Author: David Clary (Page 2 of 6)

In my last post, I wrote that Rick Warren is probably the best-known living religious figure in America. Upon giving it further thought, I’m not sure that’s true. The Purpose Driven Life was published 20 years ago, and Warren has not followed up with another book. He never had a television ministry or embarked on arena or stadium tours like Billy Graham. Warren was involved in politics for time, hosting Barack Obama and John McCain at Saddleback during the 2008 campaign and delivering the invocation at Obama’s first inauguration. (The move infuriated liberals because Warren publicly supported Proposition 8 in California, a 2008 ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage.) But Warren seemed to recede from the public arena in the last decade or so, preferring to concentrate on his church and his work in Africa.

In contrast, Joel Osteen of Lakewood Church in Houston is omnipresent. He and his wife and co-pastor, Victoria, run one of America’s largest churches in the former home of the Houston Rockets. Osteen’s services are slickly produced into 30-minute weekly programs for television. Osteen’s trim suits, gelled hair and perpetual smile is a made-for-TV package. He pumps out books, devotionals, and other merchandise sold online and at his “Night of Hope” events that fill arenas nationwide. (Osteen isn’t involved in politics and rarely speaks out on any public issue.)

What is the message that people receive from the telegenic pastor? Osteen is a purveyor of the controversial prosperity gospel, which teaches that wealth can be achieved through prayer and financial contributions. “If you want to reap financial blessings, you must sow financial seeds in the lives of others,” Osteen says, echoing Oral Roberts’ “seed-faith” teaching. “In the time of need, sow a seed.” Osteen is relentlessly upbeat — there is no trace of sin or damnation in his theology — but there is a gnawing hollowness to his sermons. Is God really just a fulfillment center for individual human needs?

Unlike Warren, Osteen has practically no theological training. Osteen dropped out of Oral Roberts University after a year and did not attend seminary. Instead, he worked as a television producer for his father, John, a Pentecostal minister who founded Lakewood as an independent church in the 1950s. Joel took over as pastor after his father’s death in 1999 and expanded the TV ministry. That turbo-charged Lakewood’s attendance growth, which surpassed 50,000 on weekends.

The Houston Chronicle revealed that Lakewood Church took in $89 million during a recent fiscal year. Seventy percent of the budget went to TV broadcasts, weekly services, and the “Night of Hope” events. Only $1.2 million was spent on missions and community service. Meanwhile, the Osteens live in a mansion with an assessed value of $12 million and boast a personal fortune estimated at more than $50 million. The Osteens are certainly living their best lives, but are their followers?

Rick Warren is probably the best-known living Christian leader in America, owing to his 2002 book, The Purpose Driven Life, which is a publishing phenomenon at more than 50 million copies sold. Last weekend, the 68-year-old founding pastor delivered his final sermon as senior pastor at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., which is among the country’s biggest and most influential evangelical churches. Warren preached the same sermon he gave in 1980 at the church’s first service. Warren’s vision was audacious for a small congregation without a permanent home. “It is the dream of welcoming twenty thousand members into the fellowship of our church family … it is the dream of at least fifty acres of land, on which will be built a regional church for south Orange County,” Warren said on March 30, 1980.

How did he do it? Like all evangelical entrepreneurs, Warren didn’t simply leave everything up to God — he had a business plan. Before deciding where to start his church, Warren conducted demographic research and found out that Saddleback Valley was the fastest-growing area in the country’s fastest-growing county (Orange County) in the 1970s. So he moved West and founded Saddleback Valley Community Church, pointedly avoiding the “Baptist” in the name because his target was the “unchurched” population.

Warren, like his megachurch contemporary Bill Hybels in suburban Chicago, was a student of Peter Drucker, the founder of modern management theory. Drucker taught that it is the customer who decides what a business is. Warren spent months going door to door to find out what people wanted in the church and gave it to them — quality child care, a welcoming environment, upbeat music and practical preaching. Drucker also taught that businesses decline when they try to “preserve yesterday.” Warren perceived that churches also fell into that trap and was determined to abandon failing programs and keep innovating and growing.

Many non-evangelical people I’ve talked to have many misunderstandings about megachurches. They see thousands of people in a large theater or arena, high-energy bands playing contemporary praise songs, and casually dressed preachers giving what seem to be TED talks. Often these churches lack Christian symbols: No crosses, statues, pews, stained-glass windows. A few I visited seemed more like convention centers or corporate office parks than places of worship. But they are designed that way on purpose. The largest market is the unchurched, and Christian iconography and liturgical complexity were alienate those people.

The real work gets done not in the large-scale Sunday service but in small groups that everyone gets steered into once they decide to become members. Typically, each group is about 10 people who meet weekly at a home for fellowship and Bible study. This is the glue that holds these churches together. Warren knew that people are unlikely to form relationships if left to their own devices. If they don’t feel connected and have a sense of purpose, they will likely abandon the church. Everyone at Saddleback is expected to play a role: Working as a parking attendant, volunteering at the welcome desk, helping with youth ministry. I talked to dozens of people during my church visits and asked why they go to there and what they like most about it. Almost everyone said they felt a sense of community. That’s a hard thing to find in today’s world of screens, toxic “social media,” and remote work.

I attended a Saturday afternoon service at Saddleback’s main campus in Lake Forest in August 2021. The main “Worship Center” was being renovated, so we met under a large tent. To my surprise, Rick Warren himself walked up on the platform to preach in the summer heat. He referenced the pandemic several times, not in an anti-mask or anti-vaccine way, but instead acknowledging the general weariness people felt from 18 months of rapid and unwanted change. He said part of his job as pastor was to get people through hard times.

Some of his comments verged on self-help: “Happiness is a choice,” “You’re going to come out of COVID bitter or you’re going to come out better, and ‘i’ is the only difference between the words.” He make an analogy that individual ingredients in a cake don’t taste good, but mix them together and put in under heat and it results in something delicious. COVID is part of God’s plan, part of the mix. “I’m a purpose-driven eater,” the portly Warren joked.

All visitors were given a packet containing a small sheet with holes punched down the side. (Attendees collect these week to week and keep them in a three-ring binder.) The front side listed five things to remember about how to trust God when you don’t like the changes in your life. Warren went through each point and connected it to a Bible verse while we followed along and filled in the blanks. The back side listed five things to do when you feel stressed by changes. Again, Warren connected each point to a Bible reading. The sermon encapsulated Warren’s approach: Acknowledging that life is hard and giving people practical tools to deal with it.

Oral Roberts and Billy Graham had long, fascinating careers that shaped evangelicalism in the 20th century. They were both born in 1918 and they both rose to early fame, but Graham traveled a much easier path than Roberts. Graham’s family ran a prosperous dairy farm in North Carolina and he graduated from Wheaton College, one of the leading evangelical schools in the country. The gregarious Southern Baptist minister seized upon the many opportunities that always seemed to come his way: hosting a Sunday night radio program as a young pastor, a job as Youth for Christ’s first full-time representative, and being offered a college presidency when he was only 29.

Graham assembled a close-knit ministry team and launched his own crusades that eventually rivaled Billy Sunday’s in size and public attention. People couldn’t get enough of Graham’s fervent fundamentalist preaching leavened by his honeyed southern accent. Graham hosted the nationwide radio program Hour of Decision, which had a weekly audience of 15 million, wrote a syndicated newspaper column, My Answer, that also reached 15 million people. Graham leaned on rich businessmen to fund his enterprises. Industrialist J. Russell Maguire propped up Graham’s film business and oilman J. Howard Pew bankrolled Graham’s magazine, Christianity Today. Graham’s clean-cut image and anti-communist messaging were irresistible to wealthy conservatives. Oilman Sid Richardson introduced Graham to Dwight Eisenhower, which placed the minister at the highest reaches of American power.

Oral Roberts was never comfortable in such rarefied air. He was raised in poverty in rural Oklahoma and stuttered from an early age. At 17, he contracted tuberculosis in both lungs and wasted away in bed. The family took him to a tent revival run by a divine healer, and Roberts said he felt the power of the Lord and could breathe normally again. The stuttering stopped, too. Roberts became a Pentecostal Holiness preacher, and like Graham, found the life of a pastor too dull. He launched an independent healing ministry in 1947, and traveled from town to town promising miracles to ever-growing throngs of believers.

Roberts tapped into grassroots networks of Pentecostal businessmen to sponsor his crusades. One of the most important was Demos Shakarian, a dairyman who chaired the local committee for Roberts’s crusade in Los Angeles in 1951. Shakarian told Roberts he wanted to start a group that would encourage spirituality among businessmen. The organization, the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International, broke across denominational lines and introduced Pentecostalism to the middle class. Shakarian entered the inner circle of Roberts’ advisers.

Early on, Roberts perceived the power of television. His no-nonsense style and darkly handsome visage came across well on TV. His organization, the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association, excelled at direct-mail fundraising — by the end of the 1950s, the ministry was the largest receiver and sender of first-class mail in Tulsa. Nearly all of the letters sent to Roberts contained appeals for healing.

Perhaps out of jealousy, Pentecostal denominational leaders were uncomfortable with his independent success. The Pentecostal Holiness church considered revoking Roberts’ ministerial credentials in 1953 because some leaders felt his healing revivals were incompatible with church teaching. The Churches of Christ called Roberts a fraud for his faith-healing claims. One critic accused Roberts of paying people on his TV program to falsely say they had been cured.  

Many of these conflicts were aggravated by Roberts’ blustery personality. In contrast to Graham, who maintained relationships with barons like Henry Luce of Time and Life magazines, Roberts was less at ease with the press. When Roberts tried to explain his belief system to reporters, he lashed out when they mischaracterized it. Roberts had difficulty overcoming the lingering cultural bias of Pentecostal believers as “snake handlers” and “holy rollers.”  

Roberts threw himself into building his university and stopped his traveling crusades in 1968 — the same year he left the Pentecostal Holiness denomination to be a Methodist minister. Roberts resuscitated his television ministry and disseminated a teaching he called “seed-faith,” a precursor of the “prosperity gospel.” Roberts’ fundraising appeals grew increasingly desperate as he aged. He may be best known for tearfully saying “God could call Oral Roberts home” unless he raised $8 million in 1987. Roberts stayed up in his campus’ Prayer Tower until the money flowed in from his “faith partners.”

Graham never reduced himself to such maudlin displays. He continued with his global crusades well into old age and relished his status as “America pastor” who would preside at inaugurations, openings of presidential libraries, and events of national mourning. What Graham did for fundamentalism — smoothing out its rough edges and repackaging it as a more moderate “evangelicalism” — Roberts did for Pentecostalism.

Norman Vincent Peale was one of the famous — and controversial — religious figures of the 20th century. Though not typically categorized as an evangelical, Peale perfected an upbeat style of preaching, a mastery of media, and a consumer-focused approach to ministry that influenced evangelical megachurches.

Peale started out as a Methodist minister and shifted to the Reformed Church in America when Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan hired him as pastor in 1932. Peale ran the historic church on Fifth Avenue and W. 29th St. for 52 years. Peale’s teaching drew from an eclectic mix of religious and secular sources: metaphysics, psychology, mysticism, medicine, and traditional evangelism.

Peale became convinced that the health of a person’s spiritual life directly affected his or her mental and physical condition. He teamed up with Freud-trained psychiatrist Dr. Smiley Blanton to found a Religio-Psychiatric Clinic in 1937 that attracted hospital patients as well as church attendees. Peale’s novel approach and prominent pulpit catapulted him into notoriety. Peale participated in conservative causes — he attacked the New Deal and Franklin D. Roosevelt from the start — and aligned with like-minded industrialists who bankrolled his projects. (Peale participated in an ugly effort by Protestant ministers to derail John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign on the grounds that a Catholic could not truly be loyal to the United States.)

Peale is best known today for his book, The Power of Positive Thinking, published in 1952. Peale summed it up as “applied Christianity; a simple yet scientific system of practical techniques of successful living that works.” Peale’s results-oriented ministry and his bullet-point approach to preaching appealed to the business class. He welcomed being billed as “a businessman’s preacher.”

Peale was an industry of his own. The Power of Positive Thinking resided on the New York Times’ bestseller list for 186 consecutive weeks, selling millions of copies. Peale had a weekly NBC radio program, a weekly television show, a nationally syndicated newspaper column, Guideposts magazine, regular contributions to Reader’s Digest, and even a line of Hallmark greeting cards. Peale’s Foundation for Christian Living served as the clearinghouse for many of these ventures.

A real estate developer from Queens, Fred C. Trump, found succor in Peale’s business-friendly teachings. Marble Collegiate became the Trump family church: Peale officiated at Donald’s marriage to Ivana in 1977, Donald’s sisters were also wed there, and his parents’ funerals were conducted in the main sanctuary. Trump and his future second wife, Marla Maples, both attended Marble Collegiate.

Peale’s teachings about self-confidence, picturing success, and denying negative thoughts were custom-made for the Trumps. When Donald Trump encountered downturns in his business career, such as when his businesses filed for bankruptcy, he clung to Peale’s teachings. “What helped is that I refused to give in to the negative circumstances and I never lost faith in myself,” he said in 2009. “I refused to be sucked into negative thinking on any level, even when the indications weren’t great. That was a good lesson because I emerged on a very victorious level.”

Peale had plenty of critics who saw his positive thinking as a shallow form of denialism. Franklin Clark Fry, president of the United Lutheran Church of America, denounced Peale’s “positive thinking,” saying “there is nothing more sinister … than that instrumentalization of religion — the use of God to accomplish a specific aim.” That is precisely why Peale was popular and why he has had so many imitators, especially in the prosperity-gospel megachurches. To Peale, Christianity was a power source that needed to be unlocked and harnessed. He reduced everything to the individual level — there was no place in his formula for government-run social welfare programs — and taught that people could change their lot in life by picturing a positive outcome, surrendering it to God’s will, and watching the picture turn to reality. There are few more American traits than an optimism in upward mobility, and few will succeed more than those who can skillfully exploit it.

One of the thrills of writing a book is seeing a finished copy for the first time. A book lives only in the author’s mind for so long and to see it in a tangible form is truly special. Last week, I received my allotment of copies of “Soul Winners.” (The delivery guy asked if I had ordered a bowling ball.) I’m thrilled with the high level of production — the glossy cover, the heavy paper stock, quality binding, excellent photo reproduction. The moment an author submits the final manuscript, the author surrenders control of the book to the publisher. The author certainly has input on the book’s title, cover, and promotion/marketing plan, but the publisher has the final say. (In my case, they did keep my title and asked for my opinion about the cover options.) Problems inevitably crop up — for instance, printer delivery delays recently pushed back my publication date from Aug. 15 to Sept. 15 — so it’s vital you have a spirit of trust with your publisher. I’m fortunate to have people at Prometheus Books who believed in the book and were true partners in bringing it into the world.

Aimee Semple McPherson’s life story continues to fascinate nearly 80 years after her death. The recent HBO series “Perry Mason” based its Sister Alice character on McPherson, and many books and documentaries have chronicled her exploits. Sister Aimee founded her own church — which still stands nearly a century later — as well as her own denomination. McPherson was the first American woman to hold a radio broadcasting license, and she owned her own radio station when the medium was still in its infancy. Her personal travails were the stuff of a Hollywood melodrama. Fittingly, she chose to base her ministry in Los Angeles.

McPherson was influenced by Pentecostalism, an emerging strain of belief distinguished by the speaking and interpretation of tongues, also known as glossolalia. The phenomenon was described in the biblical account of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles and other followers of Jesus in Jerusalem fifty days after Easter Sunday. According to the second chapter of Acts, a mighty wind came down from heaven and filled them with the Holy Spirit — a spirit baptism — as Jesus had promised. Then they began to speak in languages they did not know, testifying to the works of God.

Pentecostals interpreted these “tongues of fire” as a gift from the Holy Spirit that could mark the recipient as capable of healing the sick and issuing prophecies. McPherson embarked on a solo preaching career, holding “faith healing” revivals in cities across the country. Her meetings created a sensation wherever she went. Hundreds testified that McPherson cured their physical ailments, while press accounts ridiculed her flamboyant methods. Some pastors dismissed McPherson as a charlatan, though their criticism may have been colored by jealousy of her large, fervent crowds.

McPherson’s church opened on January 1, 1923 — she cannily used a float as a promotional tool in that morning’s Tournament of Roses parade in Pasadena. Angelus Temple overlooks Echo Park and looks much like it did in Sister Aimee’s day — minus the twin radio spires because the radio station went off the air in 2003. The congregation today is smaller and reflects the neighborhood’s strong Latino character. Aimee Semple McPherson and the church she built blended celebrity, entertainment, business acumen, and mass communication into an intoxicating and much-copied formula.

After my junior year in college, The Buffalo News selected me to be one of their summer reporting interns. The paper arranged for me to live in an old-style cinder-block dorm room with no air conditioning. I was supposed to have a fellow intern as a roommate, but his father took one look at the grim setup and yanked him before he could move in. (I assured my poor Mom that I would be ok there, but we had a teary parting because I don’t think either of us truly believed it.) The campus bordered a tough neighborhood, but it did have a handy rail connection that I used to get to the paper’s downtown office. My gruff metro editor treated us as if we were full-time staff reporters. We covered hard news like shootings and fires as well as weekend summer festivals. Back then, the paper published a morning and an afternoon edition, and it seemed like my editor was always there, whirling around the newsroom handing out assignments (but never compliments).

The intense internship kept me busy, but my off hours were not so easily filled. My room didn’t have a TV and there weren’t many other people living in the dorm. I had a landline in my room, but I had to use a prepaid phone card to make long-distance calls. I brought a microfridge to stash slabs of lunchmeat and sacks of Arby’s sandwiches (you could get 5 for $5). I went on some adventures with an intern who had a car, but otherwise it was a lonely time.

Before I left home, my Dad let me borrow David McCullough’s biography of Harry Truman, who was one of my Dad’s great heroes. When loneliness crept in, I picked up the massive book and fell under the spell of McCullough’s masterly storytelling. I was transported from a sweltering dorm room in western New York to a rural turn-of-century Missouri farm, then to the horrors of the front in France in World War I, then to the machine politics of Kansas City, next to Washington and the awesome weight of “the moon, the stars, and all the planets” of the presidency, and finally back home to Independence, a perfect match of a city’s name and a man as there ever was.

Truman changed my life and maybe saved it, in a way. I know for certain it saved me that summer and opened the gateway to discover McCullough’s other great works. I later learned that the great baritone voice that narrated The Civil War and other PBS films and documentaries belonged to him, which only increased my admiration for his skill at making history so absorbing and real. While I was working on my first book, I read that McCullough also wrote his first book in his spare hours while working full-time and raising a family. That was inspiring to me.

I’m sorry I never got the opportunity to meet David McCullough, or at least hear him speak in person. But he leaves behind a shelf of masterful books that will always be reliable companions on life’s journey.

One of the best parts of writing a book is finding colorful characters who can drive your narrative by telling the stories of their lives. The evangelical world is full of them, and a major challenge with this book was deciding who to leave out! Over the next few weeks, I’ll highlight a few people who did the most to shape evangelicalism.

Billy Sunday — yes, that is indeed the preacher’s given name — achieved fame early as a ballplayer with the Chicago White Stockings starting in 1883. After his playing career wrapped up in 1890, he joined the Chicago YMCA and then served as an apprentice to a traveling preacher. Sunday embarked on his own ministry career and won over audiences with simple messages animated with a brawny athleticism honed on the baseball diamond.

Sunday preached biblical inerrancy — the notion that the Bible is free of all error — thus, people only needed to read the Bible for themselves and obey it. His views clashed with Protestants steeped in the liberal theology that dominated seminaries and colleges. In 1908, these churches advanced a “social creed” that called for an end to child labor, mandates ensuring workplace safety, and a living wage for all workers.

Sunday portrayed such efforts as threats to the American capitalist system. He opposed government reforms as un-Christian and un-American. The only true reform was for people to make a personal conversion to Christ. (This argument was used by evangelicals against civil rights legislation.) Treating churches as just another charitable organization was “godless social service nonsense,” he said.

Sunday himself was a big business. When he decided to hold a revival in a city, he organized committees to raise money to build a tabernacle from the ground up since no church was large enough to hold his admirers. In 1917, John D. Rockefeller Jr. and other business barons raised $65,000 to build a “glory barn” at 168th Street and Broadway that could accommodate 18,000 people. Sunday filled it for 10 weeks.

Sunday was handsomely rewarded for his efforts. Sunday walked away from his 1916 campaign in Detroit with a “thanks offering” of $46,102.28 in cash, which translates to well over $1 million in today’s dollars. Henry M. Leland, founder and president of Cadillac, presented Sunday with an $8,000 limousine with special features such as a hidden pocket designed to hold a Bible. Leland had served on the Sunday campaign’s executive committee.

Sunday believed that Christian service and financial success were intertwined — a precursor of prosperity gospel preachers and modern televangelists. If Sunday could rise from a log-cabin childhood to a position of wealth and fame, perhaps his admirers could, too. Sunday also linked Christianity and patriotism in a manner similar to today’s Christian nationalists. World War I supercharged Sunday’s jingoism, and he applauded the postwar Palmer Raids that targeted communists and leftists. “If they don’t like the way we do things, let them get out of here and leave. We don’t propose to adjust the country to suit a lot of anarchists,” he thundered.

Sunday’s feverish style fell out of fashion as the age of radio dawned, and his message curdled into nativism in his later years. (His archives at Grace College in Indiana include a 1931 letter from the Kanton Klan of Canton, Ohio, thanking Sunday for his work in the “furtherance of God’s Kingdom and the perpetuation of our American heritage.”) Yet his life story is a guide to understanding the political attitudes and flamboyance that are hallmarks of evangelicalism to this day.

While I wait for my finished copies to arrive, here’s an inside look at how vats of ink and 800-pound rolls of paper become a printed book, in this case, Marlon James’ “Moon Witch, Spider King.” Takes me back to the days when I pulled freshly inked papers off the belt in the pressroom!

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/19/books/how-a-book-is-made.html

When I asked evangelical leaders about why they supported Donald Trump, nearly all mentioned the 200 judges he appointed to the federal bench, including three justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. Republicans have long made it a priority to stack the federal courts with lifetime appointees who will hand down conservative decisions for decades. Even if Republicans lose control of Congress or the White House, they know that the courts will thwart liberal policies.

On June 24, the court’s solid conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established the constitutional right to abortion. Evangelicals in particular celebrated the decision as the culmination of years of activism. But they were not always so invested in the issue. After the Roe decision, the National Association of Evangelicals pointed out the “necessity for therapeutic abortions to safeguard the health or the life of the mother.” W.A. Criswell, the longtime pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas that I wrote about last time, said a child became an individual person only after being born, thus it was up to the mother to decide what was best. Abortion was seen as a “Catholic issue” by most evangelicals.

It took years for evangelicals like Jerry Falwell to become engaged in the fight over abortion rights. Singer-turned-activist Anita Bryant asked for Falwell’s help in her successful campaign in 1977 to repeal a Dade County ordinance in Florida that banned discrimination against gay people in housing and employment. Soon after, Falwell launched a national advertising blitz that highlighted three issues: gay people teaching in public schools, “abortion on demand,” and the spread of pornography. Falwell held rallies at state capitols to promote these issues, a movement that led to the creation of the Moral Majority in 1979. It aligned with the right-turn of the Republican Party and helped propel Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980.

Conservatives have a record of being disappointed at Republican presidents’ Supreme Court nominations. Reagan’s nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor in 1981 upset Falwell because she was seen as insufficiently conservative on abortion. George H.W. Bush nominated David Souter in 1990, who turned out to be well left of center on most issues. Even John Roberts, nominated as chief justice by George W. Bush in 2005, has proven to be too incremental for some activists. But Trump’s three justices were all carefully vetted by the conservative legal establishment to avoid any surprises. Evangelicals have reaped the benefits of the court’s rulings on abortion as well as “religious freedom” issues.