by Jeff Sharlet
JESUS PLUS NOTHING
UNIT NUMBER ONE
THE IDEA, PART 1
A FAMILIAR TABLEAU: A MAN on his knees before dawn, praying secret prayers for guidance. Only now it’s the 1920s, and the heir to the title of First Revivalist is Billy Sunday, a former ballplayer who worked the stage as if he was covering second base and calling the game at the same time, dashing back and forth between velvet curtains, winding up for a big throw and hollering at the batter. Sinner! was Sunday’s cry. He railed against reds and women’s libbers and tippling bohemians. Christ he considered a man of action and then some. Jesus, he preached, was a boxer, a brawler, a two-fisted man’s man who was also God. A twofer! Gone was the Jesus of Jonathan Edwards, austere and intellectual. And fading, too, was Finney’s Christ, an idea of the divine that reflected Finney’s own raw, native vision. Sunday preached a prosperity gospel—God loves the wealthy—and lived it as well. He was not a crook but a hustler, milking the masses with his holy-rolling vaudeville routines. Preoccupied with fame, he revived the nation again but left it largely unaltered. He did not advance the theocratic project, was not the next key man of American fundamentalism.
That honor goes to our man kneeling in the dim blue of predawn Seattle, murmuring prayers in a foreign tongue. The man is a Norwegian immigrant named Abraham Vereide, known to most as Abram, a preacher who has found in America the stature and respectability—by way of a prestigious pulpit—that eluded him in his native Norway. Still, something is beyond his grasp. He wants the peace he’s certain God has promised him, yet suffering, in the abstract, distracts him. Abram is immune to despair by this point in his life, but it bothers him, and he wishes it wouldn’t.
He is a big man—fit and square in the shoulders and in the jaw, his face broad, severe, and intensely handsome—and a bighearted man, too, and intelligent, but also simple, and glad to be so. He likes things to be in their places: God in His heavens, Abram by his Bible, men working where God puts them, all content with their calling. So it is clear something is wrong with the world: the poor. They are, it seems plain to him, out of place. Literally out of order. Something has gone wrong. God promised us we would be happy when we reached the Promised Land, and what, if not that, is America?
So what does God have in mind? Abram has not yet found an answer. He keeps praying.
This morning, 4:30 a.m., he prays alone but he is not alone. His son, Warren, is watching. He has newspapers to deliver. He moves quietly through the darkened house, pulling on socks and dungarees and tiptoeing down the back stairs so as not to wake his mother, so often ill, restricted to bed but never resting easy. Just before the last step, Warren hears a noise—a sudden intake of breath followed by an exhalation. Like laughter, only it’s followed by a moan. Then Warren hears a voice coming from the kitchen. Perched on his step like a mouse, not making a sound, Warren listens to his father’s deep murmur, still thick with the accent of the fjords. Abram’s voice sounds strange—not the way it does when he speaks to Warren or Warren’s mother or to the big men he counts as his friends. This morning he sounds as if he is talking to someone he loves and respects and of whom he is just a little bit afraid.
“Do you want me, Lord, to go as Thy Ambassador?”
Silence. Abram’s shoulders seem to settle. Maybe he smiles. He has received instructions.
“It is done,” Abram says, and Warren takes advantage of his father’s moment of serenity to slip out into the early morning, leaving Abram alone with his God.1
ABRAM PRAYED LIKE this for years, and the years grew darker, the poor poorer, the world more broken, until one day in April of 1935 he received not just instructions for the day before him but a vision for the decades; God’s hand moving His people in an entirely new direction. The revelation God gave him was simple: To the big man went strength, to the little man went need. Only the big man was capable of mending the world. But who would help the big man? Who would console him when he, as Abram did sometimes, wept in the early mornings? That the big men of society wept Abram never doubted. He thought that powerful people, so clearly blessed by God, must surely possess equally great reserves of compassion and love that they wished to shower down on the weak, if only someone would show them how.
Abram would show them how. This was his vision. His life thus far—in 1935, he was forty-nine, his once-dark brow gray like a North Pacific breaker—had followed an arc, he believed, but it had taken him a long time to see it. His ministry, he now realized, was not “among those who have had the bottom knocked out of life, its derelicts, its failures,” as a friend would write years later, “but, ultimately, among those even more in need, who live dangerously in high places.”
For nearly 2,000 years, Abram concluded, Christianity—that is, the religion, the rituals, the stuff of men with their weak, sinful minds—had bent all its energies toward the poor, the sick, the starving. The “down and out.” Christianity gave them fishes when it could and hope when it had nothing else to offer. But what good had it done? What had been accomplished between Calvary and 1935?
Just look at Seattle, Abram’s adopted hometown: nearly half the city was on relief, and the other half was dark-eyed, eyeing the blessings of the “top men” with envy, which is a blight on a man’s soul. A rich man may have little hope of getting into heaven, but an envious man could turn to violence and lose all hope for this world or the next. Abram had to help such creatures, the derelicts, the failures. How? By helping those who could help them—the high and the mighty—that they might distribute the Lord’s blessings to the little men, whose envy would be soothed, violence averted, disorder controlled.
Thereafter, Abram would spend his days arranging the spiritual affairs of the wealthy. It would be another decade—ten years spent cultivating not just Seattle’s big men but those of the nation—before Abram would coin a phrase for his vision: the “new world order.” By then, 1945, he’d moved to Washington, D.C., and he cut a different figure than he had as a preacher. He wore double-breasted suits with lapels like wings, polka-dotted bow ties, and wide-brimmed fedoras. He was often seen with his dark overcoat thrown over his shoulders like a cape. Other men considered him a spectacular dresser; those who knew him well considered his stylishness itself a minor miracle, since Abram was not wealthy. But God provided. As a young itinerant preacher, he’d traveled on horseback with a six-gun and a Bible, traveling from farmer to farmer. Now, he carried a silk handkerchief instead of a pistol, and he moved from rich man to rich man. He stayed in the best hotels and clubs—the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, the Union League in Chicago, Hotel Washington in the nation’s capital—as the guest of friends, and he traveled over the years in the best cars (God led a rich man to give him the use of a twenty-thousand-dollar Duesenberg), on private planes, in Pullman cars especially reserved for his use.
When as a young preacher out West he had once faced a pressing debt of twenty-five dollars and had no hope of paying it, a woman unknown to him squeezed twenty-five dollars into his hand. She told him, he claimed, that she had been moved by God to give him cash; had set out for his church with five dollars; had been stopped by the Lord at the threshold and been given to understand that Abram required more of her; had plucked another twenty dollars from her purse; and had floated toward the beautiful preacher, her money—the equivalent today of hundreds of dollars—pressed, through no will of her own, from her hand to his.
His hands were enormous, his fingers long. His face was granite—a straight, lipless line of a mouth and a jaw so square it could’ve been used in a geometry class. His eyes, set deep and serious beneath long dark lashes and craggy brows, looked like pale ice. They were the eyes not of a seducer but a persuader, a gaze men more than women remembered. “God gave him a majestic figure,” his eldest son, Warren, would recall. Like all those entranced by his father, Warren believed that God had granted Abram his manly appearance for a purpose: to win powerful men to his cause.
Abram would become an exponent of a religion for the eli
te—the “up and out,” as he called them—for the rest of his life. He termed this trickle-down faith the Idea, and it was really the only idea he ever had—the only one, he believed, God gave him. In one sense, it was nothing more than a defense of the status quo. It neither challenged power nor asked for anything from the powerful but their good intentions. In another, it was the most ambitious theocratic project of the American century, “every Christian a leader, every leader a Christian,” and this ruling class of Christ-committed men bound in a fellowship of the anointed, the chosen, key men in a voluntary dictatorship of the divine.
From Seattle, Abram traveled the world with the Idea, winning to its self-satisfied simplicity the allegiance of senators, ambassadors, business executives, and generals. Every president beginning with Eisenhower has attended the annual National Prayer Breakfast Abram founded in 1953. He never achieved his dream—the United States is no more a theocracy today than it was in Charles Finney’s lifetime—but in his pursuit of it he stood at the vanguard of an elite fundamentalism that shaped the last half century of American and world politics in ways only now becoming visible. Abram, observed two approving evangelical writers in a 1975 study, Washington: Christians in the Corridors of Power, “personally influenced thousands of community, national, and world leaders, who in turn influenced countless others, a remarkable chain reaction…Many of them have never heard of [Abram], much less seen him. But his shadow is upon them.”2
Shadow is indeed the word for Abram’s legacy. In 2005, Time magazine labeled Abram’s successor, Doug Coe, the stealth persuader, a term that might just as easily have fit his mentor. Abram’s upper-crust faith was not a conspiracy, but it was not meant for the masses, either. Until recently, those masses—fundamentalist as well as secular—barely knew it existed.3
ABRAM HEARD HIS own peculiar God for the first time in Norway, one June morning in 1895 when as an eight-year-old boy he was taking his father’s cattle to pasture in the high cold fields of the Norwegian village from which Abram’s family took their surname. In later life, Abram would often insist that he had been born poor, but among the white houses and red barns of the one-thousand-year-old village of Vereide, his family’s home—close to the church and surrounded by oak trees—was far from the humblest. The inlet near the village was narrow enough to resemble a river, and over it loomed two mountains, the peaks of which were perfect triangles of black and white, laced with snow even in June. In between stretched farmland, the future that awaited Abram if he remained. His father was a foreman of sorts for land owned by the crown. But Abram was restless, a popular boy yet angry and given to fighting.
His mother had died shortly before the June day on which he first heard God’s voice, and her last prayers had been for a calming of her boy’s temper. That June morning, he took those prayers with him into the fields. As he closed the gate behind him, his grief combined with his anger into a cloud of guilt and regret, of longing for his mother and for the good son he believed he should have been. He couldn’t bear himself: he ran. He abandoned the cows. He hid in a grove of elder trees, crying and shivering despite the sun that crept through the leaves. A brook burbled, and the air smelled of cow dung. He wanted to pray, but he didn’t know how. He’d never paid attention to his mother’s prayers. Then, into his mind came words: Fear not, for I have redeemed thee and called thee by name, thou art mine.
Abram would later say that at the time he had not yet read the Book of Isaiah, from which those words came. Perhaps he had read the verse, or heard it spoken by his mother, or maybe it was as he’d come to believe years later, in America: a supernatural call to the divine. Whichever the case, those words were the first intimations of what would become Abram’s theology. They resolved the age-old question of theodicy—why does God let bad things happen to good people?—by ignoring the fact that they had happened at all. Rather than wrestle with grief and loss, as the best Christian thinking does so profoundly, Abram found in the grove the seeds of a faith that he’d thereafter use as a shield against even the awareness of pain, of doubt, of the danger of despair and the hard, precious hope won from that knowledge. This was the birth of Abram’s “positive” Christianity: the censorship of suffering.
Ten years later, eighteen years old and educated to that point but with no prospects in Norway other than a life in the field, Abram left for America, the “land of the Bible unchained,” as he dreamed of it. He arrived at Ellis Island after a stormy voyage, and very first thing a woman rushed up to him and said, “Welcome!” and pressed into his hands a New Testament. Abram thought her rude and wonderful, just like America. But her kindness added no advantage. Besides his new American Bible and a Norwegian copy, he had nothing. His clothes were homespun, stitched by his sisters; his shoes were goatskin, from a goat he had slaughtered; his suitcase was a leather box of his own devising. He had only the name of a countryman who would help to seek out in Butte, Montana, a boomtown run like a fiefdom by giant Anaconda Copper, and just enough money to get there, a hard journey of fifteen days.
His connection turned out to be a man in a shack by the railroad, but the old hand knew what to do with a new Norwegian. “Let’s go uptown and meet the boys,” he said, and took Abram past a row of brothels punctuated by whore-lined alleys to a saloon. At the saloon Abram’s guide sat him at a bar amid a gang of miners who sweated whiskey and copper, and all clinked glasses in his honor. He would not raise his glass. They called him a dumb greenhorn. He didn’t care. They cursed him. He stood up, broad-shouldered and straight-backed, his icy blue eyes set in handsome features, ruddy but clear, a rebuke to the scars hard labor and whoring had written across his companions. He frowned upon them, the whiskey, the cleavage of women, the stink of the men, the rumble of the bar, the land of mammon unchained.
“You are in America now—do like Americans do,” one man said.
That was exactly what Abram planned; he would do as the Americans of his imagination did. “No, thank you,” he said, his voice controlled. “I never tasted liquor in my life, and I can get along without it.”
Into the cold night under a sky filled with strange stars, he walked until he came to the cliffs that loom over Butte. He shivered and stared at the mines below, lit up for night shifts like glittering stones. There he wept, and then he shouted, to the God he had been certain he would find in America. And out of the darkness, he would say to the end of his days, he heard the voice of his Lord, speaking the clean English the immigrant would soon master. This time the words came from Proverbs: There is yet a future and your hope shall not come to naught.
“In America,” he’d assured his worried father, “education is free, money is plentiful, and everyone has a chance.” Instead, his first experience of the United States was the savage life of immigrants, men and women pressed into the hardest, most dangerous work. In the days that followed, he did such labor himself, knocking around the copper camps of Montana, a once-healthy farm boy eventually laid low by sickness and industrial poison, “copper-tinged water” that put him into a state of semiconsciousness that lasted for days, hallucinatory hours spent flat on his back in the shack by the railroad tracks, his gaunt body sweating away the butter and beef and herring on which he had grown strong in Norway. It was God’s doing, he believed: “The European starch had to be washed out.”
And it was. The boy from the village that bore his family name worked as a section hand, a floor mopper, and a hard laborer, beaten out of his wages again and again by crooked bosses who called him a “big-footed Norwegian”—feet, apparently, being the currency of bigotry with regard to Norsemen. On the Fourth of July 1905, Abram asked to be paid for work he had done as a painter in the town of Basin so he could buy some “American clothes” to celebrate the holiday. Stick it, said the boss. So Abram took the American option: “when I heard the train whistle, bound from Basin to Butte, I said goodbye.” In Butte on that Fourth of July, Abram spent his last dime on a streetcar ride to a park on the edge of the city, where he found a grove o
f trees far from the American celebration. He had no money, no friends, no place to sleep. The city was too far behind for him to walk back, but that didn’t matter: Abram wanted to die right there and be done. It was a moment like Finney’s, only starker: Abram’s suffering was in his belly as well as his soul. He sat in the shade of the trees beneath the high plains sun and waited for an answer. He’d brought all his possessions with him in a small bundle—the goat hide suitcase from home lost along the way—and from it he took out his New Testament and began to read through his tears. As his eyes scanned the now-familiar words, he sensed God Himself once again speaking: Ye have not chosen me, but I chose you… The Gospel of John, chapter 15, verse 16…Whatsoever you ask the Father in my name, he shall give it to you.