Lawrence Wright - Saints and Sinners: Walker Railey, Jimmy Swaggart, Madalyn Murray OHair, Anton LaVey, Will Campbell, Matthew Fox

This book is terrific, a knockout, a grand slam. It has everything: exhaustive research, elegant prose and the most colorful imaginable cast of real-life characters.

Lexington Herald-Leader

Inscrutably wonderful. Saints and Sinners is a quietly gracious look at a man searching the greater mysteries providing an intimate counterpoint to the extremes he encounters in the American landscape.

San Antonio Express-News

Saints and Sinners is an entertaining and intellectually invigorating success. Wright performs an admirable job exploring the epistemology of both atheism and faith.

Texas Observer

Wright provides six vivid, memorable portraits. His subjects religious ideas are simply stimulating.

Library Journal

Searching for a personal faith in this gallery of the bizarre Wright gives us a riveting account.

St. Louis Post Dispatch

A nuanced, finely written and immensely insightful book which may tell us more about American religion and culture than any single volume Ive picked up in a long time. In a wordwonderful.

Harvey Cox, Harvard University Divinity School

BOOKS BY Lawrence Wright

Remembering Satan

Saints and Sinners

In the New World

City Children, Country Summer

Lawrence Wright
SAINTS AND SINNERS

Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of eight previous books of nonfiction, including In the New World, Remembering Satan, The Looming Tower, Going Clear, and Thirteen Days in September, and one novel, Gods Favorite. His books have received many prizes and honors, including a Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower. He is also a playwright and screenwriter. He and his wife are longtime residents of Austin, Texas.

www.lawrencewright.com

Lawrence Wright is available for select speaking engagements. To inquire about a possible speaking appearance, please contact Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau at .

VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION

Copyright 1993 by Lawrence Wright

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,

New York, in 1993.

Portions of this work were originally published in Texas Monthly and Rolling Stone.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Warner Bros. Publications Inc.: Excerpt from Mississippi Magic by Will Campbell. Copyright 1969 by EMI U Catalog Inc. All rights reserved. Made in USA. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications Inc., Miami, FL 33014.

PolyGram Music Publishing Group: Excerpt from Storms Never Last by Jessi Colter. Copyright 1975 by Songs PolyGram International, Inc. Excerpt from Rednecks, White Socks and Blue Ribbon Beer by Chuck Neese, Bob McDill and Wayland Holyfield. Copyright 1973 by PolyGram International Publishing, Inc. and Songs of PolyGram International, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: Wright, Lawrence. Saints and sinners : Walker Railey, Jimmy Swaggert, Madalyn Murray OHair, Anton LaVey, Will Campbell, and Matthew Fox / by Lawrence
Wright.
p. cm.
Religious biographvUnited States. 2. United StatesReligion
1960 I. Title.
BL72.W75 1993
291.092273dc20

[B] 92-54382
eISBN: 978-0-307-79071-2

v3.1_r1

For Roberta

My Partner in Life and Spirit

Its a pleasure to acknowledge the many debts I have incurred while writing this book. Gregory Curtis, the editor of Texas Monthly, and Jann S. Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone, have been steady supporters over the years, and I thank them for giving me the opportunity to write about the subjects included in this work. I also wish to pay particular homage to Robert Vare and Eric Etheridge, two fine editors whose taste and sensitivity inform much of this book.

Ive been fortunate to have the assistance of friends and colleagues who have examined these six stories with a caring and critical eye. Thanks to Jan Jarboe, William Martin, Jan McInroy, Betty Sue Flowers, and Lonnie Kliever, each of whom graciously contributed their own invaluable intelligence. In a special category, as usual, is my friend Stephen Harrigan, whose critical judgment is reflected on nearly every page.

I also wish to thank the often unrecognized fact checkers who devote themselves to the inglorious task of making a writers words accurate. I salute Pat Booker, Valerie Wright, David Moorman, Amy Kaplan, and Tamar Lehrich.

While I was writing this book, I was a beneficiary of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In this season of controversy surrounding federal support of the arts I want to say that this book, as well as my career as a writer, has been helped immensely by the financial assistance the grant provided. I hope other artists will continue to receive the support and recognition I enjoyed.

Finally, I thank my agent, Wendy Weil, and the editor of this book, Ann Close, for their encouragement, their insight, and their friendship.

Journalists have never known exactly what to do with religion. On the ladder of professional esteem, religious writing ranks between recipes and obituaries. We who write about what people do have a more difficult time with what they think or believe.

And yet spiritual matters are far more influential in peoples lives than, for instance, politics, the mainstay of the journalists craft. This is true even in this supposedly secular age in which we live. Yes, one can look at the evidence of the declining membership of traditional churches, at the loss of any sense of the sacred in public life, and at the corruption of television evangelists who accept MasterCard and Visa and holler the name of Jesus as their 800 numbers roll across the screen. It is easy to see the decay of the religious ideal in America.

That does not mean that religion is dead. We areas usual in this countryin the middle of religious tumult. The growth of modern fundamentalism is one of the most significant social movements of American history, comparable to the Great Awakenings of our past. The continuing appearance of cults of various kinds testifies to the fact that the American hothouse still seems to be a suitable climate for the rise of freelance prophets and spiritual experimenters. Compared with the moribund, but state-supported, denominations of Europe, the religious life of the United States is continually refreshed by the schisms and improvisations of one new sect after another. Some are overnight fads; others will take hold and become the established congregations of the future. It is confounding to realize that the success of one belief over another has little to do with the apparent craziness of the doctrine.

The Gallup polls, which have been measuring religious trends and church attendance for more than half a century, show a remarkable stability over time. In 1991, 42 percent of Americans regularly attended church, which is almost exactly the same figure as the number of churchgoers in the thirties (41 percent in 1939). More than half of all Americans said they believed in the existence of the Devil (up significantly from 39 percent in 1978). On Easter, 1991, 85 percent of Roman Catholics and 72 percent of Protestants attended services. Nine out of ten Americans prayed every week and said that they have never doubted the existence of God; eight out of ten said they believed in miracles and expected to answer for their sins on Judgment Day.