness, and the Lord ended up using him for great things including being King Solomon’s teacher. But what about Bathsheba?
It doesn’t say whether Uriah and Bathsheba had children of their own. It doesn’t say if Bathsheba grieved that he was dead, just that she was given her allotted mourning time. Then she became property of the King. How many Bathshebas are there?
Maybe Uriah and Bathsheba had children, and maybe they mourned their father, even if he was a Hittite. What happened when those children grew up? Did they see their countrymen bowing to the King and taking his word as gospel? Did their blood boil when they saw their mother, trapped by the King’s whims? Did Bathsheba grow to enjoy being a queen, after some time had passed?
One day, when David has been too glorified, Uriah’s children might tell the story of a king who should have been at war with his men, but instead remained in Jerusalem. Yet, with their father long dead, who will listen to Uriah’s children in David’s kingdom?
Chapter 18
KIDS
I’d like to ask [Marilyn Manson], ‘Did I influence you in any way to this lifestyle?’ I keep thinking, ‘Wow, did I do something I should have done differently?’
—Carolyn Cole, former principal, Heritage Christian School,
in Marilyn Manson, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell (1998)
I am 10 years old. I only can give a quarter. Please don’t underrate me because of my age, I believe strongly in Jesus.
—Letter to TV evangelist, reported by Zira Bransletter in
Tulsa World (27 April 2003)
One Sunday morning around ten, pyjamaclad, I answer the knock at my door. There, standing, immaculately groomed, are an elderly gentleman, a middle-aged woman and a boy of about nine. Jehovah’s Witnesses. I’m too tired. I don’t have the energy to play with the J-Dubs. I tell them I can’t possibly and shut the door.
As soon as I do, I am struck by the image of the boy. He was hollow-eyed, lost and silent. That terrible look children have when they are in a situation that is, for them, timeless and powerless. While other boys are at soccer, or even in church, he is out, dressed in pants and a long-sleeved collared shirt and a bow-tie with his mother and the old man, doorknocking, recruiting.
I throw on a sweatshirt and walk around the block looking for them. I want to talk to the boy. They’d come to preach to me, so I figured it was only fair. I want to say to him: get your older brother, get someone at school, get anyone to Google these people. Find out about them. It’s okay, kid, but you haven’t got long till you can leave—or have you? But they were gone.
The fundamentalist Christian worldview provides a bizarre perspective on life. Apparently I am an evil parent because I refused to teach my son the Santa story. I had thought it perverse to lie to an infant about a Coca-Cola version of God, only to tell him years later that we’d all been deceiving him for no defensible reason.
And I would find it far stranger to instill the values of the Old Testament into a developing child’s psyche at home or via innocent-looking 85-year-old women in scripture classes. The stories of the bible are brutal and unpredictable. A few pages into the book, by Genesis 6, God’s heart was filled with regret and he decided to drown the lot of us. The giraffes and tigers looked sweet going in two by two, but I’m still not good with the Noah story. A few months ago, my mother gave me a DVD. ‘A friend of your father’s makes these,’ she said. ‘Just show it to Sam.’ Sure, Mum, right after Nightmare on Elm Street. On the back it reads:
God created the world in six days, the heavens and the earth and every living thing, including Adam, who lives in the Garden of Eden.
When God creates Eve from Adam’s rib as a companion for Adam, he warns Adam and Eve about the Tree of Knowledge, and to never eat its fruit. A wicked serpent tricks Eve into eating a fruit from the tree and when she gives it to Adam to eat as well, God becomes angry and banishes them from the Garden of Eden and punishes the serpent. In the new mortal world, Eve gives birth to Cain and Abel, who become great friends until they are adults. When Cain suddenly kills Abel out of jealousy, he is cursed to become a restless wanderer of the Earth.1
All fundamentalists realise the urgency of controlling the children, and born agains are no exception. I am eternally grateful that my parents sent me to a state high school. Evangelical Christians have a dreadful tendency to send their children to ‘Christian’ schools o
r, worse yet, to homeschool them.
While there is an infinite variety of Christian schools world- wide, the evangelical/born-again/Pentecostal school, often advertised as ‘non or multi-denominational’, is the scariest. Entertainer Marilyn Manson grew up in a devout evangelical family and attended a Christian school. Manson credits it with his loss of faith and much of his gory artistic expression.
Gradually, I began to resent Christian school and doubt everything I was told. It became clear that the suffering they were praying to be released from was a suffering they had imposed on themselves—and now us. The beast they lived in fear of was really themselves: it was man, not some mythological demon, that was going to destroy man in the end.
And this beast had been created out of their fear. The seeds of who I am now had been planted.2
A Christian education sounds super, but if the school is attached to a church, spiritually or financially, it can make for some close-knit problems. It’s one thing if all the kids from church go to school together. It’s another if the senior pastor is the principal. One nasty rumour in either the church or the school and a family’s reputation can be destroyed.
Born agains believe in indoctrinating children relentlessly. As with smoking, the younger you get ’em started, the harder they find it to quit. According to research published in 2004 by the Barna Group, an organisation specifically devoted to born-again Christian market research, there are 98 million Americans who have received Jesus Christ as their saviour, thirty-eight per cent of adults and thirty-three per cent of teenagers. Around a third of America is saved! One study highlighted the age, circumstances and subsequent values of 992 born-again Christian salvation stories. It is a stark set of demographics. The age at which salvation takes place becomes very significant.
Forty-three per cent of Americans who received Jesus or got saved did so before the age of eighteen. Half of these were led to the Lord by their parents, another twenty per cent by a relative or friend. This group were least likely to get saved via media or at an event or church, which is another reason why fundamentalists promote ‘family values’. The most sure-fire way to get people saved is to give birth to them. These early birds are much more likely than those who convert later to stay ‘absolutely committed’ to Christianity, although they are also less conservative in their spirituality, watch less religious TV and talk about their faith less with their friends than the latecomers.
Thirty-four per cent of born agains got saved between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. Parental influence on their decision dropped to twenty per cent, which was the same as that of a friend. Other relatives accounted for sixteen per cent, ministers ten per cent, and twenty per cent were triggered by an event. Youth rallies and church take on a meaningful role during young adulthood.
Only twenty-five per cent of American born agains got saved after their twenty-first birthday. These are the people more likely to watch religious TV and discuss matters of faith.
Hillsong pastors preach that if you don’t bring your kids to church, you can’t expect them to stay saved. The research generally supports this. Hillsong sets itself up as the alternative to hell for all children; without Hillsong your precious bundles will be ‘out there in the world’ and end up ‘on drugs’. How Hillsong knows this I’m not sure, but it’s almost guaranteed they’ll be ‘on drugs’ the second Sunday they skip ‘church’.
The kids’ program at Hillsong is extensive, even including their own life-size costume characters. At Hillsong Kids, or Kid-song, Jesus is fun.
The Hillsong Kids’ music is by far the coolest Sunday school music ever. It’s got a real mainstream pop feel, sung in the little girl voices that are so popular now. Hillsong Kids also has live album recording sessions. My favourite song is ‘Every Move I Make’ from Shout to the Lord Kids where Hanson meets Roxette.
It starts with a great guitar lead that everyone from birth to my age and older can get into, even do their housework to, which wound up happening to me. And I know it’s terrific to have the kids up and happy and not fighting on a Sunday morning and, true, this kind of music has made me yearn for Hillsong in ways unseen since Youth Alive rallies. It just made me wonder about consent. It’s all very well for adults to subject themselves to trancelike states and hypnosis, but are these kids going to sue when they grow up? Some of the other songs are intense too. ‘I Give You My Heart’, ‘Worship You Forever’ and ‘Open the Eyes of My Heart’, for example.
Not satisfied with just their kids, they want yours as well. And everybody else’s. I still get fl ashbacks of the DVD of Bobbie in Uganda, meeting her orphan and putting a $30 pink Colour Your World t-shirt on her, ‘from all the princesses at home’, while the other ten children in the room had gaping holes in their clothing.
Closer to home, Hillsong is making sure that it impacts on the young people of Australia with its message, whether or not they are aware of it. Hillsong runs community service programs for children and teenagers of all kinds that at first glance appear apolitical or inoffensively ‘Christian’. One such service is Shine, for girls aged twelve to sixteen. Promoted as a course that offers young women self-esteem, Shine currently runs over 150 programs, including in detention centres and high schools, with very positive feedback. Teachers and welfare workers have told me that the girls love the program and the attention they receive.
Shine is explicit in its wishes for female self-discovery:
Shine presents the truth that every girl has intrinsic value and is somebody.
This journey is explored through the concepts of worth, strength &purpose …
I have worth!—Through skincare, makeup, haircare and nailcare, girls discover their value in their God created uniqueness.
I have strength!—Explores the power of choice in each girl’s life and reinforces the truth that decisions determine destiny. Covers willpower, feelings, peer pressure, problem solving, etiquette and respect.
I have purpose!—Purpose and destiny are examined in the light of looking after themselves; identifying the hopes and dreams they have for their life and the confidence and tools to walk in them.
Shining.3
If only I knew then when I was growing up what I know now. The answer’s been nailcare all this time.
Chapter 19
THERE’S NO BUSINESS
LIKE SHOW BUSINESS
His unity is an arrow, it is a shield, when everything is great, and right and correct in God, not perfect, but correct, you know what I’m saying? It’s like it is a shield, the enemy cannot, the fiery darts of the Enemy cannot penetrate your lives.
And it is also an overshadowing protector, which is what we try and teach you from Malachi about giving when you when you doing what is correct in God, there is a protection over your life, that you don’t even have to like, hello, it’s just there.
So it is a very, very powerful thing. Amen?
—Bobbie Houston,
She Loves and Values Her Sexuality (2004)
If you’re still wondering whether an organisation is a cult, try this two-second test: if it’s all about recruitment and fundraising, it’s a cult. Some longstanding ex-members of Hillsong say it was always about numbers and offerings, that there was always a competitive spirit.
The rivalry was over salvation quotas initially. Pastors would argue over coffee about who had more conversions that year at their church or rally. They were serious, sometimes heated discussions.
The church was a good place to do business. And there were plenty of opportunities to make money right from the start.
It’s all due to the trust the Australian government has in charities, namely Christian ones. Conservatives believe that charities operate as a collective Florence Nightingale, and allow them extraordinary tax breaks as a result. Along with educational institutions, religious institutions do not have to pay sales tax. The Assemblies of God could have written this policy in as the fifth gospel. For them it started small with salary packaging and fleet cars.
> According to folklore, pastors were always poor and struggling. Ministry is a calling, not a career. If God requires your service, he’ll supply your needs. It was called living by faith, and the miraculous abounded. Pastors were paid very little, we knew that.
What we didn’t know was the unmatchable unlimited salary packaging operation these boys had. They might take, for example, a $30,000 salary but receive only $15,000 in wages. This usually qualified them for social security benefits, and greatly reduced the level of personal income tax paid. The remaining $15,000 could be used to pay for bills, mortgages, holidays, or anything really in the church’s name. No tax on it. This was called the ‘pastoral expense account’.
There are no fringe benefits concerns for church or pastor. So where other companies offer a car on top of a cash wage, the employer has to pay fringe benefits income tax on the car. The Australian Tax Office isn’t stupid. So when it was time for everyone to get a new car, the Assemblies of God was able to save thirty per cent using their non-taxable expense account. A new car depreciates around ten per cent within seconds of driving it out of the showroom, so within six months the boys were selling the car as a new model at ninety per cent of its original retail price, profiting roughly twenty per cent. Which allowed everybody to improve next round. It’s always worthwhile noting which brand of car is mentioned from the pulpit to know which deals have recently been cut for the pastors.
Of course, all churches are allowed this benefit. Not all churches, though, say explicitly that they need more money. By the mid-nineties, the AoG car system had to be toned down a little. Ferraris were a little showy, it was deemed. A number of industries are grateful for the ‘name it and claim it’ gospel.
None, however, is as successful as the Hillsong industry itself.
In order to produce a successful CD in Australia, a musician has to sign a contract with a record company which produces, publishes and markets the album. The performer also has to pay distributors and retailers before any returns are made. Even independent entertainers who produce their own material must pay for distribution and give a commission for retail.