Lauren Sandler

Now Baldwin has released a memoir, “The Unusual Suspect,” a reference to the one critically acclaimed film for which he’s known. The book, the “Gospel according to Stevie B.,” is part testimonial and part evangelical manifesto, a cocktail of anti-intellectualism and a biblical interpretation that would have Jesus spinning in his grave, had he stayed there. Baldwin preaches that free will is a lie of Satan — we must shut off our brains, he says, and be led by what God tells our hearts. Furthermore, he writes, efforts to end global poverty and violence are just the sort of “stupid arrogance” that incur God’s wrath, which we’ll be feeling any day now in the coming apocalypse. I suppose when the star of “Bio-Dome” is advising the president and converting kids by the thousands to his gnarly brand of faith, the end is, indeed, nigh.

“The Unusual Suspect” features an open letter to Bono, lambasting him for lobbying for debt relief for developing countries instead of preaching the gospel on MTV. Bono must be in league with Satan, whom Baldwin spends a lot of time thinking about. “I am smart enough to know that Satan is alive and well today,” he writes. “Satan has all kinds of power, and he is able to control the minds of anyone whose mind isn’t controlled by God.” Baldwin’s theology — and criticism of secularists and Christian poseurs like Bono — is written with remarkable confidence for someone who can only recite six of the Ten Commandments and four of the Twelve Apostles.

All of this might seem like the easily ignorable ravings of a Hollywood has-been if the book wasn’t climbing bestseller lists. Baldwin writes that “God has called me to go and make disciples of the youth of America. That is what I am going to try to do, and if you try to stop me I am going to break your face.” Most frightening of all, Baldwin is succeeding. All of his dude-speak is actually speaking to the dudes. Thanks to his book, videos and live sermons, he continues to draw thousands of young people across the country into his church of celebrity and absolutism.

The youngest of Hollywoods famous and infamous Baldwin brothers, Stephen was best known for a host of mediocre movies and his passion for blow before Sept. 11, 2001, the day he got religion. His wife had already been born again, converted by a Brazilian housekeeper. Baldwin says the housekeeper was sent into their service not to clean their toilets but to save their souls. Every morning, Baldwin says, he would wake to his wife lying prostrate next to the bed, her head pressed against the floorboards, deep in prayer for an hour. “If you want to love Jesus, great, but can you cook my breakfast now?” was his response. Then two jets smashed into the World Trade Center.

“For Stephen Baldwin, September 11th was clearly the demonstration of the impossible becoming reality,” he writes. He was now prepared to believe that Jesus died for his sins and was resurrected, that the Bible was the inerrant word of God.

After his rebirth, Baldwin saw everything in a new light, including his career. His “Usual Suspect” costars were speeding toward Oscar-anointed careers. But God had bigger plans for Baldwin, like starring in “Bio-Dome” with Pauly Shore. The stoner comedy offered Baldwin the chance to utter sacred lines like, “When we’re not saving the environment, we’re thinkin’ of you, naked, thigh deep in tofu.”

“God wanted me to make it,” Baldwin writes. “One of the reasons kids will listen to me today is because they recognize me from the movies. But not just any movie. One movie: ‘Bio-Dome.’” God had also instructed Baldwin to play Barney Rubble in “Viva Rock Vegas,” and told him to turn down the part of Jennifer Garner’s love interest in “Alias.” The deity apparently makes a lousy manager.

Or not. Baldwin says God led him a few years ago to Beach Fest, a Christian revival that draws about 300,000 a year to a holy-rolling spring break party in Florida, where he met the event sponsor, a Portland, Ore., evangelist, Luis Palau. Since then, Palau has thrown millions of dollars at Baldwin’s Livin It ministry, in which the actor travels as a headline act with a group of skateboarders who provide entertainment, authenticity and conversion stories at “radical” revivals. The Livin It tour drew an audience of over a million in 2005, selling out stadiums from Atlanta to Kingston, Jamaica. At the Minneapolis Metrodome, the tour packed in 40,000 people in a single evening; the wait for an autograph after the “altar call” lasted three and a half hours. (Last year’s X Games drew only 16,000 to a skateboarding competition.)

Baldwin also directed the “Livin’ It” video, an infomercial for Jesus directed at heathen teens. It’s a typical skate video: all low angles under leaping boards, quick intercuts, grainy stock, a soundtrack of hip-hop and California surf punk, and behind-the-scenes antics of skaters pelting each other with McDonald’s fries between dips into the half-pipe. Christianity isn’t mentioned for the bulk of the video, save for a brief moment when Baldwin looms into the lens and lauds one mutton-chopped skater as his “gangsta for Jesus.”

Only after the skateboarders have wowed the viewer with their athletic prowess and hip haircuts is the purpose of the video revealed. Then, Christian music fades up under a montage of soulful camaraderie. Skaters stand together in prayer circles, arms wrapped tightly around each other’s shoulders, exchanging meaningful smiles. It’s the very picture of belonging, a visual distillation of what it feels like to be in, to experience all that the viewer might crave. Then the music dips under a voice-over of skaters’ testimonies, voices cut together phrase after phrase, intoning “true purpose” and “eternal comfort.”

The “Livin It” DVD came out in 2004 and was expected to sell 20,000 copies in four years; it sold 150,000 in 15 months. Within its first year of release, 15,000 people sent e-mails to Baldwin, telling him they converted because of the video. A follow-up video is in the works. Baldwin has recently released a comic book called “Spirit Warriors,” a two-dimensional fictional attempt to yield more conversions. The comic is the story of “six radical young kids [who] enter the spiritual war zone every day for classic battles of good against evil. The Spirit Warriors have given their hearts over to the Lord and will battle for his glory no matter the cost.”

To witness Livin’ It at its most intimate, I met up with the tour in Sayville, Long Island, just down the sound from where the Baldwin boys were raised. Sayville is a perennially uncool town, where oldies bands play the annual summer fair on a main street that’s actually called Main St. When the tour’s skateboarders arrived, all trim chests and shaggy hair, it was clearly the coolest thing to happen since local boy Joey Buttafuoco was convicted. The town is about as mad for Stephen Baldwin as one can imagine people being for, well, Stephen Baldwin.

Instead of the usual stadium setup, that night Livin It appeared at a nearby church. A giant white tent sheltered skate ramps and endless rows of folding chairs, which couldn’t hold the crowd of kids and parents with cameras, who spilled out beyond the tent poles. Baldwin — a slightly different figure than the one you may remember from his slimmer, blonder days — jogged out onstage, his Jesus T-shirt billowing, his hair slicked across his scalp and down the back of his thick neck. “Yeah, yeah!” he yelled over the music. “There’s a new Jesus in town, and that’s what he sounds like! Are you ready to get gnarly?”

Baldwin launched into what appeared to be a hackneyed impersonation of what many youth-group survivors would recognize as embarrassing Pastor Cool. “You’ve heard of Jesus Freaks?” he bellowed. “Well, I’m the first Jesus Psycho!”

After several minutes of Baldwin’s surfer-dude revivalism, the skaters began to loop their willowy frames along curves of plywood and rails of steel, tracing arcs in the air, flipping their boards under confident feet. The Long Island kids who had taken a valuable evening away from improving their video game scores were star-struck. After the demo was over, Baldwin took the mic once more to command, “Come up here right now. The team wants to pray with you.” The stage overflowed with the eager bodies of hundreds of boys, all filling out decision cards with tiny yellow pencils hoping that their shoulders would be the next under the grasp of the praying skateboarders.

Baldwin is just one of many pitching evangelical Christianity — with a side of politics — to young America. Like dozens of recent books that line the shelves of Christian bookstores, there’s plenty of talk in “The Unusual Suspect” about how Baldwin is an “adrenaline junky,” how he’s on the “gnarliest thrill ride” with Jesus. Venerating scripture in the vernacular of extreme sports — best seen in two books by Ryan Dobson, son of James Dobson, founder of the notorious Christian right group Focus on the Family — is the latest trend in youth-marketed publishing.

Ryan Dobson receives a shout-out in Baldwin’s book as a messenger for “Homey,” as Baldwin calls God. In Dobson’s book “Be Intolerant,” he rails against relativism, homosexuals, environmentalists and “inclusive, open-minded Christians,” charging his readers to “get your armor on and take up your cross.” He knows just how to instill pride in the heart of his father. “I bleed conservatism,” Dobson told me when I met him at a Christian publishing convention in Denver last year, crossing his ornately inked arms over a T-shirt that says, “Jesus Loves My Tattoos.” “I see conservatives like me everywhere, at hot rod shows in Vegas, surfing top breaks on the coast, crazy motocross freaks like me living for Jesus. We know we’re right, we have the power of the truth behind us. And because of that, I see cities on fire.”

For Dobson, Baldwin and young Americans the nation over who yearn for the certainty this brand of Christianity pitches, the personal is political. Absolutism reigns in the new evangelical youth movement, shining through the chaos of modernity, global terror, media bombardment and glorious moral relativism. Baldwin pitches the ultimate dumbed-down fundamentalism, offering reductive, brainless theology. “I sleep good at night because I am totally content in the knowledge that God is in control,” he writes, a conviction glittered up with the fact that it sprung from the mind of an honest-to-God celebrity.

Intentionally or accidentally, Baldwin has braided together what young Americans seem to crave most today: fame, cool and answers. Answers to the questions of who will look out for them, who will love them, who will tell them how to live. Answers from a man who called himself the son of God, and another one who calls himself Stevie B.

But watching Capitol Hill shift to Democratic control this week has challenged assumptions about Evangelicals and the GOP. According to the Associated Press, one-third of Evangelical voters supported Democrats this year, up more than 10 percent from 2004. And while many election-watchers predicted that sex scandals — be they Mark Foley’s or Ted Haggard’s — would keep Evangelicals away from the polls, they turned out in even higher numbers than they did to reelect Bush. Twenty-four percent of voters this year were born-again, up 1 point from 2004. And unlike in recent elections, Americans who attend weekly religious services voted in almost equal numbers for Democratic and Republican candidates.

No matter how much some voters may have opposed gay marriage — banning it this time around in seven states — many refused to vote a straight ticket. “We’re sick of being manipulated for Republican politics,” one conservative Christian voter told Salon in Colorado Springs on Election Day. “We’re sick of being taken for granted. I’m not saying I’m a liberal, but I’m fed up with these folks, and I’m not alone.”

Many voters told exit pollsters that their anger about corruption in government and the quagmire in Iraq led them across party lines. However, the races in which religious-right candidates lost tended to go to equally religious Democrats. Ken Blackwell lost his bid to govern Ohio to a Methodist minister. Rick Santorum handed his Senate seat in Pennsylvania to a pro-life Catholic, Bob Casey Jr. Rep. Charles Taylor was kicked out of Congress in favor of Evangelical Heath Shuler. It remains to be seen whether these races foreshadow a 2008 election in which candidates increasingly attempt to out-pray each other for political gain.

So what, exactly, has happened to the GOP’s heretofore bedrock coalition of devout Christians? Salon asked Richard Cizik, vice president of governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals, to help us understand the changing colors of this year’s “Purpose-Driven” vote.

Did Evangelicals turn out for referendums banning same-sex marriage or stem-cell research, and, instead of voting a straight Republican ticket, vote for Democratic candidates?

I know from my experience in Virginia that’s happened. I talked to a fair number of Evangelicals who supported the same-sex marriage amendment and then punched the ballot for Jim Webb on the basis of the war issue. I know people very close to me — dare I say in my own family — who did just that.

What turned some conservative Christians against the party candidates they’ve historically supported?

The Republicans lost a lot of Evangelical votes with the corruption issue, and rightly so. The standard you see for voting is not as simple as [gauging] a politician’s stance on same-sex marriage or abortion. Moses gave some good advice: Pick capable leaders who are God-fearing, trustworthy and hate dishonest gain. Oh, really? You mean to say that God cares about greed? Just look at Colossians 3:5. What is greed? The apostle Paul says greed is idolatry.

Supporting the GOP isn’t one of the commandments the last time I checked, but it has felt that way in the past few elections.

Look, to be biblically consistent you have to be politically inconsistent. Evangelicals have to follow their Lord first, and not simply bend to the whims of a political party for the advantages that come with it. That is not good enough. We are not a cheap date. We have appeared so because of the alignment that many within our movement had had with Republicans.

Exit polls suggest that corruption was as important as the war — and more important than social issues — in determining the Evangelical vote. Do you think voters overreacted to the scandals that afflicted the GOP?

If there were some Evangelicals who became disenchanted with Republicans over corruption, and it seems to be from the election results, it was well justified. Any kind of funny business promoted voter retribution. And that’s the way it should be. We want trustworthy leaders who will tell the truth. We don’t need to go like supplicants to the political parties. We say, consider what our agenda is and join us.

Does this political moment strike you as a turning point, not just among some conservative Christians, but within the Democratic Party?

We need as Evangelicals to take stock of where we are as a country — not just ecclesiastically and theologically and otherwise, but politically too. And right now is as good a time as any to take serious stock. The Democrats know this, especially if they run candidates like Heath Shuler. Evangelicals didn’t depart entirely, but enough flipped over to make it possible for Democrats in certain districts to win, like Shuler did.

But wouldn’t it be hasty to underestimate the lasting appeal of Evangelical Republicans? Some candidates are honing their messages to widen their bases.

Sure. Gov. Tim Pawlenty in Minnesota is one Evangelical who is a conservative who won in a Democratic state. We need to take a look at him for his crossover appeal. The strategy is not a zero-sum game in which one side has to lose for the other side to win. That is so passi and unfortunate.

Would you say that many Evangelicals feel like they’re paid lip service by GOP candidates who take their votes for granted? Was this week a wakeup call?

Let’s just say that I think that for a long time the attitude [of politicians] has been, “Give them Oval Office cuff links and they’ll be satisfied.” I got mine in 1980. I don’t need any cuff links and haven’t for a long time. Cuff links aren’t on our agenda.

Though Lamborn was favored to beat his opponent, a retired Air Force officer named Jay Fawcett, the race had become tighter in the past couple of months than anyone could have predicted when Fawcett launched what was called by local newspaper columnists “a quixotic quest.” But the race became a nail-biter, especially after Rep. Joel Hefley, whose seat was up for grabs Tuesday night, said he refused to endorse his fellow Republican, a “disappointment” running “one of the sleaziest, most dishonest campaigns” he had seen. Even prayer — or the endorsement of the Christian Coalition and the NRA — couldn’t cover up that stinging public condemnation with “moral values” chatter, especially in national elections that hummed with talk of corruption.

Wednesday morning the two candidates were considered to be in a dead heat. In this area, which has elected a Republican to the House ever since the district was first drawn 34 years ago, a victory under these circumstances hardly felt like victory at all. Much less when considering who would be in charge of the House. And forget simply despising Nancy Pelosi’s liberal ways; these folks were deriding the “liberal Republicans” on the five military bases here who expressed anger against “stay the course” war addicts like Lamborn. Accustomed to the confidence that came with their decisive role in recent national elections, the Christian base here seemed shaken. For once, nobody seemed sure that all their prayers would be answered.

As the band struck up a Muzak-y rendition of “Just the Way You Are,” in came the local candidates in their dark suits and American flag ties, smacking their supporters’ shoulders and nervously scanning a screen listing exit polls. The song made for an ironic soundtrack to the scandal surrounding the man whose name has been spoken more in this district this week than any political candidate: Ted Haggard, the fallen pastor of this town’s nerve center, the New Life Church. Before the news broke last week that he had conducted a three-year affair with a male escort, Haggard had campaigned hard for Amendment 43 here, an initiative to ban gay marriage. It was clear that in this political congregation, no one liked him just the way he was.

But by the time the band struck up “The Best Is Yet to Come,” spirits seemed to lift a bit. The numbers coming in on the gay marriage ban, and on a referendum supporting civil unions, looked promising to a crowd that quivered in disgust at any mention of homosexuality, much less homosexuality with equal rights. Of all people, Mike Jones, Haggard’s accuser, was being credited with those returns. A volunteer in a black suit and red shirt named Dave Cavanagh — who calls Dick Cheney, whom he met campaigning this week, a “good man” — says plenty of blasé voters were spurred into action by the notion that Jones came out with his story in order to have an impact on the amendment effort. “That this was used as a political ploy to affect voting made everyone I know really angry. It was a backlash; it benefited the effort,” he said. Jones has said that he publicized his relationship with Haggard explicitly because of the marriage amendment.

Cavanagh was here after campaigning hard for Kent Lambert, a state representative he met when Lambert gave a public showing of slides he put together when he was working the border with the anti-immigration group the Minutemen. Lambert, who calls himself “a man who doesn’t keep his faith a secret, and a social conservative,” and who looks picture-perfect for his role, with his unmovable hair, giant gold ring and lapels crowded with candidate buttons, sees the scandal as helping his various causes. “The idea of someone trying to manipulate their vote gets them out to the polls,” Lambert said. That notion was playing out nationwide, as eight states easily supported prohibiting same-sex marriage. But whether fundamentalists would vote for “the sanctity of marriage” and whether they would vote for candidates who supported the White House’s Iraq fiasco still remained to be seen.

All this talk of the marriage amendment was filler, really, just nervous chatter over the vocalist walking through the crowd with a cordless mike, singing “It Had to Be You,” pointing to local candidates on the floor. Everyone in this room knew that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill Ritter had creamed Republican Bob Beauprez at the polls, and as the night stretched on, the House seat was still undecided in favor of Lamborn.

When Lamborn won the primary, his response to the press was “I had to say a prayer and ask that God’s will be done.” One got the sense tonight that plenty of prayers were being whispered around the tables set up in front of the stage.

By the time the coordinator of the Denim and Diamonds ball took the stage to belt out a showy rendition of “Crazy,” the returns were favoring this crowd: Lamborn had pulled into a decisive lead, and gay marriage looked like it would exist only in Mike Jones’ dreams. But the crowd hardly whooped it up praise-style when the numbers were projected onto a screen over the stage. Even when Lamborn finally appeared in the GOP suit-and-red-tie uniform to announce, “Things are looking good,” he was met not with ebullient cries but a polite smattering of applause. Things were looking good for this candidate, sure, but the House he was to serve in was already stacked against him. Senior Republican holy warrior Rick Santorum had been ousted by the time the red pantsuits here were heading to the cash bar. No one even bothered announcing the verdict when the marriage ban was decided by a margin even local voter James Dobson could celebrate.

Meanwhile, Lamborn was biding his time waiting for his opponent to concede. As the band wound up its final set, he talked to reporters about setting his sights on the House Armed Services Committee and made snarky comments about Nancy Pelosi. He commented that the evangelical vote refused to be “sidelined.” And then, as Mr. Biggs’ cleanup staff circulated with garbage bags, asking the last straggling volunteers to gather up their campaign signs, Lamborn took the stage to summon local candidates, winners all. They were given just a moment for lightning-fast speeches — a chance to parade the wives, thank the volunteers, and remind the tiny remaining crowd about “Republican principles” and “Republican revival,” all standard Christian political rhetoric. That rhetoric tonight would be the language of defeat in Missouri Sen. Jim Talent’s campaign: His concession speech opened by giving long-winded thanks to God, but no one here even bothered to do that in their victory speeches. These local wins meant little when the Senate was still hanging in the balance.

Lamborn himself didn’t bother to invoke his faith as he wrapped up what could hardly be called a party. Blinded by the success of the “enemy,” he couldn’t even talk about winning his seat; in fact his quick speech sounded more like an angry concession. “We’ll be able to harness a backlash,” he said. “We’re going to see what the Democrats are made of, and they’re going to do things the voters aren’t happy with. Mark my words.” His words, sure — but for once in this town, not a breath about His Word.

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

Two of Haggard’s parishioners, Tim Singer and his wife, Alicia, say they usually have to drag themselves to vote. This year, they couldn’t wait. “Amendment 43 is half the reason why,” said Tim. “And Referendum I,” which would grant rights and responsibilities to same-sex couples, though without allowing marriage, per se, “is the other.”

The Singers say their neighbors, also members of the New Life Church, who share their voting practices, were all headed to the polls today for the exact same reason they were. Not to vote Republican candidate Doug Lamborn into a congressional seat, or to stem the tides sweeping Democrat Bill Ritter into the governor’s mansion, but “the gay thing,” as Alicia said, plain and simple.

“My kid said to me, ‘Mom. What’s wrong with the world? Now we gotta vote about gay stuff?’” Alicia snorts. “It’s disgusting that we should even have to think about this,” she sighed. “We’re just tired of it all. Not Pastor Ted, way back before that.”

“Yeah, I’m not just voting because of Ted,” said Tim, shaking his spiked blond hair. “I’m voting because of Rosie O’Donnell. No one pisses me off more than her. This gay stuff has gotta stop.”

Diane Hoover, a poll watcher here, says some voters have stepped forward with concerns about their paper ballots, reporting mysterious highlighter markings on the Amendment 43 section of the ballot. It’s unclear if the marks were meant to be over specific words. She’s worried that the ballots won’t scan properly because of the marks, and is investigating the problem, but has yet to hear back from a state supervisor.

Hoover, incidentally, used to work for Republican Sen. James Harvey in the 1960s, but has since “converted” to being a Democrat, since she can’t stand the way the religious right has taken over the GOP, or her town, she says. “It used to mean something very different to be a Republican than this business,” waving a hand in the direction of Haggard’s megachurch New Life across the street from the voting booths. She voted against the ban.

Same-sex marriage bans have passed in every one of the 20 states that have previously included the issue on ballots.

Lamborn is a darling of the religious right - and a former lawyer for Ted Haggard. In the wake of the Haggard scandal, he has tried over the past few days via a bevy of campaign ads to dial down his connections to the evangelical establishment. While his campaign home page may still proudly flash the logos of endorsers like Concerned Women for America and the National Pro-Life Alliance, and boast about his “100% rating from Christian Coalition of Colorado,” his brand-new persona is that of a straight-up Reagan conservative, someone who spends all his time thinking about tax cuts and border issues. Not about his “pro-family” message, and certainly not his Friday evening Bible study.

Fawcett’s run began as what many, including the Lamborn-endorsing Rocky Mountain News, considered to be an “exercise in futility.” The 5th Congressional District has not elected a Democrat since it first came into being 34 years ago. The most recent representative to fill that seat is Joel Hefley, who is retiring. Hefley has notably refused to endorse his would-be GOP successor, publicly charging him with running “one of the sleaziest, most dishonest campaigns” he has seen.

According to Fawcett’s campaign, last night the candidate received a death threat — his third since announcing his candidacy — while his headquarters was being vandalized. Campaign workers arrived at an office where the air was thick with a putrid skunklike aroma. Many of the 200 volunteers expected to come through the office today will be working in gas masks. The office has been vandalized once before, and just a week ago the campaign finance director’s car was similarly scented, while parked in front of the El Paso County Republican Office.

With the race deadlocked, tonight looks like it may be a late one for Fawcett and Lamborn. Lamborn supporters will be watching returns with the candidate tonight at Mr. Biggs Family Fun Center, about 7 miles from the church Lamborn’s buddy Ted Haggard built.

Driscoll blames Haggard’s affair with a male escort not on the former pastor’s homosexuality — which he abhors as much as that other spawn of Satan, feminism, — but on his wife, Gayle Haggard. Why? ‘Cause, he says, Gayle let herself go.

“At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this,” he wrote on his blog. “It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping him either.”

As we all know, this argument is as illogical — that a man would have sex with another man because he was turned off by his aging wife, and not because he’s gay — as it is demeaning. How she looks should have no bearing on this. But, I must rise to Mrs. Haggard’s defense, if only to point out that Driscoll is obviously using her as an opportunity for frat-boy girl-bashing of the highest right, guys? high-five! order. Find a picture of Gayle Haggard. It’s easy to do this week, with her husband’s fall from grace splashed over the front pages. And look at her. Come on: She looks fabulous.

Her failing is not in too few hours on the treadmill, but in her beliefs. First, that she should submit to her husband, as she has preached to her women’s ministry in Colorado Springs, and as she and Ted wrote in a book they published this year called “From This Day Forward: Making Your Vows Last a Lifetime.” (It’s still for sale today at the New Life Church bookstore, and available for your ironic viewing at Amazon.) And second, that he can be healed of his “sickness” — that under the close watch of Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, God can cast the gay out, and the girl-crazy boy she married will be hers once more.

With Jesus’ help, her faith asserts, Haggard can be just as straight as the aggressively heterosexual pastor Mark Driscoll, who, on his blog, is quick to explain that his fidelity to his wife — and, thus, the Lord — has everything to do with his blonde bride’s hotness, lest we think he would have married a woman who wouldn’t keep herself up to his specifications. Otherwise how could he have resisted the women who ache to provide him with earthly pleasures?

He writes, “I started the church ten years ago when I was twenty-five years of age. Thankfully, I was married to a beautiful woman. I met my lovely wife Grace when we were seventeen, married her at twenty-one, and by God’s grace have been faithful to her in every way since the day we met. I have, however, seen some very overt opportunities for sin. On one occasion I actually had a young woman put a note into my shirt pocket while I was serving communion with my wife, asking me to have dinner, a massage, and sex with her. On another occasion a young woman emailed me a photo of herself topless and wanted to know if I liked her body.” Yeah, dude!