by Jeff Sharlet
This last is a very different question from the one usually asked about radical religion: “What do the believers want?” An understandable concern, but one that obscures the true shape of fundamentalism. Those of us not engaged in “spiritual war” attempt to contain fundamentalism by reducing its ambitions to a program, an agenda: the abolition of abortion, homosexuality, or maybe sex in general. If the fundamentalists ever won, we tell ourselves, we would all be forced to live like Puritans, or worse—the Taliban. Fundamentalism, we conclude, is therefore un-American and doomed to wither on our democratic soil.
But faith, radical or tepid, gentle or authoritarian, is always more complicated and enduring than a caricature. The Family has grown and taken root directly at the center of American democracy, intertwining with the world as it is. “Business as usual” is the Family’s business. The elite fundamentalism of the Family doesn’t lead us back to Plymouth Rock, much less to the Taliban’s Kabul. The Family’s faith is not that of a walled-off community but of an empire; not one to come but one that already stretches around the globe, the soft empire of American dollars and, more subtly, American gods. If we want to understand this fundamentalism, we must ask not what it wants to do but what it has done: how it has run parallel to and at times flowed into the main currents of history. We must solve the equation presented by Doug Coe: Jesus plus nothing. J + 0 = X. To solve for X, the role of elite fundamentalism, we’ll need to consider our variables: American Jesuses, plural, and nothing. Nothing, in this equation, stands for a great deal. All that fundamentalism has abandoned, the story it does not tell: the history of where it came from and how it came to live so close to the center of American power.
THE PLAINEST EXPRESSION of the relationship between the theology of Jesus plus nothing and the mundane world of secular democracy may be found in the words of George W. Bush. Bush is not a member of the Family, although his faith was shaped in a Bible study in Midland, Texas, organized by a group the Family started in the late 1970s for the very purpose of bringing influential men into personal relationships with each other and with a particular concept of Jesus. In 1989, Doug Coe, addressing a private gathering of evangelical leaders in Colorado Springs, assured them that Bush Senior—a secular sort whom they’d backed with reservations—was a Family relation, if perhaps a distant one. Moreover, he’d surrounded himself with godly men such as James Baker and Jack Kemp and, yes, even Dan Quayle, all associates of the Family. Most promising of all, said Coe, was Bush Junior, a good influence on his father.1 Twelve years later the younger Bush ran for president. At a 1999 debate in Des Moines, Iowa, the moderator asked the then-candidate to identify his favorite philosopher. His opponents had already named John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, but Bush said Jesus, because Jesus had changed his heart. A murmur of surprise rippled through the crowd. The moderator asked Bush to say more, implicit in his question the problem of how heart reconciles with the traditional province of philosophy, mind. Bush answered as if the audience was not in the room. “Well, if they don’t know, it’s going to be hard to explain.”
Pundits scoffed, but Bush’s response proved brilliant, a flare in the night for fundamentalist America—the equivalent of Ronald Reagan’s flirty 1980 remark to a convention of the National Religious Broadcasters, “You can’t endorse me, but I can endorse you.” And Bush’s words meant more than those of Reagan, who seemed merely to promise political favors. Bush avowed a strength of belief that must be felt to be fully understood, a faith outside the tidy terminology of liberal religion. You must be in the Word to get this powerful feeling. Well, if they don’t know, it’s going to be hard to explain. It’s beyond rational definitions. It’s an idea that denies ideas, a fixed intellectual position that rejects the primacy of intellect and the significance of “positions.” Jesus plus nothing.
As a statement of philosophy, Bush’s first answer—because He changed my heart—insists on timelessness (Jesus in the present tense), spacelessness (Jesus in Texas, in Des Moines, in Bush’s body), and selflessness, though this last not in the sense of a modesty of spirit that might lead one to help others, but rather in that of an inward gaze that is simultaneously narcissistic and blind to the particulars of the self it sees there, able only to perceive a heart remade by God. There’s a word for this wide-eyed stare: piety. We are all familiar with the figures of the pious church lady and the sanctimonious school marm, and yet such characters fail to embody the meaning of piety as it has existed for hundreds of years in Christianity and took root in America, first through the Puritans and then, in the fashion in which it lives on today, in the 1730s, in Northampton, Massachusetts, summoned from the hearts of men, women, and children by the words of Jonathan Edwards, the author of the Great Awakening.
Edwards’s legacy lies not in the Republic built on the Enlightenment ideas of Locke and Jeffersonian skepticism, but in the fact that more than two centuries later, that nation remains one of the most religious on Earth, much of it devoted to a vision of Christendom that originated with him. That this vision was at its inception theocratic is barely worth mentioning; among the elites of Edwards’s day, theocracy was simply the “Calvinist scheme” which their forebears had come to the New World to pursue. That the United States is, as much as ever, a Christian nation, is a more controversial claim. “Historians of the United States,” notes George Marsden, Edwards’s most perceptive biographer, “have been prone to give much more attention to Benjamin Franklin than to Edwards as a progenitor of modern America.” That oversight explains why most of American history cannot account for the country’s ongoing religious fervor. Although American fundamentalism has lately attempted to claim Franklin as a forebear—a collection titled American Destiny: God’s Role in America trumpets three apparently pious utterances of Franklin’s out of context and without mentioning his equal enthusiasm for the sensual life and a Christless deism—the legacy of Franklin’s ideas remains staunchly secular. But the nation does not. Christ thrives in America not so much as an idea or a deity as a mood: a feeling, a conviction, a sentimental commitment to manifest destiny on a personal level, with national implications.
When I left Ivanwald, one of the senior men, a former chief counsel to Republican senator Don Nickles, told me I was making a terrible mistake. “You may not be able to come back,” he said. He left it unclear whether that would be my choice or the Family’s, but I think I know now what he meant. If I left, prematurely in his eyes, I would literally no longer be within the mood. The ideas I’d encountered there might travel with me (as they have, in a manner the Family didn’t anticipate), but the mood could not. After I left, I went to the Billy Graham Center Archives at Wheaton College, where the Family had deposited more than 600 boxes of documents, and I sifted through these seventy years of its history in search of explicit theology, an explanation for what I’d encountered. There were snatches of argument, passages of theory, references and allusions which I have since spent several years pursuing. But most of all there was the mood. Oftentimes, in letters to one another, Family men wrote of it as a “spirit” that spread like a disease, a “contagion,” they called it. Men would come from around the world to spend time with Doug Coe, or his predecessor, Abraham Vereide, to “catch the spirit of the work.” Sometimes they’d talk politics; sometimes they’d make business deals. But more often they simply basked together in the glory of “the work.” One did not “learn” anything; one found it in one’s own heart.
There is little taste for history among Family members, and the disarray of the 600 boxes it shipped off to the Billy Graham Center suggests that nobody has ever been interested in looking backward. Not to 1935, when the Family began as a businessmen’s antilabor alliance in Seattle, and certainly not farther back, to the roots of “the work.” Those origins lie not in the New Testament, which is ultimately little more than a fabric from which the Family constructs contemporary realities, but in the dream of a Christian nation, “awakened,” as it was by Jonathan Edwards in 1735, by a piety infused
with enthusiasm and—an element overlooked by most historians of the Great Awakening—an adoration of power, divine and worldly, the intangible foundation of American empire. The love of power—world-changing power, messianic power—is not an American invention; but our civil religion, the belief that such a love can coexist peacefully with both God and democracy, is.
Biographers of Edwards note the unlikely marriage within his thought of the rigors of John Calvin—who argued that God cares so little for good deeds or bad that he saves whom he will and damns the rest of us—with the revelations of the Enlightenment, Locke’s political ideas and the scientific discoveries of Isaac Newton. But Edwards was no mere synthesizer. His preaching and writing helped spark a fire of religiosity that swept the colonies and leaped back across the ocean to the heart of the British Empire. Edwards rationalized religion; set it on a course of wildfire evangelism; and built a web of ideas in which the radicalism of the American Revolution would be entangled with a spiritual authoritarianism, an idea of God that did not so much emphasize might rather than love as equate the two. Edwards’s Jesus was personal, intimate, dedicated, like the Family, to the slow breaking of souls.
Of all insects, no one is more wonderful than the spider, especially with respect to their sagacity and admirable way of working.
—JONATHAN EDWARDS, “OF INSECTS,” IN HIS PRIVATE JOURNAL, 17162
EDWARDS’S GENIUS WAS to describe his God not through declaration but through observation. He wrote like a naturalist, of flowers and insects and cloud formations, all of creation bursting with revelation. “And scarce any thing,” he confessed, “among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning.” Edwards “felt God” at the first appearance of a thunderstorm: “I would fix myself in order to view the clouds, and see the lightnings play, and hear the majestic and awful voice of God’s thunders.”
He was tall and slender, his face long and his features delicate, his skin pale. He spoke in a soft, lovely voice, and he liked to sing aloud during storms, his lyrics the raw form of the prose he would later commit to writing. He began every day at four, because Christ rose early, too, just three days after his crucifixion. Then he prayed, secret prayers. Later, his wife, Sarah, would join him in his study, and they would pray together in that light that rises before the sun, the same blue light one finds at the heart of a flame.
He ate very little. He often studied for a dozen hours or more, time passed “not in perusing or treasuring up the thoughts of others,” wrote his nephew, but in wrestling with data from his own congregation, tested against ideas transmitted directly from God. “New Light,” the believers at the time called the religion of Jonathan Edwards. As a young man, he studied the Opticks of Newton, wrote papers about rainbows and twinkling stars, and took delight in science’s discovery that the color of things in this world is not inherent but merely a matter of perception. He loved to look at flowers; he thought often of how they would soon die. Fruit trees proved yet more revealing. “That of so vast and innumerable a multitude of blossoms that appear on a tree, so few come to ripe fruit.” So was it, he concluded, with “the mass of mankind.”
He wrote of “true religion” as not of outward forms but of inward emotion. He called this quality affection and rated it more highly than the thoughts and deeds of great men. He wrote about people with whom powerful men had never concerned themselves.
One such was a woman named Abigail Hutchinson, whose last days Edwards presented as a case study of conversion in the long essay that first brought him trans-Atlantic fame. Edwards had the good fortune to publish A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in 1736, just as developments in the technology and economics of publishing were giving rise to that modern genre known as “current events.” Lengthy works might be made widely available so quickly that narratives that had once been “history” now became part of an ongoing conversation. He hoped that his careful case study of revival, played out in the microcosm of one sick young woman’s ravaged body, would forge out of religion a new natural science. He had experimented on himself toward this end for years, recording day by day, sometimes hour by hour, the most trivial workings of God and Satan within his own mind and body. He monitored what he ate and how it affected his prayers, noted how many hours he slept and whether fatigue served as a good tool with which to break his will. But his experiments, before 1735, remained unreplicated, unverified. The Awakening of Abigail Hutchinson afforded him a guinea pig on whom to test the efficacy of devotion, the science of mind, the subjugation of heart to power.
ABIGAIL HUTCHINSON WAS a sickly, unmarried young woman who worked in a shop. She lived with her parents, people known for intelligence and sobriety, who were neither wealthy nor very poor. Their house was smoky, dark, and cold. They measured time by the sun and the sound of churchbells.
Before her conversion, Abigail was “still, quiet, reserved.” She was gentle. There was, Edwards observed—with approval—nothing fanciful about her. She was very thin.
The spark that lit the spiritual fire which was to consume her came not from scripture nor from Edwards’s pulpit but from the news of another woman’s conversion, a young and popular and no doubt pretty girl, “one of the greatest company-keepers in the whole town,” Edwards described her, granted a “new heart” by God, “truly broken and sanctified.” The formerly loose woman’s popularity grew as the men who once had courted her gathered round to hear the sweet young thing testify. One Monday in the spring of 1735, as the ice on the Connecticut River crackled and boomed and melted back into cold black water, Abigail’s brother, a converted man, decided to speak with Abigail about “the necessity of being in good earnest in seeking regenerating grace.” Abigail fumed. Why did she need to be told the necessity of being in “good earnest,” a quality now attributed to a woman who went walking with men in the dark? Abigail was in good earnest. Why did she not experience the grace—the joy—now said to be visited upon a harlot?
Abigail decided to search for the answer in scripture, starting from page one. She read about Eve, who took the devil’s fruit in her mouth; Ham, who looked at his naked father and laughed; Lot’s daughters, who raped their father. God ran javelins through those whose love was wrong, incinerated those whose gifts were not worthy, broke infants beneath the hooves of horses ridden by infidels. No one was spared. After three days of reading, Abigail was too terrified to continue. Before, she had listened to the Reverend Edwards’s sermons—nearly all variations on a theme, damnation, delivered in tones, Harriet Beecher Stowe would later imagine, “calm and tender”—but she had not heard. Now she saw: she was wicked, born wicked right from the start, cursed as Eve. She had murmured against God. “Her very flesh,” Edwards recorded, “trembled for fear.”
She shuddered when she recalled the doctors she’d consulted. Why had she believed her body deserved anything more than what God had given?
What had God given?
Hunger. A craving for food. At the same time an inability to consume. A slow strangling. The war of flesh, of belly, of the throat that closes, of the tongue that feels food’s texture, sweet and savory. Suffering was the gift of the divine.
The next day she skipped ahead to Jesus, the New Testament, “to see if she could not find some relief there for her distressed soul.” By Saturday, she could no longer read. “Her eyes were so dim,” observed Edwards, “that she could not know the letters.” She had been pious all her life, but now she knew that her devotions had availed her of nothing in Christ’s eyes. She went to her good older brother. The Bible had become like a weapon turned against her, a knife held to her throat. It had revealed her to herself as filthy, defiled by sin; she was nothing, deserved nothing.
The next morning, Sabbath-day, she was too sick to get out of bed. But she needed to hear the Reverend Edwards. No, her family said, and restrained her; so he came to her. Around thirteen hundred people lived in Northampton then, and no man was better known. His grandf
ather, Solomon Stoddard, had built the congregation to which he ministered, and, in many ways, had built the town. Its residents called him “the pope of the Connecticut Valley.” Edwards inherited the mantle, if not the full authority. Whereas Stoddard had memorized his sermons the better to perform them, Edwards gripped the pulpit and read softly, his pale face proof to his congregation of his sincerity. At times, they felt they could almost see through him.
Before the Awakening, he had wasted no time on chatter and had not often visited his flock in their homes. But in 1735, as revival burned through the town, he began making rounds, taking notes, asking questions, and shy Abigail became an object of great fascination to him. He visited her in her home, she visited him in his. Something great was happening in the valley; the fear of God had never been more palpable. Travelers spent a night and left transformed, carrying with them the spores of revival; stories would return to Northampton of spiritual fires lit across New England. In Boston, they called it hysteria; Edwards believed that Northampton’s far remove secured it from dangerous ideas. To the west of the mountain lay wilderness. To the east, church steeples scraped the underbelly of clouds like thorns. Before Edwards’s ascension to the pulpit, Northampton had reveled in its frontier freedom. It was a tobacco town, the giant green leaves aged until brown and hung like bodies in barns the sides of which opened like gills. Ale was more commonly drunk than water.