Gina Welch - In the Land of Believers: An Outsider’s Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church

IN THE LAND OF BELIEVERS

An Outsiders Extraordinary
Journey into the Heart of the
Evangelical Church

Gina Welch

METROPOLITAN BOOKS
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
NEW YORK

Metropolitan Books
Henry Holt and Company, LLC
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Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Copyright 2009 by Gina Welch
All rights reserved.
Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

This book is the true story of my involvement with Jerry Falwells church.
Except for the names of certain public figures, I have changed the names of the church members
I met to protect their privacy.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Welch, Gina.

In the land of believers : an outsiders extraordinary journey into the heart of the evangelical church / Gina Welch.1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-8050-8337-8

1. EvangelicalismUnited States. I. Title.

BR1642.U5W435 2009

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First Edition 2010
Designed by Meryl Sussman Levavi
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For my mother

Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a
bushel, but on a candlestick;
and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.

M ATTHEW 5:15

IN THE LAND OF BELIEVERS

B EYOND THE ENTRANCE COLUMNS OF J ERRY F ALWELLS T HOMAS Road Baptist Church, beyond the lobbys lake of dark marble, down past the cavernous sanctuary and The Lion and Lamb Caf, deep into the linoleum warren of offices, closets, and classrooms, I am sitting under buzzing fluorescent lights, facing a blank dry-erase board, waiting for my evangelism class to begin. This class is one of dozens of groups being kicked off across church that night, with titles ranging from Money Management and Wise Guys Bible Study to Classic Car Restoration and The Biggest Loser. I wonder where the people I know from church are, having guessed some of them might want to try the evangelism class. My two classmatesa stout, heavy-lidded man challenging the seam strength of his button-down and suspenders, and a toothless fellow wearing a T-shirt on which an eagle is swooping down over the American flagare discussing good places to plant a new church.

Would you go where people are out drinking beer in the street, to the impoverished neighborhoods that need Christ, the man in suspenders asks, or would you go where the rich people are?

The toothless man rubs his whiskered chin. I surely dont know. What about Canada?

Just as I consider picking up my things and popping into Cake Decorating down the hall, a bald, guided missile of a man strides into the room and begins squeaking a pen across the dry-erase board. I know who this man is, although I hadnt realized he would be teaching the class. He is the lead pastor in EPIC, the church Singles Ministry, and he frequently gives prayers during Sundays main church service. He is a military something-or-other, and I remember that Jerry Falwell had once joked that he had left his toupee in Iraq. He is bronzed, mid-forties, with tiny, glinting eyes and a white, bristled goatee. Embroidered in gold thread on his fleece jacket are the letters TRBC. 100% Effective Evangelism, he writes, has moved to Dr. Falwells conference room. He turns to us.

Im Ray Fletcher, he says in a banjo twang. Were going to go on a long walk.

I F YOU KNEW ME , you would think I had no business being in Jerry Falwells conference room. Falwell and I werent even in the same ideological atmosphere. Beyond our citizenship, our native tongue, and the basic biological processes of being human, we shared almost nothing. I considered him a homophobe, a fearmonger, a manipulator, and a misogynistan alien creature from the most extreme backwater of evangelical culture.

I could probably guess what Falwell would have thought of me. I am a secular Jew raised by a single mother in Berkeley, where we took a day off school in October for Indigenous Peoples, not for Christopher Columbus. I cuss, I drink, and I am not a virgin. I have never believed in God. One day when I was in first grade, my mother received a call from my school asking her to pick me up. Out on the playground, classmates had begun shoving me when I told them there was no Santa and no God. The principal wanted me off the premises for the rest of the day.

Several years later, I was at an overnight summer camp, annoyed that counselors made me endure suppertime prayers and services on Sunday. The rituals were nondenominational, but at ten years old I had anointed myself as a hardened little atheist and I dug my claws against being drafted into religious worship, of any kind. I wrote to my father, a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and appealed for sympathy.

Hello Happy Camper! my father wrote in his reply. Dont worry about saying grace. It probably wont ruin your appetite. Just put your hands together and mumble under your breath, THERE IS NO GOD. The world is complicated enough to figure out without always explaining things by saying some big white dude up in the clouds is responsible. Religion is really something that belongs in the museums.

What little I had learned about the evangelical Christian macrocosm always seemed that way to melike some inscrutable artifact from a civilization long vanished. For the better part of my life I felt comfortable not understanding its mysteries. Our orbits were simply so different, so remote from one another, that I could safely forget Evangelicals existed.

When I relocated from California to Virginia for graduate school in 2002, I thought of my move as a kind of elaborate performance art project. Citified, punk-rock, atheist me, with a Billy Idol haircut and a soft spot for Dennis Kucinich, living in the Christian South. And I treated the South like a joke for a while, ironically eating barbecue in smoke-hazed roadside joints, ironically staggering through the funhouse at the state fair, ironically wearing gingham checks. I thought it was all very funny. Id even cultivated a pretty canny impersonation of wholesome southerners, or so I thought. One night, a classmate raised in Texas and South Carolina said to me, hard fibers of irritation in her voice, Whenever you use that accent, you make southerners sound really stupid.

So she didnt think it was funny? In all my flush-cheeked pride about being from open-minded, openhearted, open-zippered Northern California, Id never considered that I was hermetically prejudiced against the very people Id chosen to live among.