Photographs by
Eleanor Gaver
Left: Denis Johnson
And in the case of this, the Eagle Mountain Motorcycle Rally near Newark, 40 miles from Dallas, it's important to Mark that he's seeking it, whatever it is, among men. He expects to find men in abundance here because this is, after all, a motorcycle rally, and plenty of both men and motorcycles have arrived already. The country air is full of exhaust and the sawing fuzztone of throttles twisted back and forth. Mark has brought along his Honda dirt bike, a 90-cc job with one-quarter the mass of a highway hog, the kind of bike children can be seen piloting around the grounds right now slowly with their feet stuck out for balance, cutting brodies in the dirt around the trash-barrels.
Not that anybody would kid him about his ride. Most of the arrivals aren't bikies, but even if they were all the roughest sort of chargers in every other way, still they wouldn't be the type to compare and criticize. These are serious Christians. Mark's other neighbor, for instance, Beauford (pronounced Bewford) Knabe, formerly a dealer in bulk amphetamine for a bikie gang in southern Illinois and now a Harley mechanic several years clean, sober and celibate, who tries, displaying absolutely no symptoms of derision, to help the Idaho man break into his vehicle with a coat-hanger, but unsuccessfully. "Don't sweat it," Beauford says. He looks like an extra in a '60s Roger Corman drive-in film. "For certain we'll find us a reformed car-thief in this bunch."
They can see, on a rise a half-mile distant, Kenneth Copeland's Eagle Mountain Church, which they won't be attending. Copeland Ministries, a televangelical enterprise dedicated to saving souls on a massive scale, expects as many as 10,000 people this weekend, and the preaching will be done from an outdoor stage of the type whose development was perfected in the '70s, for rock festivals: the stage itself mounted with several sharply gleaming Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Along the pavement's western edge some two dozen food vendors have set up kiosks, and behind them a plump, moustachioed man offers hand-lettered scrolls inscribed with over a hundred Bible verses. "They're free," he says, handing away rolled-up copies right and left from two plastic buckets. "God told me to do this," he explains. There's no charge for the event itself either -- you just turn up and find a spot. The firewood is there for the taking.
A Saginaw County Sheriff's deputy cruises the lanes of this tent city for an hour or so. He finds nothing to stop for other than the Idaho man, who flags him down to beg for help with his locked vehicle.
All morning the attendees roll in steadily and arrange themselves in about 30 acres of trodden pasture sectioned off by chalk-line vehicular pathways. Knee-high signs along the paved drive into the grounds say "Camping" and point the way -- otherwise no signs direct them. Although there's nobody around to prevent it, and in fact there's nothing to discourage it -- no posted rules, no printed exhortations or prohibitions whatever -- beer seems entirely absent, and hardly any of these people, from the middle-American retired-NCO-looking motorhomers in their khakis, stretchpants, baseball caps, to the slow hairy Bigfoot-type bikies in their gang colors and leather chaps, appear to smoke cigarettes. There's no psycho menace in them now, these men so many of whom have spent years in prison, and belonged there. Who murdered for pride, raped for amusement, stole and dealt and extorted and whored for money. Dope-demons walk around the place clean, setting up their tents and ballooning open their camper-trailers, lighting campfires and charcoal grills, letting down the tailgates of pickups with custom Harleys guyed down in the back.
Not too many of the ten thousand chairs have been filled Friday afternoon when Gloria Copeland, a vaguely Dolly Partonesque woman in white jeans and a black blouse, opens the weekend with a hymn and a prayer. In a friendly, no-nonsense manner, she states that this weekend's gathering has a special purpose, to minister to convicts. The evening sermons will be beamed by satellite into every prison in Texas. "It doesn't matter where you are, where you've been, or what you've done ... God loves you." She's finished and off the stage before much of an audience has gathered. Then a number of singers follow, all backed by recorded music. Some of these seem to be Ministry staff, young women, mainly, the imperfections of whose voices in praise and song go away forever out of the giant amplifiers -- no mountains, no hills to echo off of -- a kind of vast sweeping magnificent Karaoke ... But after a desultory start before the scattered audience, Isaac Petrie, a young black singer with the same phony taped orchestra and chorus behind him, breaks loose and lifts them out of their seats, the skins of their arms and necks dimpled with gooseflesh and the tears flowing down ... Mark can't help himself, doesn't want to, he's sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. The young MC comes onto the stage clapping and shouting out verses from Isaiah, the uplifting, reassuring Isaiah, prophet of God's sweetest promises in an Israel gone to hell. "C'mon, put yourself there!" he cries, and they stand swaying with their hands upraised.
They've come home to God, and to America, their country -- 57-channel America, Airport Terminal America, Visa-Mastercard America, America with cameras at your tragedy, at your triumph, with cameras on your streaming face, cameras on your death, your corpse, your funeral. Even the bikies have come home to America, the one where you can ride flatout a long ways, run your own shop, mind your own business, be who you are. Like spears of wheat they sway with their hands up, only they're not being arrested, they're sanctified, members of a whole different gang -- Sons of God Motorcycle Club, their colors read, Tribe of Judah; The Un-Chained Gang/Swords of Jesus Christ.
It's the cool sunny second weekend in October, weekend of the full moon. The USA Today weather map shows a big blue high front girding the state of Texas and steering Hurricane Opal well away to the east. Not that anybody here was ever worried about a little thing like a hurricane.
There's no telling where it comes from, this impression of an emphatic okayness about the psyches of the regular-looking middle Americans here, unless they were actually utterly lost somewhere and now they've come home. In the heart of someone who might have just stumbled onto this rally, the man from Idaho, let's say, 15 years a Christian convert, but one of the airy, sophisticated kind, the whole business is a millstone -- if he's going to Heaven, shouldn't he be more excited? Is he going to Heaven? In his questions, his doubts, his failure to submit unconditionally, hasn't he been nothing but a cruiser, a shopper? Impressed with the drama of his own conversion -- but as drama, rather than conversion -- was he ever really broken? And more importantly, was he ever really healed?
Out on Highway 287, which cuts northwest out of Ft. Worth and through the town of Saginaw and then abrubtly, almost immediately, into a world half grass and half sky, a Kenneth Copeland Ministries billboard stands over the low empty prairie, the only thing higher than the horizon, looking like the remnant structure of some exalted race and visible from such a distance that its message is for a long time illegible to the approaching traveller; and then only the last and largest word resolves, and then it swings past: "One Word From God Can Change Your Life ... FOREVER."
They don't mind being clear about the stakes. With rock-bottom Christians, it has ever been so. Large outdoor camp-revivals have been part of the American scene since late in the 18th century. Then, and also later, in the 1840's, it wasn't unheard of for 20,000 frontier people to convene in tent cities in the middle of the wilderness to be saved from sin as the "earner" of death -- to be rescued, in other words, from death. Despair, though it weighed on many souls, was at bottom a fear of Hell. Existential nausea was the plague of a mind ensnared by the Devil. Life was hard all over, life hardest in the American wilderness, but life wasn't the problem. Eternity was. At Eagle Mountain the stakes are as high as ever, but it's easy to sense that even beyond the technological differences -- the vast distances easily covered to get to places like this, the tricked-out trailers, the showers, the toilets, the telecommunications -- there now can be felt an altered emphasis on the Christian idea of spiritual rebirth itself. It's not just about Forever any more. Jesus has saved these souls from misery and meaninglessness, too, from the dope, the booze, the ripping and running, the chasing after. Saved them not just to be born again as the children of God and resurrected after death, but to be born again as America's sons and daughters -- to be made brand-new right now, to start all over, to be reinvented, as is the right of every American.
As sinners they've not only ignored the teachings of the Bible, but misinterpreted the rules of American striving. Rather than seek the bedrock values on which America's success is built, Bible-based values, they've lusted after flesh and money and things that run down empty. Some of these things they can still have, they are not anti-Bible, unAmerican things, but have them only by building on entirely new ground, and then have them extravagantly, burning gas and turning wheels and throwing away the mufflers and jacking up the amps. Kenneth Copeland teaches that poverty is a curse, and the testimonials in Victory, the Copeland Ministries' monthly magazine, frequently concern themselves with the believers' glorious transit from rags to riches ("From Pennies to Prosperity"; "The ABC's of Abundance") -- a transit Copeland himself has made, and not at all apologetically.
This is a biker rally, but Copeland attracts all types. As well as a tent set up by the Motorcycle Church of Christ, there's one sheltering folks from the Cowboy Church. Men and women seem to be equally represented. A scattering of blacks -- a family here, a couple there, young couple, old couple. A Christian black rap group performs, trucked in from L.A.
African-Americans were better represented at the frontier camp meetings of the early 19th century, but their campsites and services were segregated from the white ones. Outdoor meetings had long since become the form of worship most inviting to the outcast and the spiritually reluctant. In England as early as 1739, John Wesley held outdoor meetings at which, according to one diarist, "thieves, prostitutes, fools, people of every class and numbers of poor who had never entered a place of worship assembled and became godly." It wasn't a lucrative business. Methodist circuit riders were salaried from $80 a year in 1816 to $100 in 1840. A populist religious movement characterized by emotional fervor, rejection of abstract creeds and formal ritual, lay leadership, a message emphasizing simple virtues and pinned firmly to cited scriptural verses -- this was what swept the crowds together in young America.
From the wild revivals of the 1800's, the thread of history leads straight to glitter-and-glory televangelism, a development in modern communications regarded by most of the viewing public, it's safe to say, as a hideous sham. It's not evangelism that's suspect, it's TV. In its mass appeal, its broad focus, TV softens and dilutes and equivocates: Any face on that screen has got to be a liar's, and for viewers by and large the TV preacher is a figure bobbing up sometimes above the broadcast surf, outfitted in really bad taste, striking at the hearts of little old ladies and the confused parents of sexually awakening teens and dealing extensively, it would appear, in printed timetables for the death of Earth.
Copeland Ministries, for all their willingness to engage the medium, keep firmly rooted in the two-centuries-old revival traditions, particularly in their focus on the wretch, the prodigal, the outcast. On Friday night Hal Barnes, a young black lay preacher, stands in the disorienting glare of floodlights, his voice booming out into a great darkness and speaking the language of the disinherited: "Whoever you are, whatever you've done, it doesn't matter." He himself was a zealous doper for many years but shouts now that the Lord "pulled me outa that bag, rolled me up in a robe of righteousness, fired me up with the Holy Spirit, and smoked -- me -- up. . . Hit me in the main line with holiness. . ." The Texas night around him roars and shouts "Praise the Lord!" -- "Praise God!" -- Praise Him!" Those in the back are fully a quarter mile from the stage, but can watch the action on the massive video screens.
Then a regular storm of welcome breaks and nearly flattens Kenneth Copeland as he strides aboard the stage in casual dress, jeans and sportshirt and motorcycle boots. Not the big-haired sequinned mannequin of TV evangelism, but an earnest, gleeful, boyish guy, giddy, almost -- very much informed by his own humble beginnings. He does this a lot, this is his fifth rally in six months. He has two more scheduled in the next 10 weeks, but he still looks stunned by all the surrounding show, which he himself has produced through decades of ceaseless striving -- starting with rallies in shopping malls, attended sparsely by folks knocked up from house-to-house calls and mimeographed fliers pinned by wipers to the windshields of cars baking in the Southern summer -- but not solitary striving, he would insist; he never walked alone. His first word: "Ha-lay-looo-yah! Praise the Lord!"
He welcomes everyone and reminds them of the prison mission, and he and the audience count down the last twenty seconds until the broadcast begins, four! -- three! -- two! -- one! and as the screams subside, Copeland begs the prisoners watching now "in every corrections institution in the state" to cast away their pride and listen to the sermons and come to Jesus Christ. "We don't want anything from you," he tells them. "You give nothing. These people" -- with a sweep of his arm out toward the dark vital mass of souls -- "give of their substance: money. Money they worked hard for." Will an amount be named? Actual numbers spoken? "It doesn't matter where you are, where you've been, or what you've done. Jesus can heal you, Jesus can release you not just from sin, but from anything." And with an immense, imperial confidence he commands -- "You're coming outta there!" And there can be no doubt of it. He's seen the dead rise up, the crippled man walk, he's seen captive after captive forgiven and freed. This guy isn't lying.
This is Kenneth Copeland's moment, but it is not his hour. He embraces and introduces an old friend and preaching buddy, Jerry Sevelle from Louisiana, a suave gray man who delivers a lecture on the dangers of tradition, of following Doctrine but ignoring Scripture, and also recalls the days when he and Ken Copeland preached in rags, traveling in wired-together vehicles that ran on prayer as much as gasoline, standing on boxes in malls and theater parking lots. Before that Sevelle had been a countrified hippie, a pothead Cajun, but the Lord had called him, and he'd outgrown his youthful wildness.
It's Copeland's show, but for the most part all weekend he acts as a kind of MC for speakers with wild and enviable memories of slam-bang conversion, ecstatic worship, sudden visions. The mature Christian, Copeland insists, can expect direct access to guidance. "So then God says to me," Copeland remarks in the midst of a little story, and stops. "Listen here. Don't you think I know when God's saying something to me? If I had a friend and I'd been talking to him ever' day, for twenty-five years -- wouldn't I know his voice if he called me on the phone?" "God sent me." "God told me." "Jesus said I should." The Holy Spirit directs minutely -- moment by moment -- down to left and right turns.
Next page: Thirty pounds of meth -- and a vision of the cross
