{"id":61677,"date":"2025-11-23T13:40:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-23T13:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/61677\/"},"modified":"2025-11-23T13:40:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-23T13:40:08","slug":"america-is-becoming-dallas-by-hamilton-nolan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/61677\/","title":{"rendered":"America Is Becoming Dallas – by Hamilton Nolan"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u201cThe Rapture,\u201d by Sean Earley, at the Dallas Museum of Art.<\/p>\n

\u201cDallas, 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.\u201d
-From \u201cThe Accommodation,\u201d by Jim Schutze.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2013right 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2013but 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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Prestonwood Baptist\u2019s main campus is in Plano, an upscale suburb north of Dallas proper. The church\u2019s 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 \u201cHow to Talk About Jesus Without Looking Like an Idiot\u201d or \u201cAnswering Tough Questions About the End Times,\u201d but settled on a small tract titled \u201cBasics of the Christian Faith Made Easy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat makes Christians so sure that there is a God?\u201d it said. \u201cIn a nutshell, Christians point to (1) the beauty and complexity of the world around us, and (2) their collection of Scriptures, called the Bible.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2014one of the 20 biggest<\/a> churches in the country\u2014claims 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? \u201cFellowship,\u201d they all answered.<\/p>\n

The people were there for fellowship. They were there for connection. They were there not just for the church service, but for the men\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019 stadium, where louche young men sip tall boys and watch the hometown team lose.<\/p>\n

Then, they get the message.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Jack Graham.<\/p>\n

The message was delivered by Jack Graham, Prestonwood\u2019s 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\u2013 our friends from Pray.com<\/a>, the folks who produce Graham\u2019s \u201cBible in a Year\u201d podcast. Which has just reached 100 million downloads! Pray.com\u2019s CEO, Matthew Potter, presented Graham with an award for this accomplishment.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey call you the Joe Rogan of the Bible,\u201d Potter said.<\/p>\n

As you can imagine, such an impressive podcast does not come cheap. They\u2019re translating it into ten new languages. They\u2019re doing a video version. They\u2019re 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\u2019s son works) that produces all of its radio, TV, online, and podcast content. \u201cPowerPoint\u2019s budget is separate from the church,\u201d Graham told everyone. It must be supported in addition to the normal offerings. Special envelopes are passed down all the pews for this purpose.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m 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,\u201d Graham said. \u201cText \u2018Bible\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amen.<\/p>\n

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: \u201cThese 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.\u201d 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<\/a> of Donald Trump\u2019s official Advisory Board to the Religious Liberty Commission, believes that his followers must grit their teeth for. \u201cWhen you choose to follow Christ,\u201d he explained, \u201cyou put your life on the line.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Prestonwood Baptist Church, Plano, Texas. <\/p>\n

For any who doubt the urgency of this, Graham had an example: Charlie Kirk, who Graham says was clearly assassinated for his Biblical beliefs\u2014\u201cthings such as the sanctity of life, and the design of creation for men and women, and marriage and the family.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Yet faith cannot be crushed so easily. The martyr\u2019s death is bringing more people to church\u2013customers of Jesus, as it were. \u201cBible sales are increasing, 20-25% since the death of Charlie Kirk,\u201d said Graham. \u201cWe see it here in our own Bible bookstore.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe world calls good evil and evil good. So when we call something evil, the world hates that. Homosexuality. It\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll 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\u2019s 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<\/a> who was arrested for hiring two dominatrixes to film BDSM porn on his church\u2019s altar. Given the circumstances, how could you not?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u201cPenitent Magdalene\u201d by Orazio Gentileschi, at the Dallas Museum of Art.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe world says \u2018discover yourself.\u2019 But Jesus said, \u2018deny yourself!\u2019\u201d 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: \u201cHe who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity.\u201d Hast thou followed this doctrine, pastor? You haven\u2019t fucked around and supported any political leaders who might fit that description, have you, Pastor Jack? Look within, friend.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost Christian persecution today in the world is happening in Muslim countries. Same Muslims who say, we\u2019re coming for the Saturday people first\u2013the Jews\u2013and then we\u2019re coming for the Sunday people\u2013the Christians. And they\u2019re coming. The leftist Marxist communists are moving. The Islamic Marxist communists are moving across major cities in the United States and around the world,\u201d Graham said. \u201cSo what are we going to do? We\u2019re going to keep doing what we do. We\u2019re going to keep overcoming evil with good\u2026 We\u2019ll speak out against sexual sins of all kinds, and the LGBTQ movement for the sake of righteousness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Donate to our reporting fund<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t 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\u2026 couldn\u2019t 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?<\/p>\n

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\u2019s mouth. Prestonwood Baptist is growing. And with it, Dallas itself. Weary after a long day at church, I drove to Plano\u2019s one nature preserve. But I had to turn around and leave. The parking lot was full.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Rapture,\u201d by Sean Earley, at the Dallas Museum of Art. \u201cDallas, in its not always very comfortable…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61678,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[160,162,161],"class_list":{"0":"post-61677","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-plano","8":"tag-plano","9":"tag-plano-headlines","10":"tag-plano-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61677\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}