Rob Brendle’s meaningless “Vision for America”

By Noel Black

When Rob Brendle, Associate Pastor at New Life Church, agreed to write a column for my Colorado Springs-based monthly satire and humor rag, The Toilet Paper, I thought I had staged a major coup.

The paper was deliberately scandalous, often sacrilegious, juvenile and occasionally pornographic. In short, it was meant to offend the good people of the “Evangelical Vatican” and excite the minority of locals who feel increasingly oppressed by its reach. Getting Brendle on board meant that we would have a guaranteed readership in the community we meant to incite.

To give you a few examples of our tactics, we ran a regular photo feature called Church Kicker (what it sounds like), which later evolved into Church Whipper, in which a naked woman in black knee-high boots, black gloves and a cat mask whipped various churches around Colorado Springs. We also regularly staged stunts like taking drugs at Focus on the Family, putting an eight-foot long papier-machet penis in front of City Hall, and shooting free Bibles with shotguns.

Of course, we pitched ourselves as a doggedly free-speech publication so as to avoid the scowls of squawking local liberals and shrill Stepford finger-waggers alike. And I freely admit that the attempt to lure Brendle as a columnist was as much of a potential insurance policy for nervous advertisers who didn’t want to lose business from the fundies as it was a stunt to prove our point about free speech.

My friend John Dicker — who had written a couple of stories about New Life for the local weekly — put me in touch with Brendle. Much to my surprise, he was almost instantly amenable to the idea of a point/counterpoint type column. Though I was aware of the cultural omnipresence of New Life in the northeastern parts Colorado Springs where they had recently built a $17-million megachurch, I hadn’t yet experienced first hand the long leash of the Lord that allowed them to wander deep into secular culture to retrieve souls from the Inferno. Nor was I aware of their literal belief in spiritual warfare, demons, and speaking in tongues.

To me — a lifelong believer in little more than the power of the Catholic Church to produce beautiful architecture, great poets and guilty girlfriends — New Life had seemed like an innocuous adult version of Young Life, the Christian youth organization (also based in Colorado Springs) that was known widely as a good place to get laid in high school. New Life had only recently become a major political force, after Ted Haggard was named the President of the National Association of Evangelicals and a spiritual advisor to President Bush, moving him up onto center stage next to James Dobson — his dour, sexuality-obsessed neighbor just a few miles to the south.

At the time Brendle agreed to write a column for the Toilet Paper, the national media had just begun to take notice of the peculiar culture of God’s Wal-Mart — a clearinghouse of evangelical ideology packaged cleverly in every facet of Americana from punk to Pollyanna. Used to seeing pasty-faced crackers like Pat Robertson, Billy Graham and Dobson, few saw the true power of New Life’s fresh, young viral business model coming until it had already spread. And credit where credit is due: The old guard brought their flies with shit, but New Life brought them with donuts and Starbucks. If you haven’t perused their hipsterized new website, take particular notice of their “Small Groups” page where you can find Bible study and prayer groups that revolve around every imaginable type of hobby or interest: Harley Davidsons, scrapbooking, rock climbing, knitting, comedy, video games, etc. ad infinitum. You won’t find nearly as many small groups devoted to community service or charity, but it’s a free market church — the supply is there for the demand. And since George W. had so boldly put the marketing mask of evangelicalism onto the face of power, business was good.

On top of that, evangelicals were already on the march through secular neighborhoods (literally and metaphorically), and this was a free marketing/evangelizing opportunity. He said as much in his first Soul Search column:

The free exchange of ideas and the capacity simultaneously to disagree to my soul’s core with, and still respect the freedom of my ideological adversary — that is our heritage, that is our privilege, and that is why I’m writing. And I’d also like to persuade some of you to follow Jesus.

This passage perfectly illustrates what I love to hate about Brendle’s transparent public persona: the articulate and rational confidence man whose goal is — Hey! — to sell you some Jesus. But as smooth and intelligent as Brendle was in his Soul Search debates in the Toilet Paper, he seemed to suffer — as all thinking evangelicals must — from the strain between faith and reason. In other words, his intelligence (he has an engineering degree from a prominent eastern school) and his apparent belief in civil liberties never seemed to fully reconcile with his faith, which demands of him that he rationally defend a book that is ultimately indefensible as a matter of rational or literal truth.

This paradox was never more acutely illustrated to me than the night Rob first invited me to his Saturday Night service to announce our unholy alliance to his congregation. After his sermon, he brought me up on stage and, after presumptuously introducing me as an atheist, explained why he was writing a column in my paper, which he didn’t condone and couldn’t recommend. After his brief explanation of our attempt to create dialog across the rift of our respective belief systems, he handed me the microphone. I looked out at the 500 or so people in attendance that night and thought about the fact that almost all of them believed in a dictatorial God whose ancient laws and magical stories will continue to trump knowledge derived from reason and scientific inquiry for as long as such believers believe. Just a few weeks earlier, I had brought two young boys dressed in ninja costumes to pose for a Church Kicker photo in front of the New Life sign just a few hundred yards from where I was standing. In light of the obvious absurdity of the situation, I said the only thing true I could think of: “The only reason Rob Brendle and I are standing on this stage together tonight is because of the First Amendment.” And everyone cheered!

After nine episodes of the “Soul Search” column (you can read most of them by going through the back issues at toiletpaperonline.com by searching through the archives), Brendle seemed to have become increasingly impatient with the debate partners I set him up with. At one point, he completely lost his cool, and even became sarcastic, with J.D. Englehart, an Iraqi vet and war protester (Brendle is also a vet) who angrily questioned Brendle’s stance on the war:

I do have views on the war, and I assure you they’re quite clear. I was trying to be gracious, but let me be candid and clarify: it’s not the Iraq debate; it’s you who bore me. I’ve met so many of you in the last year that your “I’m mad as hell and it’s all the Christians’ fault” shtick seems tired and lame. I can’t begin to tell you how little interest I have in debating you.

The fruits of Rob’s frustration ripened in the next issue when he informed me that he would like to take a break from the usual “Soul Search” debates to write a satirical piece that would exaggerate his beliefs to a point of absurdity so that Toilet Paper readers would have the opportunity to see how secular hysteria about the supposed theocratic intentions of the evangelical community are completely unfounded. The piece was titled: Vision for America.

And yet, there was nothing terribly exaggerated about the first half of his “Vision”:

America is a Christian nation. Its heritage is comprised of the stories of people of faith, its legal code founded in Holy Scripture, its moral fabric informed by the collective conscience of a generation of God-fearing men. A veritable city on a hill, as the great Ronald Reagan put it, our country is a favorite son of the Creator himself, reminiscent of the people of Israel some 6000 years hence.

While New Life and Brendle, personally, may not believe this statement to the letter, the distinction between a Christian nation and a nation of Christians is lost on most non-evangelicals who don’t see the line.

In fact, up until the point when he says that adulterers should be jailed, nothing Brendle says has the ring of complete implausibility. And even then it’s only his tone that tips his hat. But the would-be absurdity is topped with communism! Tongue in cheek, he goes on:

With the government restored to alignment with the Giver of life, we will be in position finally to do away with those who oppose the will of God. Organized evildoers will, naturally, be given the opportunity to repent. Should the likes of the many pornographers, the ACLU, and this pernicious paper choose not to accept the gracious gift of redemption, they will simply never be heard from again. Think Gulag, Noel.

Why would I knowingly chuckle when he breathes my name and “Gulag” in the same sentence? Because Stalin was a godless communist like me, and no one who believes in Jesus could ever be capable of such a thing?

The “Vision” soon made it around the web through emails. Half-a-dozen people who read it took it for a confession and begged my permission to reprint it. But I could only tell them what Brendle had told me: that it was meant to be satire. Shrug.

It occurred to me much later that Brendle’s stab at the art of double-speak was likely just testing his mettle in the secular idiom — a new tool for his repertoire rather than a stealth manifesto. What could be cooler, after all, than Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in this age of self-mockery-as-truth? In the Borg-like way that New Life appropriates the language and iconography of subcultures it doesn’t fully understand, perhaps it was just an outfit he was trying on to see if it would fit.

It didn’t. And when it was over, he went back to his world where everything means what it says while I went to mine where everything meaningless is what it is.

Noel Black is the editor of toiletpaperonline.com.