The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

by Jeff Sharlet

  Under the Bush administration, Abstinence Clearinghouse helped the federal Centers for Disease Control establish a “gold standard” for abstinence-only sex education programs. A student in one of these programs may hear that sex outside of marriage can lead to suicide; that condoms don’t prevent AIDS; that abortion often results in sterility; and that men’s and women’s gender roles are biologically determined as “knights” and “princesses,” which, if violated, cause depression. And the Clearinghouse continues to lobby for more, bringing politicians together with activists at conferences intended to win support not just for abstinence curricula but for the privatization of public schooling altogether: vouchers for Christian academies, “character” charter schools such as those promoted by the Family’s Eileen Bakke (who has become a Family prayer partner of Janet Museveni, Uganda’s first lady), and homeschooling. The Clearinghouse hosts “purity balls” and abstinence teas. It sponsors “power virgins” around the country, good-looking young men and women who work the fundamentalist lecture circuit spreading the no-sex gospel. It also operates as a one-stop shop for abstinence paraphernalia, much of it fundamentalist despite the group’s allegedly secular orientation: 14-karat gold “What Would Jesus Do” rings; books such as Single Christian Female; ready-to-go abstinence PowerPoint presentations. There’s abstinence chewing gum, abstinence stickers in batches of 1,000, abstinence balloons in batches of 5,000. There’s even an abstinence pencil.

  Unruh considered herself broad-minded enough for the demands of an ostensibly secular society. If religion is to be kept out of the schools, she said, “shame and conscience are important tools” in its place. But “romance,” more than anything else, guided her understanding of sexuality. This is what she found romantic: a father who gives his teenage daughter a purity ring only to take it back on her wedding day and hand it over to his daughter’s new husband, her virginity passed from man to man like a baton.

  Therein lies the paradox of the purity movement. It’s at once an attempt to transcend cultural influences through the timelessness of scripture, and a painfully specific response to the sexual revolution. Populist fundamentalism grew into a political force in almost direct proportion to the mainstreaming (and subsequent weakening) of various sexual liberation movements, and as it did so it led the elites of American fundamentalism, so closely aligned with the secular conservatives as to be nearly invisible, out of the establishment coalition. Absent the sexual revolution, populist fundamentalism might still thrive only in enclaves, and elite fundamentalism still coexist easily with secular politics, as it did during the early days of the Cold War.

  But the sexual revolution hardly invented sex or the anxieties it results in when mixed with conservative Christianity. The complaints of today’s purity crusaders echo those of Abram’s men in the 1930s when they resolved to meet in all-male cells rather than submit to the authority of churches in which women comprised the clear majority, if not the leadership. “Christianity, as it currently exists, has done some terrible things to men,” writes John Eldredge, the author of a best-selling manhood guide called Wild at Heart. He thinks that church life in America has made Christian men weak. Women who are frustrated with their girlie-man husbands and boyfriends seize power, and the men retreat to the safe haven of porn instead of whipping the ladies back into line. What women really want, he says, is to “be fought for.” And men, he claims, are “hardwired” by God for battle; Jesus wants them to be warriors in the vein of Braveheart and Gladiator.

  Wild at Heart and Eldredge’s other best sellers, The Journey of Desire and The Sacred Romance (as well as “field manual” workbooks that can be purchased separately), address sexual “purity” as part of the fabric of Christian manliness. Other books, such as God’s Gift to Women: Discovering the Lost Greatness of Masculinity and Every Man’s Battle, by Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker, make sex their central concern. Every Man’s Battle has become almost a genre unto itself, with dozens of Every Man spin-off titles: Every Young Man’s Battle, Every Woman’s Battle, Every Man’s Challenge, Preparing Your Son For Every Man’s Battle, and on and on. The Every Man premise is that men are sexual beasts, so sinful by nature that, without God in their lives, they don’t stand a chance of resisting temptation. But the temptation they most fear is not the age-old seduction of the flesh but the image of the flesh. They are not opposed to modernity, but to postmodernity and what they perceive as its free-floating symbols. The books are anti-media manifestos, warning that we are prey to any media we look at; images, they preach, are forever. One author confesses to being plagued by a picture of the sitcom actress Suzanne Somers, nude in a “surging mountain stream,” that he had seen twenty years earlier. For the authors, the solution is simply not to look, an anti-iconographic stance that belongs more to the Old Testament than the New.

  I first heard about the Every Man books from a volunteer at Dunbar and Robin’s church, a twenty-five-year-old man who said he’d slept with forty women before he “revirgined” with the help of the series. I was more surprised to learn that Robin had been reading Every Man’s Battle in preparation for marriage, and planned to lead a Bible study for men in the fall using Every Man as exegetical reading. Robin seemed too smart for these books. But then, what he wanted from them was not subtle thinking but clarity, a law of black and white.

  “You’re sexually pure,” write Arterburn and Stoeker, “when sexual gratification only comes from your wife…[and] sexual purity has the same definition whether you’re married or single.” To achieve this, they argue, men must go to a kind of war. “Your life is under a withering barrage of machine-gun sexuality that rakes the landscape mercilessly,” they report in their volume for single men. They encourage making lists of “areas of weakness” and seem particularly concerned with shorts: “nubile sweat-soaked girls in tight nylon shorts,” “female joggers in tight nylon shorts,” “young mothers in shorts,” and “volleyball shorts,” which are apparently so erotic that they require no bodies to fill them. To avoid these temptations, men must train themselves to “bounce” their eyes off female curves. Older men can help, too; the coauthors urge young men to find mentors who will check in with them by phone about their masturbation fantasies. This may be embarrassing for a young Christian, so the authors suggest a code. Homosexuality is relegated to a short afterword in which they list the number of Exodus International, a ministry dedicated to “freeing” people from homosexual desires.

  What’s really strange about all this is that it works. Not in the sense of de-eroticizing the world but in the sense of reinvigorating American fundamentalism with a new generation of foot soldiers, men and women who respond to a hypersexual consumer culture by making sex, in its absence, a top priority of their religion. “Abstinence,” Dunbar told me, “is countercultural,” a kind of rebellion, he said, against materialism, consumerism, and “the idea that anything can be bought and sold.”

  Every Man operates a hotline, 1–800 NEW LIFE, for men who’ve “threatened” their relationships with women through their use of pornography. When I called to confess that reading about tight-shorted women in Every Young Man’s Battle struck me as weirdly erotic, a professional masturbation counselor named Jason told me that I needed to be more like a woman. Women, he said, don’t like porn. In fact, if I asked any woman I knew, she’d tell me that for her to “use” porn, she’d have to fall out of love. Women are just that pure.

  What if I became so womanly that I developed a desire for men? I asked. Perfectly normal, he assured me; many men passed through that dark corridor on their way to purity. The end result, he promised, would be total manhood. To get there, Jason suggested I sign up for a five-day, $1,800 Every Man’s Battle workshop (held monthly in hotels around the country), in which I would take classes on shame, “false intimacy,” and “temptation cycles” and work with other “men of purity” toward “recovery.”

  Every Man’s Battle also offered a two-day “outpatient program” for women, Every Heart Restored, to
help them deal with their husbands’ depravity, which is another one of the paradoxes of the purity movement. Men’s sexuality, according to the movement, is on the one hand all-encompassing, capable of eroticizing nearly anything, and at the same time so simple and dumb that the best they can hope for is to adjust themselves to their wives’ slow simmer. Women, meanwhile, are inherently purer than men and thus simpler, and yet their sexuality is complicated and subtle, a story in which husband and wife must play carefully scripted roles. Books such as Wait For Me, a tie-in to a Christian pop hit of the same name by the Christian singer Rebecca St. James, What Every Woman Wants in a Man, by Diana Hagee, and When God Writes Your Love Story, by Eric and Leslie Ludy—not to mention the numerous Every Woman’s Battle titles and countless Christian romance novels—peddle a soft-focus vision of female desire drawn not from scripture but from fairy tales. Wait For Me opens with the claim that God has planted in every man and woman a dream in which women long to be rescued by a “champion warrior” with a “double-edged sword” from the towers in which they’ve been imprisoned by the “Dark Lord.” All women, writes Lisa Bevere in Kissed the Girls and Made Them Cry: Why Women Lose When They Give In, “long to be rescued by a knight in shining armor.”

  And yet Kissed the Girls and Made Them Cry goes deeper than chivalrous clichés. Bevere’s description of the love of Christ isn’t filled with the inadvertent innuendos that plague the men’s guides (“true manhood,” promises one Christian manhood guide, gets “polished by the hand of God”) but rather an eroticism, studiously gentle and mysterious, that is revealing of chastity’s allure. Riffing on the scene from the Gospel of John in which Jesus refuses to condemn an adulteress, Bevere writes, “At first, He is not willing to look at her or to answer them. He bends down and writes in the dust. The finger of God etches in dust letters that are not recorded for our knowledge.” Jesus, Bevere supposes, is thinking about man’s first love, Eve. “Perhaps, in His memory He is seeing another who attempted to cover her nakedness in a Garden long ago.” She imagines every woman in the crowd waiting to hear what Jesus will say; she hears in Christ’s rebuke to the men a secret message for women. “Let He who is without sin cast the first stone,” Jesus preaches. For most people, the story ends there, but Bevere lingers until the frustrated accusers have left, and there is just Jesus and this naked woman, and finally “she lifts her head and meets His gaze,” and Jesus tells her He does not condemn her, and tells her to go, and sin no more.

  It’s a beautiful scene, depicting Jesus as romantic hero. And it really is “countercultural,” an alternative not just to the sexualized world but also to the unforgiving fundamentalists of generations past. But then Bevere writes—and this is really the crux of the whole virginity movement—that the problem arose not because the woman sinned, which goes without saying for Christian conservatives, but because “a treacherous enemy has dragged the women of this generation”—us, now—“naked and guilty before a holy God.”

  God forgives; that’s why “revirgining” is always an option. “The enemy” is the problem. Who is it? In the Gospel of John, the enemy, as Bevere puts it, were Jews, those whom the gospel writer called “the children of Satan”; but in the Gospel of Lisa Bevere, the enemy is more abstract and more powerful. It’s sex. Not “real sex,” the kind she enjoys with her husband, but everything else—every fantasy that doesn’t conform to wedded bliss, every thrill that doesn’t belong in church, the lust that spoils the romance of Christianity.

  BEFORE ROBIN BECAME fully Christian—back when he cared as much about his guitar as he did about God—he dated a non-Christian girl. His voice grew husky as he remembered: “There were times, when we were naked, and my tongue was inside her, and she’s whispering for me to go further.” Dunbar stared at him. He knew this story, but he didn’t mind hearing it again. It wasn’t prurient for them; it was bonding. “There were times,” continued Robin, “when I had to ask myself, ‘What do I believe?’”

  “But you weren’t alone with her,” Dunbar said.

  “No.”

  Dunbar turned to me. “He had responsibility to us.” His brothers.

  But Robin kept letting them down. After high school, he stayed at home for a year while Dunbar and the rest of his friends went on to college. He joined a Christian punk band, Straight Forward. He started slipping. At college, he continued to slide. He began dating a woman only recently born again, still immature in her faith. She was thrilled by Robin’s attention; he was a man known to be on fire for God. The girl—a “baby Christian,” in the lingo—wanted to get closer to that warmth. She did so the only way she knew how. “A blow job,” said Robin.

  It had been one thing to go down on his girlfriend when he wasn’t sure what he believed. It was another to let a girlfriend go down on him after he’d committed himself to God. But then, he said, that’s how it works all too often when a man looks like he’s devoted to Jesus. “It becomes more about giving than receiving”—an implicit recognition of the sexism he knew permeated the best intentions. Even among Christians, the girls “will go down on you, but you don’t have to go down on them.” The experience, he said, broke his heart. What it did for the girl who sucked him off and got dumped for her impurity, he couldn’t even imagine.

  That summer, Robin and his fiancée were to marry back home in Visalia, where Dunbar would be his best man. Power felt like he had waited a long time. He didn’t want to marry for sex, so he’d restrained himself from proposing until it did not even enter his mind. Soon he would experience his reward. A “sexual payoff,” according to the authors of Every Man’s Battle, that will “explode off any known scale.”

  Like the fundamentalists of old, today’s Christian conservatives define themselves as apart from the world, and yet the modern movement aims to enjoy its fruits. To the biblical austerity of chastity, they add the promise of mind-blowing sex, using the very terms of the sexual revolution they rally against. And that’s just the beginning. Sexual regulation is a means, not an end. To believers, the movement offers a vision grander even than the loveliness of a virgin: a fairy tale in which every man will be a spiritual warrior, a knight in the service of the king of kings, promised the hand and the heart and, yes, the sexual services of a “lady.” That is the erotic dream of American fundamentalism: a restoration of chivalry, a cleansing of impurity, a nation without sin, an empire of the personal as political.

  UNSCHOOLING

  WE KEEP TRYING TO explain away American fundamentalism. That is, those of us not engaged personally or emotionally in the biggest political and cultural movement of our times—those on the sidelines of history—keep trying to come up with theories to discredit the evident allure of this punishing yet oddly comforting idea of a deity, this strange god. His invisible hand is everywhere, say His citizen-theologians, caressing and fixing every outcome: Little League games, job searches, test scores, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, the success or failure of terrorists, victory or defeat in battle, at the ballot box, in bed. Those unable to feel His soothing touch at moments such as these snort at the notion of a God with the patience or the prurience to monitor every tick and twitch of desire, a supreme being able to make a lion and a lamb cuddle but unable to abide two men kissing. A divine love that speaks through hurricanes. Who would worship such a god? His followers, we try to reassure ourselves, must be dupes, or saps, or fools, their faith illiterate, insane, or misinformed, their strength fleeting, hollow, an aberration.

  We don’t like to consider the possibility that they are not newcomers to power but returnees, that the revivals that have been sweeping the nation with generational regularity since its inception are not flare-ups but the natural temperature fluctuations of American empire. We can’t accept the possibility that those we dismiss as dupes, or saps, or fools—the believers—have been with us from the very beginning, that their story about what America once was and should be seems to some great portion of the population more compelling, more just, and more beautiful than
the perfunctory processes of secular democracy. Thus we are at a loss to account for this recurring American mood. The classic means of explaining it away—class envy, sexual anxiety—do not suffice. We cannot, like H. L. Mencken writing from the Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925, dismiss the Christian Right as a carnival of backward buffoons resentful of modernity’s privileges. We cannot, like the Washington Post in 1993, explain away the movement as “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” We cannot, like the writer Theodor Adorno, a refugee from Nazi Germany, attribute America’s radical religion—nascent fascism?—to Freudian yearning for a father figure.

  No, God isn’t dead; Freud and Marx are. The old theories have failed. The new Christ, fifty years ago no more than a corollary to American power, twenty-five years ago at its vanguard, is now at the very center. His followers are not anxiously awaiting his return at the rapture; he’s here right now. They’re not envious of the middle class, they are the middle class. They’re not looking for a hero to lead them; they’re building biblical households, every man endowed with “headship” over his own family. They don’t silence sex; they promise sacred sex to those who couple properly—orgasms, according to a bit of fundamentalist folklore passed between young singles, “600 percent” more intense for those who wait than those experienced by secular lovers.

  Intensity! That’s what one finds within the ranks of the American believers. “This thing is real!” declare our nation’s fundamentalist pastors. It’s all coming together: the sacred and the profane, God’s time and straight time, what theologians and graduates of the new fundamentalist prep schools might call kairos and chronos, the mystical and the mundane. American fundamentalism—not a political party, not a denomination, not a uniform ideology but a manifold movement—is moving in every direction all at once, claiming the earth for God’s kingdom, “in the world but not of it” and yet just loving it to death, anyway. It feels fabulous, this faith, it tingles in all the right places.