The Lack of a 'Vision Thing'

It would be fair to expect that my recent weekend visit to my parents' pink house on a quiet street in San Francisco was going to be rather tranquil. It wasn't. During my stay, I watched as my 80-year-old mother and father sat forlorn while their wooden house shook to the sounds of the youthful Christian soldiers singing and praying in the storefront church next door.

It is a scenario that plays out for my parents several times a week, and their efforts – pounding on the walls, screaming "Quiet!" at the churchgoers, pleading gently, and then not so gently, with the mustachioed pastor – always end in despondency.

The walls dividing my parents and the Baptist battalion next door shake loudly to a born-again beat from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. every Saturday and Sunday – and every Tuesday and Thursday night too. Despite the fact that this church is wrecking the serenity of my parents' remaining golden years, I can relate to the motivation this faithful flock has to meet so often and pray at such heavenly volumes.

A former born-again believer myself, I have seen the capabilities of a religious militancy that believes it can move mountains. I've also witnessed how this same militancy in the thousands of evangelical churches across the United States has swayed the results of presidential elections, silently aligning the cold strategy and tactics of electoral politics with a vision that extends beyond election day and into the next life.

When I looked in on the Sunday sermon next door I felt no surprise that the calls on the faithful to embrace Jesus and the apocalypse were paired with a push for a Bush second coming and the pastor's scintillating defense of the White House-sponsored Federal Marriage Amendment, which the mustachioed shepherd called "muy urgente" – very urgent. The church service brought me back to my experiences of mixing of politics and faith during the Reagan era. At that time, I was unaware of how the exceptionalism embodied by Reagan's vision of the United States as a "shining city on a hill" blended seamlessly with the ancient ideas I was taught about Christianity and the salvation of the earth. Reagan just made sense to me, and I left it at that.

My experiences with the evangelical church started in the early '80s. I was supremely grateful to the leadership of the Open Door Alliance church for helping me escape the unhealthy – even deadly – lifestyle of a 20-year-old living in recession-ridden barrios in Reagan's "shining city." The rocket-fuel combustion of gratitude for being taken in and the apocalyptic faith I grew to adopt – many of us were convinced that the end was nigh – fired me up during bi-weekly bible study sessions, which made clear that I stood on the side of the good, true Christians, and not among the fallen faithful.

Shortly after my conversion experience (I grew up Catholic), I spent all my time participating in discussions, sermons, and mentoring by deacons and pastors. I was introduced to "practical" examples of how to interpret reality – including political reality. At that time, abortion was the filter through which we understood our place in the "worldly" process of elections.

Following training ostensibly designed to bring me closer to the rapture, I found myself transported to new – and radically political – heights in advanced study groups. We spent our time praying for the presidential candidate who was "right" on abortion, the presidential candidate who we heard about in services and on Christian radio, the presidential candidate we saw praying with Christian pastors on the covers of mainstream magazines.

Convinced that I needed to take up spiritual arms in a world slouching towards Satan, I attended mass events where members of various regional churches "volunteered" to register new voters for the 1984 presidential race. Before long, many of us were writing checks to televangelists like our spiritual hero and Reagan supporter, Jimmy Swaggart, one of the pioneers of televangelism whose inspired, working-class message delivered thousands of souls – and more than $500,000 in daily commitments from televised sermons.