The Man Who Quit Money (5 page)

.  .  .

S
IXTY YEARS LATER
, the Shellabargers are still crazy for each other. Dick still talks like a ranch hand, and Laurel still corrects him.

“We used to call Dad the original railroad bum,” he told me as I sat in their living room.

“But he wasn’t a bum,” Laurel said.

“No, he wasn’t. We were just joking with him. I wish I had his skills.”

“You do,” said Laurel. She turned to me. “He just doesn’t give himself credit.”

“My grandfather was a barber,” Dick told me.

“A cosmetologist,” Laurel insisted.

That night, heading into the bedroom they had readied for me, I paused in the hallway outside their office and listened. Dick sat at his desk, dictating an upcoming Bible lesson while Laurel transcribed the notes so that a deaf girl in the class could read along as he lectured.

“Verse nineteen,” he began, clearing his throat. “Capital
I
. I will betroth you to Me, capital
M,
in righteousness and in justice, comma, in loving kindness and in compassion, period.”

I knew that they had computer programs and the Internet, from which they could cut and paste this verse. But they enjoyed the ritual, he the preacher, she the scribe. Dick Shellabarger continued: “Verse twenty. Capital
A
. And I will betroth you to Me, capital
M,
in faithfulness, period. Capital
T
. Then you will know the LORD, all capitals, period.”

.  .  .

A
MONG EVANGELICAL
C
HRISTIANS
, all of whom await the Second Coming of Jesus, there are historically two camps: postmillennialists and premillennialists. For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most were of the “post” variety, meaning that they expected the Messiah’s return after the thousand-year reign of peace. In order to hasten His arrival, they set out to create that harmonious world here and now, fighting for the
abolition of slavery, prohibition of alcohol, public education, and women’s literacy.

The chaos of the Civil War and industrialization caused many evangelicals to rethink their optimism. They determined that Jesus would actually arrive
before
the final judgment. Therefore any efforts toward a just society here on earth were futile; what mattered was perfecting one’s faith. As historian Randall Balmer writes, these believers “retreated into a theology of despair, one that essentially ceded the temporal world to Satan and his minions.”

This schism widened in the twentieth century. After the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in which fundamentalists were humiliated by the national press, premillennialists retreated into their own subculture, shunning the politics and causes of the times. “They turned inward,” writes Balmer, “tending to their own piety and seeking to lure others into a spiritualized kingdom in preparation for the imminent return of Jesus.”

When Dick Shellabarger proposed to Laurel, just months after they met, she was planted firmly in the camp of the premillennialists, and said she could only marry a like-minded Christian.

“My parents have belonged to a church all our lives,” Dick said.

“That’s not enough.”

“How could that not be enough?”

“Is it personal?” she asked him.

As it turned out, the theological distance Dick would have to travel was not very far. The church to which his family belonged, however loosely, was the Plymouth Brethren, a sect founded in Ireland in the 1820s by John Darby, the very author of the Dispensation Chart that had captivated Laurel. Dick’s grandfather was a lay minister who had memorized the entire New Testament.

Dick was saved, and in 1949 the Shellabargers married and joined the Plymouth Brethren. The faction is so certain of the Bible’s literal truth that Southern Baptists look loose by comparison. The Brethren hold that God ought not to be worshipped in a denominational church with a professional minister. They call their buildings “chapels” to reflect their belief that a church is a holy fellowship of believers, not the mere structure where they meet. They believe that orders like Catholics and Lutherans, by building such massive earthly organizations, have strayed from the teachings of the Bible. For fear they will be perceived as just another denomination, they usually don’t use the name Plymouth Brethren officially, which is why most Americans have never heard of them.

For six decades, Dick and Laurel balanced their service to Christ with the material needs of raising a family. Because the Brethren had no paid pastors, Dick served as a lay minister. Women were not allowed to preach, but Laurel led Bible study groups. Nonetheless, as newlyweds they needed an income. Dick’s parents had closed the guest ranch, and without a high school diploma, his options were limited. He landed a job on a Montana ranch, sight unseen. In 1949 he overhauled an old Buick and drove north with his bride and their few belongings. Upon arriving, they discovered that the wife of the rancher had fallen ill, and couldn’t work.

“Your wife can do the cooking,” said the rancher.

Instead of capitulating, Dick displayed a trait he would one day pass on to his son: the refusal to work under unfair conditions.

“I intend on her not working,” said Dick. “She’s pregnant.”

“Well, that’s the deal we had.”

“No, it’s not.”

“That’s what was in the letter.”

“I just happen to have the letter in my pocket.” Dick whipped out the paper and unfolded it.

“Well, she’s going to cook and that’s it,” said the rancher.

Dick cocked his fists, and the rancher turned and ran. The Shellabargers repacked the Buick and headed home.

Dick took a job in a print factory, but when required to run off a batch of girlie calendars, he quit. The couple learned that they were just different from their coworkers. “They thought we were self-righteous goody-goody two-shoes,” Dick says. “It’s always been like that. When I traveled to conventions, I didn’t drink, didn’t go to the prostitutes. I had to push them off my lap.” After the birth of their daughter, Pennie, Dick attended a Brethren college in Chicago. Their first son, Rick, was born. The young family lived in a cramped flat for three years while Dick learned the Word. “I was an old hillbilly pounding the streets south of Chicago, in the all-black ghetto,” he says.

Dick worked a series of jobs in car dealerships and printing factories, uprooting the family every few years. He and Laurel had three more sons along the way. In the Colorado mining town of Gypsum, they started a Brethren meeting. (“We brought a beekeeper to Christ,” Laurel remembers.) Laurel stayed home to raise the children. Neither parent pursued a permanent career: their true calling was the Lord.

Their last-born was Daniel James Shellabarger, delivered in 1961 in Arvada, a suburb of Denver. After Daniel’s birth, Dick took a job at his brother’s Chevy dealership. The next year he was hired by Denver Volkswagen, then in 1967 promoted and transferred to the national office in San Antonio, Texas, which is where Daniel began first grade. For a string of good years Dick jetted around the country to conventions and dealerships.

The family’s idealism reigned. On holidays in San Antonio, the Shellabargers would pack all five kids into a VW Beetle—Doug and Dan stuffed in the “way-back” hatch—and drive to the Mexican border. The gates were flung open and Mexicans would flood in over the Rio Grande bridge to spend the day shopping and visiting relatives. Dick and Laurel and the kids greeted them on the side of the road, armed with fistfuls of evangelical tracts in Spanish. None of the family spoke the language, but that didn’t matter. All seven would pass out the pamphlets and say
Hola
and
God Bless
. “Mexicans are just starving for the Word,” Dick says. It wasn’t quite a mission to Africa, but it was the life Laurel had always wanted.

While Daniel’s Good News upbringing might seem anachronistic to many raised in the calamitous sixties and seventies, the Shellabarger family was the norm for many fundamentalists. “So comprehensive was this alternative universe,” writes Randall Balmer, an evangelical himself by upbringing, “that it was possible in the middle decades of the twentieth century (as I can attest personally) to function with virtual autonomy from the larger culture and have, in fact, very little commerce with anyone outside.” As with fundamentalists of all stripes, the Plymouth Brethren insist that theirs is the only true way among all other types of Christianity—to say nothing of other religions. This is why, in a 78 percent Christian-majority nation like America, many evangelicals consider themselves a besieged minority. “We believed growing up that everyone outside our church was evil,” Suelo says now. “Not to be trusted.”

Those years of relative wealth in San Antonio turned out to be the exception. After a series of mergers, Dick lost his job in 1969 and returned the family to Denver, where Daniel started middle
school. He grew into a small, serious boy. While Ron and Doug had inherited their father’s loping frame, Rick and Daniel had the fine bones of their mother. Daniel was anxious about being the smallest and the youngest; sometimes he wore a pair of boots with big blocky soles to try to be as tall as the others. He was often so nervous about going to school that he’d get sick and be allowed to stay home. Although he was sociable enough to make friends, the family’s life of itinerant gospel-spreading took its toll.

“All the moving combined with my parents’ idealism made it hard to have friends,” Suelo says. “Especially when you’re told that everyone outside of the family, or the church, is evil. People would tease us, but instead of fighting back we turned the other cheek. Now I realize that what kids want, when they tease, is to engage with you, to spar, and that’s a way of making friends. But I couldn’t see it then.”

Although insular, the family was warm and well functioning. Childhood friend Randy Kinkel, who went to school with Daniel near Denver, recalls the Shellabarger home as laid-back and welcoming, graced by Laurel’s radiant smile and filled with a menagerie of pets, including dogs, cats, birds, fish, even an alligator. “Dan fit in as much as a quiet, thoughtful kid can at that age,” Kinkel says. “He was an incredibly funny kid, good at voices and mimicry, and also could draw very well. I don’t remember thinking he was any kind of religious nut.” Daniel and Randy’s favorite lark was writing a fake newspaper in which the local kids’ TV-show host, Blinky the Clown, was always drunk and causing trouble, explosions, death, and general mayhem. “The humor was very sophisticated for grade school,” says Kinkel.

Daniel’s preoccupations returned to religion. While his church preached that the Bible was absolute truth, sometimes
its members didn’t follow Jesus’s teachings. Some of the Brethren, like Mr. and Mrs. Hatch, who donated the new Sunday school building for the plain stone campus in a working-class Denver neighborhood, arrived in Cadillacs, fur coats sleek in the winter sun. One Sunday in 1969, just as Mr. Hatch was opening the massive car door for his wife, an odd-looking character walked down the street: long hair, faded blue jeans, a Mexican blanket draped over his shoulder. A hippie, is what Daniel’s father called the type. The hippie walked right up to Mr. and Mrs. Hatch and took in their Cadillac and furs with contempt.

“Is this what Jesus taught?” he said. “Are you serving God—or money?”

The Hatches were speechless. The hippie sauntered on past. Suelo stared after him, aghast, until his father tugged him into the chapel.

“Heathen,” said his father. “He don’t understand.”

But Daniel couldn’t shake the man’s words. He had read the Gospels. Wasn’t it true that Jesus had commanded us to cast aside our worldly belongings? Mathew 19:21: “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor.” And hadn’t Paul written in Timothy 6:10 that the love of money was the root of all evil?

What if that heathen was right, and the Brethren were wrong?

.  .  .

I
N
1974, in a fit of entrepreneurial zeal, Dick cashed in a life insurance policy and moved the family again, this time to tiny Safford, Arizona, to launch a Montgomery Ward catalog franchise. Just after Daniel celebrated his fourteenth birthday, the
business failed. “He lost everything,” Suelo says. In 1975, bankrupt and humbled, Dick brought his family to Grand Junction and once again accepted a warehouse job at a Chevrolet dealership owned by his brother.

There the family made the closest they’d come to a permanent home. The Shellabarger kids would attend high school and begin college there, and all but Daniel would marry. Grand Junction was a dusty oil and farm town, and a hub for rail and trucking, where the most exciting thing to do was ride the elevator to the top of the bank building. The largest city on the Western Slope of the Rockies, it lacked the charm of mining towns like Aspen and Telluride that would become luxury resorts. This was Nixon country, a stronghold of the silent majority, home to numerous churches and tough men with mustaches driving large pickup trucks. It suited Dick and Laurel fine. Like fundamentalists across the nation, they were emerging from decades of political apathy, and finding their voice in a new movement called the Religious Right. They were staunch conservatives who opposed abortion rights, homosexuality, and any intrusion by the government on their religious lives.

The family rented a clapboard cottage in a bleak neighborhood along the train tracks. Rick was living at home, and Ron, Doug, and Daniel were still in school, sensitive newcomers prone to getting picked on. Their one advantage was that with the name Shellabarger, they were assumed by the kids at Grand Junction High to be part of the rich family whose name dominated the billboards for the statewide Chevy dealers.

Around this time, Suelo began to question the sense of American exceptionalism that his parents had instilled in him. On a mission to Bolivia with a Christian group called Amigos
de las Américas, in which North American teenagers gave vaccinations to South Americans, he developed some ideas about the nature of wealth, greed, and generosity that still influence him today. He traveled to the lowlands near the Brazilian border. It was Suelo’s first glimpse of the Third World, at a time when Bolivia was second only to Haiti as the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere. “That was the first time I saw kids with bloated bellies,” he remembers.