Now there are plenty of amusingly prophetic stories in this 2005 Harper’s article on recently disgraced mega-church leader, Ted Haggard, make no mistake. Take for example the tale from New Life Ministries’ early days when, “[Pastor Ted] staked out gay bars, inviting men to come to his church,” or when a few years later “He moved the church to a strip mall. There was a bar, a liquor store, New Life Church, a massage parlor.” But all ironicness aside, the article’s main thrust (lol) seems to be the stories that Colorado Springs’ evangelical Christians tell themselves about their adopted homeland…
Crime, of course, looms over this story. Not the actual facts of it—the burglary rate in and around Colorado Springs exceeds that in New York City and Los Angeles—but the idea of crime: a faith in the absence of it. And of politics, too: Colorado Springs’ evangelicals believe they live without it, in a carved-out space for civility and for like-minded dedication to common-sense principles. Even pollution plays a part: Christian conservatives there believe that they breathe cleaner air, live on ground untainted by the satanic fires of nineteenth-century industry—despite the smog that collects against the foothills of the Rockies and the cyanide, from a century of mining, that is leaching into the aquifers and mountain streams.
But those are facts, and Colorado Springs is a city of faith. A shining city at the foot of a hill. No one there believes it is perfect. And no one is so self-centered as to claim the perfection of Colorado Springs as his or her ambition. The shared vision is more modest, and more grandiose. It is a city of people who have fled the cities, people who have fought a spiritual war for the ground they are on, for an interior frontier on which they have built new temples to the Lord. From these temples they will retake their forsaken promised lands, remake them in the likeness of a dream. They call the dream “Christian,” but in its particulars it is “American.” Not literally but as in a story, one populated by cowboys and Indians, monsters and prayer warriors to slay them, and ladies to reward the warriors with chaste kisses. Colorado Springs is a city of moral fabulousness. It is a city of fables.
But we all tell ourselves these kinds of stories about our own lives from time to time. For every born-again sinner seeking peace and redemption in the Colorado mountains, there exists a similarly frustrated artist or intellectual looking for validation or acclaim amongst the bright lights of New York or Hollywood. Our environment is not simply a matter of “where we live” it seems, but of who we want to be. What’s particularly interesting about the stories that the conservative Christians tell themselves, however, is how huge the disparity between the fable and reality has become. Look at these statistics, quoted from a recent Vanity Fair article to get an idea of what I’m talking about:
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, of the 10 states with the highest number of total inmates per 100,000 residents in 2003, 9 were red. Of the 10 states with the most female inmates per 100,000 residents that same year, all were red. (Conversely, of the 10 states with the lowest incarceration rates of female prisoners, 9 were blue.) Not only do red states pack a larger percentage of their populations into their sardine cans, they have a near monopoly on capital punishment. Since 1976, the highest number of executions have been carried out in red states, with Texas—no surprise—ranking No. 1 on the hit parade. George Bush may be stingy with the pardons as president, but his wrist was quite limber when it came to signing those execution approvals as governor of Texas. “Now, you would think that all of this imprisonment and death might result in safer, more peaceful Red States, wouldn’t you?” asks John Grevstad in his book, Red State, Blue State: Defending the Liberal Jesus and Blue State Morality from Red State Religion and Hypocrisy (which references the above statistics). But nay. “You would be wrong. Red States tend to be the most violent places to live.… Red States dominate the rankings of violent crimes despite their emphasis on judgment and incarceration.” It’s never fun having your ass shot off, but the odds of that occurring seem higher in the red states, which account for all of the top 15 states in rates of death by firearms (2003). Methamphetamine addiction is a national scourge, but it’s been chewing the heart out of the red Middle West, where Missouri has the tragic distinction of hosting the highest number of lab incidents (meth labs or production facilities raided by authorities), with Indiana, Tennessee, Iowa, and Kentucky also among the top six states afflicted with an outbreak of bootleg chemistry. The 10 states with the lowest meth-lab incidents? Eight of them are blue. Then there’s the violence or despair directed selfward. Of the 15 states with the highest adjusted rates of suicide (2003), 14 are red.
Anyway, I could say more but the linked articles already do a much more exhaustive job of that than I feel like attempting at the moment. The Harper’s one is particularly brilliant at painting a picture of life inside Pastor Ted’s “mega-church,” which, in all honesty, sounds like a Flaming Lips concert gone horribly, horribly wrong. =)
