Losing My Religion (7 page)

At the same time, Warren seems genuinely bewildered by his success. He frequently mentions how many millions of books he’s sold as if he still can’t believe it. He talks the same way about getting a fan letter from President George W. Bush or how NASCAR drivers are using the
Purpose Driven Life
for Bible study.

With so much at stake, and with a profile so high, Warren is careful to keep clear of controversy. He has declined numerous opportunities to have a regular television program—not wanting to be associated with televangelists—and has been generally media-shy, preferring to work through pastors and churches. He drives a three-year-old Ford truck and announced to his congregation that he had paid back 23 years of salary to Saddleback Church with the royalties from his book. He now “reverse tithes,” giving away 90 percent of his book’s royalties to ministry.

“Now that our church knows I’ve done this, I’m eager for the nonbelieving public to know it too, because it counteracts the popular perception by skeptics that all ministers are all in it just for the money, especially large-church pastors,” Warren told me.

To eliminate gossip and temptation, Warren has vowed never to be in a room alone with a woman except his wife, Kay. Even if an elevator door opens and there’s only one woman inside, Warren said that he lets that one go and waits for another—or takes the stairs.

Following Warren around for a few days is exhausting. Part of his genius is that he has attention deficit syndrome, which allows him to generate idea after idea (though he not surprisingly has disdain for meetings). It’s not hard to imagine him back in his high school days, when as a skinny, long-haired guitar player with John Lennon glasses he started a Christian club on campus, sponsored rock concerts after school, gave out New Testaments, produced a Christian musical and published an underground Christian newspaper. Today, Warren is in an even bigger rush to win converts.

“[God] wants His lost children found,” Warren told me. “I decided a long time ago I’m not going to waste my life. Life is too short and eternity is too long.”

After my story ran, Warren gave me his private e-mail and cell phone number in case I ever needed someone to talk to. It was a gesture I suspect he made to almost everyone he came in contact with for more than a few minutes.

It is refreshing to see a man of God, at the height of his powers, remain grounded. Later on the religion beat, I would watch a Catholic cardinal step out of a limousine and extend his hand to a parishioner who asked “His Eminence” if she could kiss his bishop’s ring. I would investigate high-profile pastors and find they owned several mansions, late-model luxury cars, custom-made suits, jets and yachts. And I’ve watched as Christian leaders, from congregations large and small, tumbled into sexual affairs because they didn’t see the danger in being alone in a room with a woman. Rick Warren was different from most.

You didn’t have to have a powerful position to be holy. Jen Hubbard believed in her faith enough to risk her job and take on one of the best-known names in the evangelical community. At the time I met her, Jen was a gung-ho 27-year-old evangelical fresh out of college. She landed what she thought was a dream job, working for Hank Hanegraaff, the best-selling Christian author and theological watchdog known for his syndicated radio show,
The Bible Answer Man
. Jen worked for Hanegraaff’s umbrella nonprofit organization, the Christian Research Institute, then based in Orange County, California.

Jen oversaw communications to and from potential donors, working to get people to give money to the ministry and feel like their money was making a difference. In the office, she sat near the women who paid the ministry’s bills and processed donations. Jen soon grew alarmed that donor money seemed to be paying for the personal expenses of Hanegraaff and his family. His ministry paid for, among other things, a luxury sports car, a large salary for his wife who rarely worked in the office, and country club dues. Jen and other employees took their concerns to their managers, who told them to keep quiet because “dealing with the issue was not within our sphere of influence….”

After her co-workers went home, Jen started to copy any questionable invoice that she saw, including ones for a board-approved 2003 Lexus sports car and smaller items, such as repairs to Hanegraaff’s children’s computers, meals at the country club and birthday flowers for his mother.

“Donor money shouldn’t have been used for these things,” Jen told me. “I worked with donors, and they expect their money to be handled wisely, not spent lavishly.”

When management learned she had been making copies of the invoices, she was fired. Her actions, though, spurred an audit by the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability that resulted in what it called a “significant reimbursement” to the ministry.

“I felt angry and broken that the Christian community did not apologize to me,” Jen told me. “I felt like I did this thing that felt in line with my faith, and here I was shunned by the most ‘powerful’ people within that faith group.”

She acted on her responsibility to God to safeguard the donors’ money, and her actions left her unemployed and her boss still in ministry. How could that be? I often thought of Jen when I saw Christians lacking the courage needed to make a sacrifice required by their faith (a category in which I often found myself). If this young woman could take on a national evangelical leader, what was stopping the rest of us from practicing a more radical form of Christianity?

True believers were by no means limited to Christianity. On the religion beat, I had gotten to know a rabbi named David Eliezrie, who founded a Chabad-Lubavitch synagogue in Yorba Linda, California. The Chabad-Lubavitch movement is known for its rabbis who wear long beards, black suits and fedoras. The Lubavitchers, a small but rapidly growing part of Judaism, interested me because they are so different from other Jews. Their passion in their beliefs and quest for innovation allow them to break many of the cultural traditions surrounding their faith and reach out to disenfranchised Jews. The Lubavitchers don’t isolate themselves from the world as do other Orthodox Jews, but embrace it. For example, they were one of the first religious groups to harness the power of the Internet to connect their members around the world, to attract new recruits and to serve as a research tool for any Jew.

The Lubavitchers have become an island of growth, innovation and success at a time of aging synagogue memberships and stagnant population elsewhere among American Jews. The beliefs of the Lubavitchers seemed far-fetched to me—for instance, that God wants men and women segregated inside the synagogue, or that menstruating women cannot have sexual relations with their husbands and must take a purifying bath after their period before resuming sex. But I was intrigued by the confidence they have in carrying out their faith, especially in bringing nonreligious Jews back to the fold.

“When a Jew alienates himself from his people, God forbid, it is only because he is thirsty,” said their late leader, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson. “His soul thirsts for meaning in life, but the waters of Torah have eluded him. So he wanders about in foreign domains, seeking to quench his thirst.

“Only a shepherd who hastens not to judge the runaway kid, who is sensitive to the causes of its desertion, can mercifully lift it into his arms and bring it back home.”

I wrote two lengthy features about the Lubavitchers, describing how the followers, inspired largely by the teachings of Schneerson—who died in 1994 and wasn’t replaced—have taken the Jewish world by storm (and generated plenty of controversy by doing so). In keeping with Schneerson’s ideas, Jews exploring their faith in Chabad centers don’t have to accept all—or even any—of the group’s Orthodox practices. They need not join a synagogue or pay dues. The idea is to patiently lead Jews back to Orthodoxy one small step at a time—by getting them to attend a Sabbath service, light candles Friday night, listen to a lecture from a Jewish scholar.

The success of the Lubavitchers can be measured two ways. First, there are the hard numbers. The number of Chabad rabbis and their families who now serve lifetime assignments has doubled in the past decade to more than 4,000 in 61 countries, according to Chabad statistics. In an era where some denominations, including Roman Catholicism, have left pulpits empty because of clergy shortages, the offspring of Chabad rabbis are following in their parents’ footsteps in such numbers that a surplus of about 200 new rabbis and their wives is now staged in Brooklyn, awaiting assignments around the world. Schneerson said there was no higher calling.

“A Jew may say to you, ‘Why can’t you leave me alone?’” Schneerson told his followers. “‘Why can’t you just go and do your thing and let me do mine? What does it bother you if I drill this little hole in my little boat?’

“You must answer him, ‘There is only one boat, and we are all in it together.’”

Lubavitch officials say a new Chabad center opens every ten days somewhere in the world. Chabad’s fundraisers, including its widely publicized West Coast telethons, bring in more than $800 million annually. The movement’s outreach is so good that it attracts money from other Jews who see it as simply a good investment for Judaism. A New York investment manager has given millions of dollars to support newly ordained Chabad rabbis and their wives each year. Among other things, he has sponsored 35 couples to open Chabad Houses at colleges across the country and 33 others to expand adult Jewish learning in the United States. The banker, who attends a Modern Orthodox synagogue, said Chabad’s emissaries provide the most cost-effective way of strengthening the Jewish community, whether it’s at an American college or in Africa.

The second measure of Chabad’s growing influence is the controversy it generates, much of it from Jews frustrated at the movement’s success and worried that the Lubavitchers’ brand of Judaism will become too influential.

Schneerson’s charisma was such that in the final years of his four decades of leadership, increasing numbers of Lubavitchers believed the rebbe was the
moshiach
, the Messiah. A dozen years after his death, the belief that Schneerson is the Messiah has waned dramatically, at least in public.

“The Jewish community is becoming deeply dependent on them for religious services and ceremonies, education and social services,” said David Berger, an Orthodox rabbi and a history professor at Brooklyn College who has written a book on Chabad. “It’s a clear and present danger to Judaism.”

Danger? Here’s what I saw: a group of people who, on the whole, lived out their Jewish faith in a way that outshined most of Judaism. Their leaders, rabbi-and-wife emissary teams called
schluchim
, didn’t mind doing the dirty work—living in remote outposts in lifetime assignments, earning modest salaries and ministering to nonreligious Jews. From my reporting and talking to others who had covered the movement, I found most Lubavitchers to be happy and content with their lives. The evidence for that is in their children; the majority of them—more than 70 percent in California, where the best statistics are kept—also become
schluchim
. Imagine what would happen to any faith group if 70 percent of its pastors’ offspring became pastors themselves. It always struck me as ironic that one of the best evangelical denominations was found in Judaism among the Lubavitchers. For me, their actions produced an attractive portrait of faith in action.

I found radical believers easy to spot, because they shined so brightly among the gray of the spiritual pack. I didn’t even know if
I
wanted to be holy. I feared where God would take me. I liked my life. It was comfortable. I had money and a nice home. I didn’t live among the poor and sick; visiting once in a while was enough. When these thoughts crept into my mind, the words of C. S. Lewis from
The Weight of Glory
haunted me:

Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

 

I thought Lewis might be right, but I lacked the courage to test the premise. I’d stick to making mud pies in a slum. He was writing about nonbelievers, but the words applied to Christians, too. Was I doing enough? Was I truly dedicated to God? Or was I making convenient compromises? It seemed to me that all Christians had to come to grips with another challenge from Lewis, who wrote in
God in the Dock
: “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”

I started to view the moderates of my faith (myself included) as people who didn’t fully believe the radical, uncompromising message of the Gospels. We didn’t turn our lives entirely over to Christ. We stored up treasures on Earth and not in heaven. We didn’t go too far out of our way to help the poor or make real sacrifices in the name of Jesus. We lived a version of Christianity Lite, a feel-good brand of faith that didn’t extend much past Sunday morning.

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.

—2
TIMOTHY
2:15

 

I
T WASN’T EASY
writing about the faith of a true believer. Journalists like to trade in facts. In many ways, sports teams and courthouses are among the easiest beats for reporters because the action happens in real time, right in front of them. There is a clear winner and loser, and statistics to detail what happened. At the game, you can even watch instant replay in case you missed the action the first time. In a courtroom, you can get a transcript and other legal documents to refer back to if you’re hazy on a point. On the religion beat, you’re dealing in facts mixed liberally with matters of faith. It’s drilled into journalists that “if your mother tells you she loves you, better check it out.” But such journalistic standards can’t be applied to much of faith reporting. It’s impossible to check whether God is real, or whether someone’s conversion is authentic. Large portions of religion stories are ultimately unknowable.

It wasn’t my job to prove the Lord’s existence or the worth of someone’s faith—unless its worth could actually be proven. I operated on the premise that God and their faith were real to the people I interviewed. This allowed me to slip into their skin and feel what they felt. David Waters, a
Washington Post
editor and one of the country’s best religion writers, developed a list of Ten Commandments for reporters on the faith beat, which I followed probably better than the Bible’s Ten Commandments.

First Commandment:
“God is real. For billions of people on this planet, God is more than a fact. God is a central factor in their lives, their values, decisions, actions and reactions.” This was easy for me. It was the reason I got on the religion beat.

Second Commandment:
“God is everywhere. Don’t think of it as the religion beat. The world is our beat. Worship attendance is 24 to 40 percent [of the American population]. But belief in God is more than 90 percent.” I tried to find stories in places other than church, as they made for richer tales: the struggle of a Jewish father to get his son’s prep football game moved from Friday night because it fell on Yom Kippur; the controversy over a Muslim football league whose team names included the “Infitada,” “Mujahideen” and “Soldiers of Allah”; and the success of UCLA scholars in building a virtual-reality theater that acts as a time machine, dropping visitors off onto the dusty streets of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain in 1211 to tour the cathedral there.

Third Commandment:
“God really is in the details. John Ashcroft’s father, a Pentecostal preacher, died the day after his son was sworn into the U.S. Senate. ‘John,’ his father said to him the night before, ‘I want you to know that even Washington can be holy ground.’” David’s point is that stories about God can be found everywhere, even in throw-away lines in articles or interviews. Also, he advises us to dig deep in our interviews. I almost always uncovered the most revealing insights at the end of my interviews, when everyone was relaxed and less guarded.

Fourth Commandment:
“God is the object, not the subject. You don’t have to write about God (or religion) to write about the difference God makes in the way we live.” This is great news for religion writers, because it means that almost any piece of news can be turned into a religion story. In July 2001, I wrote a front-page story about how church leaders were taking advantage of the $600 tax rebate Americans were getting from the federal government by asking their congregations to simply sign over their checks.

Fifth Commandment:
“God is good. Behind many if not most stories of hope, struggle, sacrifice, survival, forgiveness, redemption and triumph is someone’s faith.” I found if I probe deep enough into any dramatic story, I find religion near its roots. I did a story about a guy who ran across the country at the pace of a marathon a day (26.2 miles). The reason? He had prayed for a way to raise money for needy children—and he heard God tell him to run an extreme distance.

Sixth Commandment:
“Don’t just write for the Church Page. God created the world in seven days, not one. No need to cram all the God-related copy in one weekly ‘Faith & Values’ section or page. Write for every section. Write for every day of the week.” I had a running competition with a colleague whose beat included Disneyland over who could get their stories in the most sections of the paper. In one year, I was able to get onto the front page and in the Metro section, the Sunday magazine, the Calendar section and the business section. (She still beat me.)

Seventh Commandment:
“Don’t take weekends off. Friday night through Sunday night is Game Day for most religious folk. You can’t understand someone’s faith unless you experience the public expression of it.” I found this to be invaluable in learning about different faiths, though I tended to find my actual stories outside of the religious services.

Eighth Commandment:
“Don’t spend too much time in your head. Faith isn’t just expressed. It’s experienced. It’s belief and behavior. It’s intellectual, emotional, and, above all, spiritual.” I tried to report on mystical experiences with the same level of objectivity as a denominational squabble. When the marathon runner said he was ordered by God to run across America, I wrote it in a straightforward manner, without a snicker. For context, I did contact those around him to see if his behavior had changed since becoming a Christian, and checked criminal and civil court records to see if anything interesting turned up. But as for people’s alleged interactions with the Lord, I simply reported what their experiences had been. I tried to follow the example set by Supreme Court Chief Justice William O. Douglas, who in 1944 wrote the majority opinion in the
United States v. Ballard
case. Guy Ballard claimed, through mass mailings, to be a healer and prophet of God (he also claimed to be Jesus, St. Germain and George Washington). The government convicted him of fraud, which he had undoubtedly committed. But the Supreme Court overturned the conviction, with Douglas stating:

Heresy trials are foreign to our Constitution. Men may believe what they cannot prove. They may not be put to the proof of their religious doctrines or beliefs. Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others.

…The miracles of the New Testament, the Divinity of Christ, life after death, the power of prayer are deep in the religious convictions of many. If one could be sent to jail because a jury in a hostile environment found those teachings false, little indeed would be left of religious freedom.

 

Ninth Commandment:
“Fear not. Even God had editors. They might not always get what you’re trying to do or say, but keep at it.” Religion frightens a lot of editors, many of whom aren’t used to the subject and are uncomfortable with expressly religious terms. For one of my early stories, I covered the Harvest Crusade in Anaheim, California. The three-day event is designed to convert nonbelievers to Christianity. I wrote a line in the story that went something like this: “About 20 percent of the crowd came out of the stands and onto the outfield to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior.” The editors on the copy desk flipped over that line. They said it implied that Jesus Christ was everyone’s savior. No, I replied, it said that these people accepted Jesus Christ as
their
savior. It was just a fact. That’s what happened. That was the whole point of the Harvest Crusade. They thought the line was still offensive and wanted to change it to something like “About 20 percent of the crowd came out of the stands and onto the outfield to
express their new belief in God
.” I actually had to appeal to some supervising editors to keep the reference to Jesus Christ in the story.

Tenth Commandment:
“Forget the flood. Interview God. No matter the story, ask people about their faith and how their faith guides their thoughts and actions.” For me, this is derivative of Waters’s Fourth and Fifth Commandments. I suspect that my friend had a hard time coming up with a fresh Tenth Commandment, and David Waters’s
Nine
Commandments didn’t have the proper ring.

Waters’s Ten Commandments served me well on the religion beat, and the Seventh Commandment—thou shall not take weekends off—allowed me on a personal level to sample a wide variety of Christian denominations and churches and find where I wanted to make my spiritual home. We had left the feel-good theology of my mega-church for a Presbyterian setting with more rituals, traditions and probing sermons. Yet mainline Protestantism felt to me one step short of my final destination, the Catholic Church. In my decade as an evangelical Christian, I had studied the Bible, especially the New Testament, extensively—something most Catholics don’t. Yet that knowledge gave the rituals of the Catholic Church deep meaning and beauty. Attending a Mass, I felt like I was standing on the shoulders of 2,000 years of Catholics who went before me, an unbroken line that could be traced directly back to Christ and His apostles. This filled me with a sense of awe and humility—and a little pride.

I did have problems with parts of the Catholic theology, including its sexual teachings (for example, a ban on condoms, even if it meant millions dying in AIDS-plagued Africa). More fundamentally, I couldn’t accept transubstantiation, the climax of the Mass when, according to the church, bread and wine are literally turned into the body and blood of Christ. Of course, I wasn’t alone. Millions of Americans—whom some orthodox Catholics derisively call “Cafeteria Catholics”—don’t agree with many of these teachings (40 percent don’t even go to confession, a basic requirement of the church). If Catholics truly believed they were in the real presence of Jesus during the Eucharist, they would fawn over and worship the Blessed Sacrament, the unused but consecrated bread and wine that is placed, in most churches, in a golden tabernacle; the Blessed Sacrament usually sits off to the side of the altar, ignored by the faithful, except for a few true believers who can occasionally be found before it in prayer and adulation.

I didn’t only rely on the comfort of the crowd. Written into the Catechism of the Catholic Church—a reference book that outlines church teachings—is a wonderful loophole called “personal conscience.” If something, even church doctrine, goes against your conscience, you’re allowed to follow the moral voice inside your head. As the Catechism says, “A human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience. If he were deliberately to act against it, he would condemn himself.”

My conscience allowed me to practice birth control without guilt or fear of eternal damnation. It allowed me to view the Eucharist as only a symbolic representation of the Last Supper. I planned on being a Cafeteria Catholic, picking which parts of church doctrine I would keep and which I would ignore. But my selection was based on conscience, not convenience.

To become a Catholic officially, I needed to go through a year-long process that consisted of some introductory courses and then months of classes. I signed up in the summer of 2001. Greer wanted a refresher course in her childhood faith, so she came along. We had a vague idea that after I was received into the church, we would have a proper church wedding and get rid of the Catholic stigma that we were adulterers not worthy to receive Communion.

On Tuesday evenings and Sunday mornings we arrived at Our Lady Queen of Angels in Newport Beach to learn about the church, its history and its doctrine. Father Vincent Gilmore led the program, which was called the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). Father Vincent was part of the conservative Norbertine order, on loan to the Queen of Angels parish because of a priest shortage within the Diocese of Orange. In his late 30s, he rode mountain bikes and was a gifted teacher who believed squarely in the church’s teachings. He explained them passionately, simply and thoroughly. I was also assigned a sponsor. I was fortunate to get Bob Gannon, a lanky gentleman with salt-and-pepper hair whose decency and kindness knew no bounds. Though soft-spoken, he was a prosecutor in the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, so I knew he could be tough. To me, he was a loving soul who patiently answered every question I threw at him.

As the people in the class began to get friendlier, some discovered that I was a religion writer with
The Times
. The recognition wasn’t unpleasant. Some remembered stories I had written before the class started. A few talked about a story I had written just before Easter, some months before. It focused on retired Bishop Norman McFarland, a giant of a man at least six-foot-four with a wide girth and booming voice. He was known for his gruffness. When his successor, Bishop Tod D. Brown, publicly released the diocese’s finances for the first time, many priests within the diocese heralded the move as the start of a new era of openness. They implied that Bishop McFarland had run the diocesan finances with an iron fist and in secret.

I had called him on a Sunday afternoon to get a response. Knowing his reputation, I dialed his number with trepidation. The bishop’s phone rang several times before he picked it up and growled an irritated, “Hello!”

“Hi, Bishop, this is Bill Lobdell with the
Los Angeles Times
,” I started, trying to keep the quiver out of my voice. “I’m working on a story and would like to get a comment from you.” I paused, trying to think of something to break the ice. “How are you doing today?”

“Pretty good until you called and interrupted my goddamn football game,” he barked. “What do you want?”

The conversation didn’t get any better.

My Easter story, written much later, put Bishop McFarland in a far different light. I watched him and Father John McAndrew minister to inmates inside the Theo Lacy Branch Jail in Orange, California, on the eve of Good Friday. There I met inmate Anthony Ybarra, who claimed he was experiencing the best day of his life. He had been upset because he didn’t know when he would see his two-week-old son, and was crying hard. But a priest was washing his feet, just as Jesus did for his 12 surprised disciples at the Last Supper. Father John McAndrew cleaned and kissed Ybarra’s feet, along with those of 11 other prisoners. Bishop McFarland then heard Ybarra’s confession.