Gospel, page 92
I admit to being afraid, wondering if he might murder me for the money and run to an exit he had in reality discovered. Deeper and deeper into the labyrinths we wandered!
I asked of him, “How do you keep the vermin, which I hear all around me, from consuming this … relic of ours?”
He said—how horribly!—to me, “I’m sure they have a feast now and then? Perhaps with each bite they are cured of all their rat diseases, yes?”
Such were his infernal jests!
35. Then we came to the door of the chamber where this hideous apostasy, this death-relic of Our Master was supposed to be secreted …18
THE PROMISED LAND
Why should the taxpayers have to spend money to cure diseases that don’t have to start in the first place? Let’s help the drug users [with AIDS] who want to be helped and the Haitian people. But let’s let the homosexual community do its own research. Why should the American taxpayer have to bail out these perverted people?
—From a 1983 newsletter issued by
JERRY FALWELL’S Moral Majority
“Oh, why is God letting this happen to us? We haven’t done anything wrong—oh, I cry and pray every night that God will allow the truly guilty people to be punished for what they’ve done to Jim and Tammy Ministries.…”
—TAMMY FAYE BAKKER (quoted AP 6/30/87
before the conviction of her husband
of embezzling $158 million from PTL contributors)
Yes, I believe all dancing, by whatever name it may be called, is sinful and harmful. For example, all television dance programs show performances designed essentially to incite and arouse lust in people’s minds and hearts. The contortions they display are all too similar to the perversions of the heathen nations who lived so long ago.… I can see where it would be a temptation for young girls to want to learn tap dancing or ballet dancing. I cannot, however, recommend it for Christian girls. I would even put gymnastic dancing in the same category.… Neither should we resort to bodily movements that provoke lust in others or set a bad example.
—Straight Answers to Tough Questions (1987)
JIMMY SWAGGART
Beware of the scribes who like to go about in long robes and to have salutations in the marketplace and the best seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at feasts, who devour widows’ houses and for a pretense make long prayers.
They will receive the greater condemnation.
—Mark 12:38–40
JESUS
AUGUST 29TH, 1990
TPL Farley drove the station wagon down a slight hill under a canopy of live oak trees draped with Spanish moss, limply stirring in the humidity. Lucy noticed a Louisiana state highway sign with the number illegible from rust and a shotgun blast.
“Here it is,” said Farley. “Where it all started.”
It was a brick box of a church, three feet above the ground on cement blocks in the event of high water. PHILADELPHIA FIRST PENTECOSTAL, said the rotting wooden sign, black letters on white peeling paint. There were white double-doors in front, a squat steeple on the roof that resembled a bird feeder, also white. Lucy felt the gravel lot crunch under the station-wagon tires.
“Does anyone use it anymore?” she asked.
“The Senior Center does,” he said, motioning across the road to a simple series of one-story brick apartments in an L-shaped building. “Dad will still come up here once a month to be with the seniors and longtime members and prayer-partners.”
Prayer-partners, Lucy had realized, meant people who had given sums of money from the very beginning of The Promised Land Ministries.
Farley explained to Lucy that, chronologically, there were four other churches between this humble building where Farley Bullins, Sr., felt the anointing and the “God-Dome,” the Bullins Seminary complex in Philadelphia that from the air—as a popular postcard showed—resembled a crown.
“We’ve got a bigger Senior Center in Philadelphia,” he explained, “one that you have to pay a bit for. This one’s free.”
As the station wagon wheeled in the lot recircling through its own scattered dust, Lucy gave it another glance. She imagined a younger, less jowly Reverend Bullins exhorting and thumping his Bible, bullying Satan in this unattended box of a church. She saw it all: his fervent prayers to be delivered unto a great congregation, the private moments no less agonized than Gethsemane when the funds ran out or the cable service in some Southern city was canceling his telecast. For this was a man, she told herself, who knew even at the Philadelphia First Pentecostal that his mission would be worldwide, and God, apparently, did not interfere in his dreams.
(Give Us time.)
Farley had been a dutiful tour guide. He had already shown her the Poverty Outreach program, the Feliciana Parish Homeless Mission, the rambunctious children–filled playground dedicated to Obadiah Bullins, the reverend’s father, also a preacher.
Near the Mississippi River, Farley drove down a dirt road over the levee down to a quaint but impoverished row of wooden houses. A group of dark black children stopped their ballgame in the middle of the road to let Farley cruise through. This was Catfishtown. Like all towns on the river, there was a seedy shacktown that met the docks on the riverside of the levee. With each flood the slum would be washed away, only to be rebuilt when the water went down again. One such flood in 1948 had washed away Obadiah Bullins’s home where Farley Sr. was raised, where he and Lila Mae Bullins, married at sixteen, spent their early years.
Farley happily talked at length, allowing Lucy to drift into her own thoughts. After the long flight, a day of combativeness from O’Hanrahan and a series of phone calls that revealed Rabbi Hersch had made it back to Israel in one piece, Lucy had time to remember: I am actually back in the United States.
Frankly, thought Lucy, Louisiana didn’t look so terribly American anymore after Europe and Africa. Yesterday afternoon, a TPL deacon had arrived to greet them at New Orleans International and had brought the Bullins family station wagon. Farley put Lucy’s bags in the back and offered to drive her “the long way home” through New Orleans. It was late in the day and the light was lengthened by humidity, but still intense in the yellow sky. Americans black as the Africans of Khartoum lingered on wooden front porches of brightly painted shack-houses motionlessly observing children in underpants giddy with a flailing garden hose. Farley spoke of welfare fraud—highest welfare percentage of any American city—and rampant criminality as he found the wide avenues of live oak trees, branches laden with moss, the parade of stately homes covered in hanging ivies, dangling flowering vines, bougainvillaea … indeed, it struck Lucy that after the initial effort to raise New Orleans all subsequent human and floral accumulation had been permitted to droop, fall to ruin and listlessness. Lucy saw the famed Spanish ironwork of the balconies, the French mansard rooves and street names, and she factored in as well the peculiar Southern gestures overlaying the colonial accomplishment, something that whispered the sins of the Confederacy, something not of an America she recognized.
Yet, there was the Circle K Convenience Store, the Exxon station, the American flag flying from homes now that troops had been called away to the Persian Gulf. Lucy felt strangely assured by the shield-shaped Interstate 10 sign that seemed to connect her with highways back home.
Farley had driven the station wagon—windows rolled up and air-conditioning blasting—through the French Quarter, stopping constantly for uncareful tourists. Lucy had craned to look at this foreign city within American borders as Farley pointed out St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square, choked with sunburned tourists, wide white women in terry-cloth shorts, red-faced retirees broiling in the tropical sun, European backpackers uninformed about the stifling heat and humidity when they had planned their American summer odyssey.…
“There’s all kinds of black mumbo jumbo stirred up in the Catholic Church down here,” Farley regretted, shaking his head.
“The whole of Christianity is an accretion of other cultures’ mumbo jumbo, Farley.”
(O’Hanrahan could tell you of St. Tammany, beloved in St. Tammany Parish, but in reality named after the graft-ridden Tammany Club of New York. The Bienville brothers who founded New Orleans named two streets after their own names, adding a “St.” as did a town planner who gave New Orleans St. Adrien. And yet no local saint is as beloved as St. Expedite, named for the word “expedite” that was stamped on Italian shipments of religious statues. Whenever a statue was hard to identify it was decided to be St. Expedite. There are even Protestant churches to St. Expedite in New Orleans.)
Farley had driven them past Bourbon Street, giving her a momentary glimpse, confirming for Lucy why O’Hanrahan longed for the ten blocks of rowdy bars and Creole restaurants with jazz spilling competitively from the neighboring clubs. Farley told her that each Mardi Gras, he and the TPL Young Americans for Jesus group, about a hundred of them, were bussed in to Bourbon Street—the destination sign on the bus read “Heaven”—to hand out pamphlets for God, picket in front of the gay bars and topless joints, preach through a megaphone above the boisterous din.
“Does it do any good?” she had asked.
“I think the young people who participate,” he had said, as if he himself were much older, “really grow from the experience.”
Typical, thought Lucy.
The point is not really to “save” the revelers but rather to procure an “experience” for the self-satisfied youth-mob haranguing the partygoers. Yes, she reasoned, how they must swell with pride when the gay couples yell back, when the sinners taunt them, when the topless dancer tells them to go screw themselves—how steeped and ennobled becomes their martyrdom. Catholics, Lucy thought at the time, keep this vice for martyrdom behind closed doors in the family context where it belongs—Pentecostals take it to the street.
Lucy got curious about the geography of bayous and parishes, which substituted for counties in Louisiana. She opened the glove compartment, put aside a Bible—“That’s for when Daddy has to make a house call,” said Farley—and looked up Philadelphia on a tattered 1981 Texaco service-station map. Farley meanwhile was pointing out a street in outlying Philadelphia, Louisiana, named for Flora Hicks Johnson Pratt, one of the first prayer-partners to contribute to the TPL ministry. The old girl had left Reverend Bullins all she had and the town fathers decided a run-down street of nearly condemned houses should be named in her honor. Currently there was a brouhaha between the only black man on the council—despite Philadelphia, Louisiana being 60 percent black—and the town over whether to name the street near the TPL Medical Center after Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Next stop,” said Farley, truly at home playing tour guide, “we’ll go to the Newlife Covenant Center.”
An hour into this afternoon of touring, Lucy could not be bothered to generate a polite question of interest as to what the Newlife Covenant Center did. She instead amused herself thinking of O’Hanrahan currently at the TPL Bible College Library, trying to transliterate the Gospel of Matthias with the unscholarly resources collected by Reverend Bullins. She could hardly wait for his commentary. Lucy and her mentor, on the flight from Israel, got to sit with Reverend Bullins’s party in first class, two seats off to themselves. O’Hanrahan, trying to hide his terror at being on a plane, took out a cocktail napkin and made a proposed itinerary in New Orleans, oysterhouses and posh hotel restaurants, neighborhood dives and ancient jazz hangouts. He assured Lucy that she would get his deluxe tour, including a little church in East New Orleans in which absinthe was yet distilled illegally …
But none of this was to pass. The professor and Lucy had been, so far, prisoners of the Bullinses, pleasantly confined to their grand antebellum mansion on the Bullins TPL Bible College campus, surrounded by fresh all-American Bible College students, considerate, well-groomed young men, beauty-contest-pretty virginal young women, all with distinctive TPL crosses dangling from fine gold chains.
Last night, O’Hanrahan had spent hours trying to reach Rabbi Hersch’s home number and finally around 1:30 A.M., the rabbi, safely back in his house, picked up his phone. The sleeping serum had only lasted through the night and the rabbi had been awakened by the hotel cleaning staff. Once awakened, he flew back to Israel and, according to the phone call, told Mossad everything he knew and received assurances that Flight of the Griffin and Operation Rapture and all other shenanigans were soon to be investigated and hopefully halted. The rabbi promised to fly to New Orleans and make his way to Philadelphia as soon as he could get away.
“Well, here we are,” Farley announced, as a series of condominiums came into view. There was the omnipresent TPL logo in a circle with the sign Newlife Covenant Center underneath. “It’s the home my daddy set up for unwed mothers,” he added.
Lucy felt her stomach tighten.
“I mean, it’s well and good to be against abortion like a lot of TV preachers, but if you don’t have an adoption outreach program, it’s sort of hypocritical, don’t you think?”
Lucy smiled blandly. At some point, she realized, I am going to have to escape the minions of The Promised Land ministries and get to a drugstore and buy one of those home-pregnancy tests.
“A lot of girls get in trouble,” Farley went on, explaining the obvious, how girls often get pregnant and have nowhere to go.
“How does the clinic work?” asked Lucy quietly.
“Oh well, it’s all free. It’s open to born-again Christians mostly but we’ll take anyone and preach at them later,” he added, laughing. “We find a Christian home for the child and then the adoption papers are all signed. The TPL Newlife Center is the second-biggest adoption agency in the state, after the state itself.”
“How about…” She focused her thoughts. “What about the women keeping their children?”
Farley pulled the station wagon into the parking lot.
“They’re just girls,” said Farley. “Fourteen and fifteen, that kind of thing. Can’t take proper care of a kid, you know.”
Lucy found it a bit cruel to pose such a thing to a teenager. On the other hand: childless couples were made happy, the children themselves could have a better home, better opportunities. Then again, Southern Baptist morality runs these girls out of town, out of their homes in the first place, saying: give up the baby and we’ll help you pay for all the shame and trouble you caused. Then the girls get saved and born-again to convince themselves it was the right thing to do.
(Might not it be the best thing, My child?)
Yes, Lucy thought starkly. It is perhaps the unselfish thing to do.
“But they don’t get to see them,” said Farley.
“What?” Lucy asked, caught not listening.
“The girls don’t get to see the babies. Because then it’s just too difficult to give them up. So a lot of the girls want the baby to be taken right after they give birth. I mean, they get to find out what it was, boy or girl and all that. And they get to write a letter to their child that the child can open when they’re eighteen years old, saying, you know, why the mother gave him up and that kind of thing.”
Lucy closed her eyes, imagining the emotional violence of the process. The physical pain of childbirth wouldn’t be as great as the absence afterward, Lucy saw. A mother might well cherish the humiliation of being tossed out of her pious Christian home, might well venerate the sickness and labor pains of pregnancy: that was the time, my child, we were together.
The Newlife Covenant Center headquarters was an angular four-story building that looked like it might be a suburban office complex, perfect for a dentist or insurance firm. Lucy fought a feeling of dread as Farley and she entered the lobby, a sunny waiting room with a nurse behind a desk. Farley said many irate parents—once a disgraced Dad toting a shotgun—barge in to see their fallen daughters and are firmly turned away.
“I don’t know why people have to be like that,” concluded Farley.
“One day,” said Lucy, “and it’s already happening, a woman can be a single mother without a community thinking it’s any of its business.”
“You think? What would your mother say,” he asked playfully, “if you came home pregnant?”
Lucy didn’t say anything.
Posters in the lobby of the Newlife Covenant Center advertised the “TPL Fullness Festival,” posters that were ubiquitous in Philadelphia. Along one wall there were framed photographs of parents with adopted children and laminated letters mounted on polished wood thanking God for sustaining the mother in her ordeals and delivering a child to them at last. Lucy looked at one mother, middle-aged, hefty and careworn in Southern cat-eye glasses, flowing like an ikon of Mt. Athos with love and feeling for her precious adopted child.
Lucy noticed the woman behind the reception desk wore a lapel pin of two baby feet, tiny and toylike. Farley explained the pin was an idea from Jerry Falwell’s center in Lynchburg on which this center was based; the tiny feet were the size of a fetus’s feet at nine weeks. Lucy felt hot revulsion for this fetus-re-creation, the crassness of the appeal. Farley, meanwhile, was being accosted by three pregnant teenage girls who recognized him from TV:
“Farrrrrley,” sang one chunky, wide-faced country girl, laughing, “there’s still time to marry me, honey, and make this baby legit!”
Lucy observed the girls.
How many times would they regret this decision? As they got older and saw a world that didn’t stigmatize the single mother … would they not replay these months again and again in their head? Wouldn’t they want to write the agency and meet the child? Or maybe that’s where the strength of religion comes in; the constancy of faith that says: God led me to this decision and it is done. Forever and ever.
As Farley and Lucy went back to the station wagon for the rest of the grand tour, she found herself admitting that Reverend Bullins and his operation weren’t entirely, as first suspected, wholly a money-grubbing scam. Misguided and self-serving, she wouldn’t deny, but it was at some level … at least sincere. And Farley and his father seemed to be led by some sort of vision. She was pleased by the ease and laughter Farley had with the pregnant girls, so free from judgment, so eager to radiate charity and love, so no girl would feel she was the exiled sinner in the TPL family. Catholicism, admitted Lucy, has none of this community … though she wondered if it were more a function of the close-knit Deep South rather than Pentecostal Christianity.
