Fwd: 11/02/06: Harpers: Jeff Sharlet: Soldiers of Christ (originally published in May 2005)
[via Ned Sublette]
fans of evangelical homoeroticism will want to check out the artwork
by the painter referred to in this article, thomas blackshear:
http://www.africanamericanartandgifts.com/xq/ASP/ ThomasBlackshearGalleryTheForgivenCanvasTransferFramed/ StockNumber.17233/qx/AfricanAmericanArtDetails.asp.
http://www.africanamericanartandgifts.com/xq/ASP/ ThomasBlackshearGalleryTheVessel/StockNumber.2039L/qx/ AfricanAmericanArt_Details.htm
http://harpers.org/SoldiersOfChrist-20061103288348488.html
Soldiers of Christ
Inside America’s most powerful megachurch with Pastor Ted Haggard Posted on Thursday, November 2, 2006. Originally from May 2005.
By Jeff Sharlet.
They are drawn as if by magnetic forces; they speak of Colorado Springs,
home to the greatest concentration of fundamentalist Christian activist
groups in American history, both as a last stand and as a kind of
utopia in
the making. They say it is new and unique and precious, embattled by
enemies, and also that it is “traditional,” a blueprint for what
everybody
wants, and envied by enemies. The city itself is unspectacular, a
grid of
wide western avenues lined with squat, gray and beige box buildings,
only a
handful of them taller than a dozen stories. Local cynics point out
that if
you put Colorado Springs on a truck and carted it to Nebraska, it
would make
Omaha look lovely. But the architecture is not what draws Christians
looking
for clean living. The mountains help, but there are other mountain
towns.
What Colorado Springs offers, ultimately, is a story.
[…]
The city’s mightiest megachurch crests silver and blue atop a gentle
slope
of pale yellow prairie grass on the outskirts of town. Silver and
blue, as
it happens, are Air Force colors. New Life Church was built far north of
town in part so it would be visible from the Air Force Academy. New Life
wanted that kind of character in its congregation.
“Church” is insufficient to describe the complex. There is a permanent
structure called the Tent, which regularly fills with hundreds or
thousands
of teens and twentysomethings for New Life’s various youth
gatherings. Next
to the Tent stands the old sanctuary, a gray box capable of seating
1,500;
this juts out into the new sanctuary, capacity 7,500, already too
small. At
the complex’s western edge is the World Prayer Center, which looks
like a
great iron wedge driven into the plains. The true architectural
wonder of
New Life, however, is the pyramid of authority into which it orders its
11,000 members. At the base are 1,300 cell groups, whose leaders
answer to
section leaders, who answer to zone, who answer to district, who
answer to
Pastor Ted Haggard, New Life’s founder.
Pastor Ted, who talks to President George W. Bush or his advisers every
Monday, is a handsome forty-eight-year-old Indianan, most comfortable in
denim. He likes to say that his only disagreement with the President is
automotive; Bush drives a Ford pickup, whereas Pastor Ted loves his
Chevy.
In addition to New Life, Pastor Ted presides over the National
Association
of Evangelicals (NAE), whose 45,000 churches and 30 million believers
make
up the nation’s most powerful religious lobbying group, and also over a
smaller network of his own creation, the Association of Life-Giving
Churches, 300 or so congregations modeled on New Life’s “free market”
approach to the divine.
[…]
After church, I walked across the parking lot to the World Prayer
Center,
where I watched prayers scroll over two giant flat-screen televisions
while
a young man played piano. The Prayer Center-a joint effort of several
fundamentalist organizations but located at and presided over by New
Life-houses a bookstore that when I visited was called the Arsenal
(its name
has since been changed to Solomon’s Porch), as well as “corporate”
prayer
rooms, personal “prayer closets,” hotel rooms, and the headquarters of
Global Harvest, a ministry dedicated to “spiritual warfare.” (The Prayer
Center’s nickname in the fundamentalist world is “spiritual NORAD.”) The
atrium is a soaring foyer adorned with the flags of the nations and
guarded
by another bronze warrior angel, a scowling, bearded type with massive
biceps and, again, a sword. The angel’s pedestal stands at the center
of a
great, eight-pointed compass laid out in muted red, white, and blue-
black
stone. Each point directs the eye to a contemporary painting, most
depicting
gorgeous, muscular men-one is a blacksmith, another is bound, fetish-
style,
in chains-in various states of undress. My favorite is The Vessel, by
Thomas
Blackshear, a major figure in the evangelical-art world.[2] Here in the
World Prayer Center is a print of The Vessel, a tall, vertical panel
of two
nude, ample-breasted, white female angels team-pouring an urn of
honey onto
the shaved head of a naked, olive-skinned man below. The honey drips
down
over his slab-like pecs and his six-pack abs into the eponymous vessel,
which he holds in front of his crotch. But the vessel can’t handle
that much
honey, so the sweetness oozes over the edges and spills down yet another
level, presumably onto our heads, drenching us in golden, godly love.
Part
of what makes Blackshear’s work so compelling is precisely its unabashed
eroticism; it aims to turn you on, and then to turn that passion toward
Jesus.
[…]