“The Rapture,” by Sean Earley, at the Dallas Museum of Art.
“Dallas, in its not always very comfortable role as broker of money and fashion between Texas and the world beyond, has always been a changeling, gregarious and outward-bound in one chapter of its life, suspicious and rigid, inward and fearful in the next, tugged on one side by the xenophobic impulses of the state and on the other by the lure of the great beyond.”
-From “The Accommodation,” by Jim Schutze.
Going to church in a mall is a particularly American version of utopia. This is the dream that Prestonwood Baptist Church offers. Under the spacious, suburban skies of Plano, Texas, the Prestonwood campus delivers the architecture, amenities, and abundance of parking lots that you might expect from a trip to Dillard’s and the food court. The complex includes a Sports and Fitness Center, a handsome stadium, and a private school, whose Prestonwood Lions have been five-time state football champs.
The main building, with the sloping green metal roof and cream walls of a modern middle school, is flanked by a cross-topped tower and a 30-foot-high Christmas tree. Inside, its soaring atrium frames more than just a 7,000-seat megachurch with tiered seating. There is also a coffee shop, and a huge buffet restaurant and dining hall, and meeting rooms, and a book store, and a Kidz area, and many very tidy restrooms. There is cool air conditioning and clean carpets. There are friendly greeters and family activities. Here, you can find refuge from Satan’s scorching rays. Here, you can grab a chicken sandwich and a cappuccino and park your kids somewhere and yap and shop and relax. Yes, Jesus is here–right inside those double doors. But this is more than a church. This is a lifestyle. If you find yourself beguiled by the lifestyle, there is no telling where you might end up.
In this sense, Prestonwood is part of a much larger project. It is one pillar of a comprehensive vision of how America should live. There are many such visions–but right now, this one is ascendant. It has momentum. It is seizing territory, charging forward, feasting on the plastic fruit of plastic seeds planted by generations past. It is the idea of infinite American entitlement, blessed by god and unrestrained by man or nature. Everything for us, and hell for our enemies. In practice, this vision amounts to Christ, Cars, and Conservatism.
Nowhere will you find this rising strain of the American ideal practiced more purely than in Dallas, Texas. Here the ideal is given room to run. It is not that these are the only sort of people in Dallas, or that they represent everything that Dallas has to offer. What I mean is that if you want to find out what it looks like when the spiritual, physical, and political spheres of a place are controlled by the same kind of maximalists who are currently expanding their control over the same spheres of influence nationally, Dallas is the place to look. It is the cradle that has lovingly nurtured the vision that is coming for all of us.
Prestonwood Baptist’s main campus is in Plano, an upscale suburb north of Dallas proper. The church’s property abuts a country club development, and everyone at church on Sunday looks as if they just stepped in from the golf course. Few ties. Local police strolled the hallways providing unnecessary security, a reflection of the American belief that any space can be improved by armed men. Before the 9:30 service, I browsed the airportesque book store, seeking guidance. I considered buying “How to Talk About Jesus Without Looking Like an Idiot” or “Answering Tough Questions About the End Times,” but settled on a small tract titled “Basics of the Christian Faith Made Easy.”
“What makes Christians so sure that there is a God?” it said. “In a nutshell, Christians point to (1) the beauty and complexity of the world around us, and (2) their collection of Scriptures, called the Bible.”
Well, shit. I already knew that. Underlying truths would be more elusive. But not due to any stonewalling on the part of the congregants. Prestonwood—one of the 20 biggest churches in the country—claims more than 50,000 members, and as far as I could tell, all of them were real nice folks. They greet you when you walk in the doors. They come up and introduce themselves when you sit unobtrusively in the pews. One retired gentleman told me the story of his career with Texas Instruments. A couple sitting behind me invited me to lunch, to chat about the Christian self-help book for women that the wife was working on. What, I asked each of them, was the secret sauce that made Prestonwood so popular? “Fellowship,” they all answered.
The people were there for fellowship. They were there for connection. They were there not just for the church service, but for the men’s groups mission trips and sports leagues and school and tween hangout room and buffet and gym and basketball league. The solicitous nature that it was all delivered with, the aggressively open arms, only served to reinforce the idea that everyone was in the right place. The people here were religious, but they did not just come here for religion. They come for judgment-free acceptance. The thing that we all want. They came for love.
But love is not all that they get at Prestonwood. They get a stage show with a 120-person choir, and a full band, with a brass section on one side and a string section on the other and a drummer set up in back. They get a lead singer with groomed stubble who looks like he should be in Coldplay as he disconcertingly belts out paeans to Jesus’s nail-scarred hands. They get a baptism ceremony performed in a waist-deep pool that is erected high above the stage, with a clear plexiglass barrier facing the audience so that they can witness a half-dozen new church members being dunked by a man wearing a headset mic. The baptism pool looks exactly like the pool overlooking the North end zone of the Jacksonville Jaguars’ stadium, where louche young men sip tall boys and watch the hometown team lose.
Then, they get the message.
Jack Graham.
The message was delivered by Jack Graham, Prestonwood’s lead pastor, who has the silver hair and smooth, unaccented gregariousness of Bob Barker. The first message for the thousands there on Sunday morning was not a prayer, nor a blessing, but rather a sales pitch. Graham was joined on stage by a couple of special guests– our friends from Pray.com, the folks who produce Graham’s “Bible in a Year” podcast. Which has just reached 100 million downloads! Pray.com’s CEO, Matthew Potter, presented Graham with an award for this accomplishment.
“They call you the Joe Rogan of the Bible,” Potter said.
As you can imagine, such an impressive podcast does not come cheap. They’re translating it into ten new languages. They’re doing a video version. They’re doing an animated version. This is all part of spreading the gospel, and thus, supporting it is blessed. Prestonwood has a media production company called PowerPoint (where Graham’s son works) that produces all of its radio, TV, online, and podcast content. “PowerPoint’s budget is separate from the church,” Graham told everyone. It must be supported in addition to the normal offerings. Special envelopes are passed down all the pews for this purpose.
“I’m going to ask you, as your pastor, if you would like to give a gift for this, whoever you are, that you give the most generous gift you can,” Graham said. “Text ‘Bible’ to 59789, or visit Jack Graham dot org slash Bible, or the QR code will take you there. Or you can do it the old-fashioned way, you can just send in a check.”
Amen.
Then, after another song, the other message. Graham began to preach about a passage in the Gospel of John, in which the Lord tells his disciples: “These things I command you so that you will love one another. If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.” This message is one of persecution. It is one of defiance. It is that Christians are under attack from our wicked world, and must not be shy in their determination to fight back. It is a pep talk for a war that Jack Graham, a proud member of Donald Trump’s official Advisory Board to the Religious Liberty Commission, believes that his followers must grit their teeth for. “When you choose to follow Christ,” he explained, “you put your life on the line.”
Prestonwood Baptist Church, Plano, Texas.
For any who doubt the urgency of this, Graham had an example: Charlie Kirk, who Graham says was clearly assassinated for his Biblical beliefs—“things such as the sanctity of life, and the design of creation for men and women, and marriage and the family.” Now, Kirk has been martyred by a demonic foe, his martyred blood becoming the seed of the church, just as the polemicist Tertullian said in the third century.
Yet faith cannot be crushed so easily. The martyr’s death is bringing more people to church–customers of Jesus, as it were. “Bible sales are increasing, 20-25% since the death of Charlie Kirk,” said Graham. “We see it here in our own Bible bookstore.”
For a first-time attendee, the most disconcerting aspect of Prestonwood was its juxtaposition of Jesus, money, and sex, in a way that seemed capable of frustrating the enjoyment of any of the three. Graham had more to say about sex.
“The world calls good evil and evil good. So when we call something evil, the world hates that. Homosexuality. It’s evil. Killing babies in the womb. Evill. Mutilating little children in the name of biology or science or gender identity? Evil. Fornication and sexual sin of all kinds? Evil.”
I’ll be honest: it just seemed weird to hit this crowd of nice friendly folks with a hard sales pitch followed by a deranged kink list this early on a Sunday morning. The sexual repression inherent in Southern Baptism fairly pulses and throbs, threatening to overcome its victims at any moment. What else could even motivate such a speech to a bunch of retirees and young families on a sunny day? The church’s songs, with their erotic pleas for a powerful savior to take us in his arms to save us from the lures of the serpent, reeked of displaced sexual energy, desperately seeking an outlet before it exploded into the hottest of sins. Christianity seems determined to taunt its users with their fantasies and make the entire experience so unpleasant that it will crumble into sexlessness. I felt a new sympathy for the New Orleans priest who was arrested for hiring two dominatrixes to film BDSM porn on his church’s altar. Given the circumstances, how could you not?
“Penitent Magdalene” by Orazio Gentileschi, at the Dallas Museum of Art.
“The world says ‘discover yourself.’ But Jesus said, ‘deny yourself!’” Graham thundered. Yet is Prestonwood Baptist denying itself? Has it denied itself its manicured campus, its gleaming buildings, its fitness center, its media company, its budgets, its empire? Let us not forget Ecclesiastes: “He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity.” Hast thou followed this doctrine, pastor? You haven’t fucked around and supported any political leaders who might fit that description, have you, Pastor Jack? Look within, friend.
“Most Christian persecution today in the world is happening in Muslim countries. Same Muslims who say, we’re coming for the Saturday people first–the Jews–and then we’re coming for the Sunday people–the Christians. And they’re coming. The leftist Marxist communists are moving. The Islamic Marxist communists are moving across major cities in the United States and around the world,” Graham said. “So what are we going to do? We’re going to keep doing what we do. We’re going to keep overcoming evil with good… We’ll speak out against sexual sins of all kinds, and the LGBTQ movement for the sake of righteousness.”
The messages were mutually reinforcing. The world hates you because you are good and the world is evil; the more the world tells you are, for example, rude for incessantly yelling about how gay people are evil, the more you know you are doing god’s will; and you better support the church, because it is the place that will shelter you in this world that is telling you that you are being a jerk.
I couldn’t help but wonder if this entire package was necessary. The thousands of congregants who wake up their kids and put them in button-up shirts and dutifully bring them to church in the sincere belief that they are raising them right, the retirees who come to stay active and make friends, the many lost people beaten down by an isolating modern world who reach out their hands for that community of acceptance and love… couldn’t we do that without the perverse sexual loathing and various flavors of bigotry? Could we not have the love without the accompanying hate? The community, without the accompanying need to make our community an army ready to destroy all others?
I guess not. The results speak for themselves. Jack Graham has a direct line to the White House. His own priorities later come out of the President’s mouth. Prestonwood Baptist is growing. And with it, Dallas itself. Weary after a long day at church, I drove to Plano’s one nature preserve. But I had to turn around and leave. The parking lot was full.